Hey guys,
Second post for me here, this is quickly becoming my favorite forum!
I was a long time Evernote user in the early days of Evernote. I even got the snapscan scanner, I always loved it. In the last year and a half I have been using Apple Notes and pretty much stopped using Evernote
My question is, are any of you guys using it currently? I’m thinking of going back to it, but I keep reading that it’s not being used as widely as it used to be
Again I’m loving these forums!
I used it for a long time as both a digital notebook and a digital filing cabinet. I paid for the subscription this year but rarely open it. Now that I have an iPad Pro, I prefer taking notes with the Apple Pencil where possible. If it’s not possible, I use OneNote because it handles text formatting and more complex tables a lot better than Evernote. I still think the web clipper for Evernote surpasses almost everything else available but it hasn’t been enough to keep me in the app. And in terms of a digital filing cabinet, there’s nothing Evernote can give me that I can’t do in Dropbox or on iCloud.
I still use it, have been a paid subscriber for a while now. It’s my dump everything, digital filing cabinet, notebook, and presenter notes as well. Lately with the influence of this forum 
I’m going to experiment with DEVONthink Pro.
I use it for storage of documents I want to keep, never as a note-taking app. Easy to categorize and search. I’ll probably never use 90% of what’s in it, but it’s there if I do need it.
I am still using it. Big plus is that Evernote is still cross platform. So if you’re stuck using Windows at work and your Mac/iPhone for personal use, then Evernote is works for that.
I use Evernote for several things:
reference notes – like car tag, furnace filter size, etc. Note: Apple Notes could work for this. I found these are quick to search in Evernote.
Tech notes – Those steps that need to be done occasionally on computers and such. (Like how to remove the desktop shortcut to Evernote on the Windows computer at work.)
The occasional pdf — These tend to be temporary, like for travel or conference. For long term archiving, they get moved into DevonThink on Mac. I find Evernote quicker to find things on iOS than DevonThink.
Logs and lists updated through Drafts 5 on iOS — This is the main reason I still use Evernote. I have several actions in Drafts to prepend lists or log events to notes…
a. Gas log – I enter milage, price per gallon, and total price paid each on a line in Drafts on iPhone. An action formats a nice single line with date and appends to my Gas Log note in Evernote. It keeps a running list of visits to the gas station and fuel used/costs.
b. Car maintenance log – another Drafts app appends oil changes, etc. with the date into a note in Evernote.
c. Blood pressure log – every time I visit the doctor, I enter my blood pressure. A Drafts action appends it with the date into a note in Evernote.
d. Doctor visits log — Fortunately I don’t need to visit the doctor very often, but it is good to keep a record. Again, a Drafts actions formats occasion with the date and appends it to an Evernote note.
You can use Drafts app to append to text files in Dropbox too, but the search in Evernote (although it seems to take a couple extra taps to get there) is still fast. Syncing is also fast.
I’m a paid subscriber and use it every day. I have notebooks for all my projects, classes, meetings, checklists, and then a huge archive of old notebooks. I’ve also used it as a shared journal for writing groups.
I’ve had good luck with it – anytime I’ve thought “wouldn’t it be great if I could…” I find that Evernote does it.
I use it extensively… I have pretty much use for all aspects of my life - from gas bills PDFs (with info of a conversation with the company) - to work meetings to Kids Club info. I share certain Notebooks with my Wife so its a shared resource.
My usage has evolved over time, I now tend to use one long note for a meeting/issue rather than using tags or searching for a key word - this works better with my brain!
However I tend to NOT write notes directly into EN, the lack of DarkMode and Markdown Support are frustrating… I tend to use a Drafts Action to send the info, or a ‘Markdown-Evernote’ script action on a MAC.
But: it is invaluable for me, I have others, but IMHO nothing goes close.
I find the forum unhelpful, there are a few EN evangelists who cannot aspect that things can get better, and I am worried that much of the direction is towards Business, but we shall see!
I ditched it after having the paid service for several years. This decision was influenced by Notes new features in High Sierra, some annoyance with periodic Evernote glitches, unhappiness with the poor formatting in Evernote (tables in Evernote have to be the worst implementation EVER), and by the adoption of Things3 for project management.
Holding and marking up PDFs was one of the main activities in Evernote. I had a lot of PDFs in Evernote. I was able to import them all into Notes successfully however for some reason this seemed to permanently bog down Notes.
One of the things I had noticed over the years was that Command-space Search on MacOS and the equivalent on iOS had gotten very good. That’s the main way I launch apps and find files. I’d had in mind the idea of why am I putting PDFs into an app instead of just filing them “out in the open”. So I have now switched to that method. I moved the PDFs out of Notes and into folders in Documents (sync’d with iCloud) and for new notes I do my markup in Preview. I even have a Keyboard Maestro action to automate certain PDF actions. After this change Notes is very snappy again.
Part of the reason I like this approach is, for my little brain, it is actually cleaner. I don’t need to open another app to look for something and I don’t need to use anything like DropBox for storage. I’ve got a very seamless experience across Mac and iOS.
But my decision was very specific to my usage of the apps. There are certainly cases where Evernote is well justified. So I’m happily productive without having to pay for Evernote.
I dropped Evernote about 2 years ago. I wasn’t a heavy user of it in the first place; mostly for organizing research on solving puzzles for geocaching, but sometimes as a journal or for putting travel info into one place with notes & documents. Never enough to justify (to me) paying for a subscription. When they started removing more and more features from the free tier, I decided enough was enough and migrated everything to Apple Notes & other cloud storage (iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive).
I dropped it a couple of years ago after we tried their “biz” offering. Moved personally to DEVONthink. Just started testing the Webclipper functionality again and it is superior in nearly everyway to that of DEVONthink that I will probably continue using Evernote for that purpose and weekly doing an import into DEVONthink. PIA the workaround.
Would like to see something on the business side similar to DEVONthink that had some of Evernote’s biz features.
Currently I’m still using Evernote but with more and more remorse everyday. It feels like ages since there’s been an improvement to their Mac app, with the web having much more features than a dedicated desktop app. I’ve slowly been transitioning to using Apple Notes in place of Evernote especially when using an iPad pro. Neither notes or Evernote handle the Apple pencil well in my opinion, but my money is on Apple to improve this before Evernote gets around to it. Their focus on teams and ignoring of individual users is the biggest red flag IMO
Still using it. Nothing I’m aware of comes close to the Evernote web clipper. I guess I’ll revisit in the spring when my subscription renewal rolls around again.
I agree with many comments from prior posts. I am a heavy user of Evernote (8,956 notes as of this writing). I list below some of the key reasons I continue to use the application, especially as compared to Apple Notes. It’s worth noting, though, most content creation happens outside of Evernote. Common content entry paths…
Why I continue to use…
Frictionless capture and quick find are key to my own daily personal productivity. I find Evernote coupled with these other tools works really well to support these goals. – jay
Been using Evernote free version for a couple years now. Replaced nvAlt so I can add formatting and attachments as needed. Mostly use it as a notes files.
It is clunky and slow. It works, but I’m keeping my eyes open for a better alternative.
I still use it everyday. The biggest reason is that it is cross-platform and I am on Windows 10 at work. I can’t find any good alternatives.
I think the key is to not think of it as anything other than bulk storage and quick notes. I find it aggravating for any attempt at long form writing.
I used to be a fairly heavy user of Evernote. However, I completely switched over to Bear when it first came out and I haven’t looked back. I think it is a wonderful alternative to Evernote. I can’t see myself going back to Evernote from Bear, for what it’s worth. For a while, I did feel that Evernote did have one area where it was ahead, which was web clippings. However, Bear has added this functionality into iOS. It’s not quite as fully featured as Evernote, but it definitely gets the job done. It can turn a web page into Markdown, which I love, and was not a feature of the Evernote clipper. One thing to note, this doesn’t seem to be available on Bear for macOS. The app for Mac is great, however, I do feel like they are putting most of their effort into iOS (although, both versions seem to have parity for the most part). Just something to think about, but I do use Bear exclusively as well on the Mac and do not have any problem. Although, I do wish they would add an ability to clip webpages to the Mac like they have on iOS
I’ve been an Evernote user for years and have not found another clipper that can equal theirs. On the other hand, I am a single user, and their current pricing policy is causing me to begin migrating my stash to Bear and DevonThinkPro. Bear for often used items & temporary access, DTPro for archiving and permanent storage. I don’t think their pricing is unfair for pro/business users, but it priced me out of paying for it. I will continue to use the free version for clipping, especially for complex pages, but not for storage any more. Bear is getting better all the time.
I use it all day everyday along with its companion apps Scannable, Penultimate, and Skitch. My primary needs are to get documents and information into and out of a personal database quickly and seamlessly. Evernote does that the best (for me).
I’ve been using EN since 2010. I have about 30 years of records, 6000+ notes, of which 95% are PDFs. And I can normally find anything within a couple of minutes. I’ve tried Apple Notes and several other apps over the years but nothing, IMO, can beat EN search.
Now I am researching DEVONThink! I have played around with Bear a little bit in the past and I cannot seem to get into the layout of it. Maybe because I am so used to EN?
Ultimately I am using EN because it has so much of my data already in it(and I like web-clipper)
I am going to do a bit more research into the two above, but I think right now EN still has my $$