News like this makes me glad I got out of Evernote years ago when some early tectonic rumblings were being felt… This seems like a product about to die or do a 180º shift towards a new business model, both of which could be bad for a large portion of users…
(DEVONthink and Notes are what I have used for the last 5 or so years)
People seem to use Evernote so many different ways for so many different things that I’m guessing exit strategies will be pretty varied and individualized. For one person Apple Notes may be the best replacement, for someone else, DEVONthink, etc.
I tested Evernote for my small form digital reference system but ditched it in favor of DEVONThink. I don’t like cloud based apps and was uncomfortable putting personal data into their system. Since part of my DT system includes a First 30 days section with critical items to handle in the first 30 days if either I or my husband or both of us is dead or incapacitated that is not something I wanted out public anywhere at all even encrypted.
I’ve set up my own syncing option using WEBDav to get DT synced across 2 computers and 3 iOS devices.
Anticipating this issue with Evernote I switched from EN to DEVONthink Office Pro approximately six months ago. Devonthink is not intuitive but it is worth going through the learning curve, in my opinion. It has most of the advantages of EN plus a great deal more flexibility. I also use Apple Notes but only to a limited extent. I use DEVONthink to store every document that I believe is important as well as indexing my cloud drives (Google, Dropbox, iCloud) so that everything is in one central location no matter where they are ultimately stored. I have found that it works fine for me and in the web clipper is also good.
PS, I also take all meeting notes in DEVONthink or import handwritten notes from Notability. Because Notability now reads hand written notes, and because Devonthink automatically OCRs PDFs, once you put them in DEVONthink you can use the search function to find your hand written notes. I have found it works very well.
Good idea that - never thought to try Notability inside DTPO.
One major drawback though, is my darn handwriting. Chiefly due to it combining my own unique shortform code, and being reminiscent of the scrawl an acid-tripping spider would leave behind were it walking backwards over butter.
Regardless, will give this a go and see what surfaces.
Brad, your description of your hand writing has me laughing as I prepare to board a plane for Korea. That was hilarious. It even sounds worse than my hand writing, which I didn’t think was even possible. 
With the latest scuttlebut on the Evernote Corporation I’m tempted to jump ship.
But then I have to find a way to move my notes elsewhere. I believe the route to Apple Notes is well tested. Any opinions on it?
You know as much as I use DT I had never thought to index what does live in the cloud (My shared scrivener projects and some other image and misc files I share for the historical society) Thanks for the tip!
I too laughed at your handwriting description. I also have my own sort of shorthand and combine printed with script such that even a doctor would be hard pressed to read my notes later. That’s why I tend to retype them into my computer, then at least the typos are easier to fix. 
Yes I have about 8000 notes but I am finding its search not as great as I would like to narrow the notes down and rely more on the Stack and folder along with tags to locate the files and I would like to see a better way to share notes without having to have the user go through Evernote links. Thank God for Mac’s Print to PDF as that is the only good way to export a note. The lack of choices either using Evernote’s file structure or HTML I think has turned a lot of people off.
Having said that, I think it is time to make the Time Investment into Devon Think and at least copy all my notes into local files that DT can index.
I have just been postponing what I anticipate as a huge learning curve.
So much for the crew leaving the sinking ship last it may so be Gone4EverNote
Since OCR is a major contributor to my keeping EN around, is there an alternative software package or app that has great OCR but doesn’t break the bank? (PDFPen offers it, but I already use PDF Expert which offers 95% of what I need - only need OCR occasionally).
There is a terminal package called Tesseract you could use, and is of course, free. If there’s a specific OCR task (e.g., OCRing PDFs, or converting a jpeg to an OCR’d PDF) you can just write an alias for the command and the relevant arguments/options/flags.
DEVONthink Pro Office (and only the Pro Office, not Pro, and not Personal) come with ABBYY OCR. While the ABBYY OCR has fairly high accuracy, I do find it inflates file sizes A LOT unless you dramatically decrease the image quality. This works just fine for me if I’m doing receipts and invoices, but if I have long-form documents that need OCR I find this to be a problem because quality is much more important in those instances.
Thanks for the Terminal tip, that’s a pretty solid use scenario!
Tesseract is not the most accurate of OCR engines but if the image is clear and the text is typed text, it’s reliable. Again, a bit onerous to work out what options and so on, but if you’ve got a little terminal experience (maybe coupled with some kind of automation with Hazel, Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, or TextExpander to simplify issuing the required commands) it shouldn’t be to bad for the periodic OCR needs.
I hope you’ll post back with whatever you land on, I’m interested in this topic as well!
I am trying that too… but do you have selective syncing OFF? Meaning, are ALL of your drive’s documents on your computer? Would it work with Selective Sync?? I am not sure, I may try that today
Thanks
I am still a premium subscriber and have been for years. Each year I assess whether I need to keep a premium membership.
Skitch was the killer app that always kept me happy. I recently started using Monosnap and have fallen in love with that for screenshots, so this year the decision my be tougher.
I find myself using Apple Notes more for note taking now and with Monosnap replacing Skitch for me, Evernote has just become a storage area. If Evernote doesn’t introduce some killer features this fall, this may be the year I cut back to a free account.
If your sync service automatically removes local copies and leaves only a file pointer (e.g, Dropbox’s project infinity or whatever it’s called, and iCloud Drive’s Optimize Storage), this plays very poorly with DEVONthink’s indexing since it’s expecting an actual file, not just a pointer to a file on a server. Normally this results in a “missing” file (A file that DEVONthink exists but which it can’t find on disk).
I sync all of my files but in DEVONthink I am indexing them, not syncing them. This saves room on my database.
Do any of the possible Evernte alternatives have a mature web-clipper? (the one in EN is fantastic)
I tried DevonThink a year or so ago and really didn’t like it at all - so if I do switch it won’t be to that