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…
iOS - Drafts; Content created in an app and saved via the Sharesheet; Workflow HQ workflows. I rarely, if ever type new content in iOS Evernote. The UI and UX is not good.
Mac - Web Clipper; Various Alfred workflows; Mail to Evernote (iOS, too); Hazel rules; Some direct entry of content
Why I continue to use…
Emailing to Evernote. Creating new notes from an email is a simple forward (save your Evernote email address in Contacts)
Search, not only typed text, but text within attached documents (including images with recognizable text)
AppleScript automation. Many EN workflows of mine (Alfred and Hazel) are supported through AppleScript
Ubiquitous access anywhere from any device and any browser
The Web Clipper
Easy note sharing with others including non-iCloud users
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 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 $$
I’m a long time Evernote user. I use it cross platform, at work, individually and with my family. I use it as a reference store for lots of e-mail and online things - receipts, useful articles I want to make sure I always have a copy of. It’s OCR feature is invaluable for much of the content that goes in and whilst I don’t feel the need for a personal journal, it is my work journal for everything I’ve done that day.
Whilst I could accomplish much of the above with a file system and a comprehensive system search function, I’d miss out on the simple content sharing, the web clipping and the OCR of things like images of whiteboards that I add into it.
I haven’t seen anything that comes anywhere appreciably close to matching these points. I guess Google Keep and Microsoft One Note would be the closest. But many of the favoured Mac options are confined to the Apple-sphere and whilst I love my Apple Tech I work with and across a variety of platforms and I want to be able to get my suff wherever and whenever.
That’s not to say there aren’t some annoyances of course. The ENML note format is nice in many respects and frustrating in others. Code and Markdown are not things that in my experience are well handled by this platform.
I’m a long-time Evernote user and haven’t seen a need to change, although Bear and Apple Notes seem like good alternatives if I ever felt like switching. Like @Eurobubba, I really enjoy the Evernote web clipper! I also appreciate the fact that there’s a web interface, so I can use Evernote even if I’m not on my own computer. (Well, yes, I could use it on my iPhone, but I’m a poor phone typist and I often use Evernote for writing.)
I use it daily. Cross platform, great clipper and Scannable integration. I use OneNote at work but Evernote stands out really in one area, search. Search is great on the apps and computer, and hits are shown when you are searching google.
I’m doing a web development course and have gone back to it for that reason alone. I’m saving snippets of information relating to various things I discover along the way. I tried using it as an everything bucket some time ago and ended up hating it so now I have a very specific use case and I find that’s better.
I signed up for Evernote a few months after they began in 2008. I played with it for quite a while until I finally understood what it was and how to use it. I think it was great in the beginning and it was constantly getting better and i think was a technology leader. I was a paid subscriber for years and was very happy with it.
But a few years ago things really started to radically change all of a sudden. The CEO left the company which he always stated he was building a 100 year company. The monthly and yearly subscriptions have gone up and I believe they had some privacy issues. I also dont like that it is so hard to get your stuff out of Evernote if you want to bounce to another platform. And with the free account you now can only have two devices that sync your account. It just doesn’t work for me anymore. I do still use it for one feature as when i take a picture and want to have a caption for it. And i might jut start using apple notes for that.