Evernote has a bit of a love/hate relationship amongst this forum and podcast. Personally, I’ve always found it to be useful and there have been a ton of improvements since they were acquired by Bending Spoons.
I’m in a bit of quandary as the price hike is almost double for me. I currently pay £79.99 per year, but going forward it will be £154.90 for me. I’ve got over 4000 notes in Evernote.
It’s not so much the cost, which I’m in the fortunate position than I can afford, but it’s more the value I get from Evernote that I’m now questioning, and whether Apple Notes of other alternatives would be just as good for my own use case.
I will probably look at Apple Notes (or maybe even OneNote) in more detail going forward…
It’s interesting that, with Evernote increasing its prices and Todoist doing the same (I’ve just cancelled Todoist after probably about ten years of using it), Craft is promising not to do the same. Given that there is now a web clipper for Craft, perhaps that’s an option for you.
More reason to use Craft is their upcoming MCPs and APIs for integrating with Claude, ChatGPT, etc., along with significant improvements to the Craft “Assistant” feature. All good stuff.
Third party conversion of .enex to TextBundle or markdown would facilitate import to Craft.
When Todoist explained why they had to, Evernote did it quietly.
Over the five years since I was determined to leave, I kept looking back to Evernote and see if it’s improved. Unfortunately its performance is still well below the standard although many on social media appreciated Bending Spoons.
I first settled down on Apple Notes after trying Notion, Craft and Bear, but still kept considering alternatives and went back especially because of its unreliable search.
I also thought of Obsidian but couldn’t deal with the images at that time, but I switched it eventually 2.5 months ago and no longer tried other apps or going back to Apple Notes since then. It’s a note taking app with features which are truly useful for me, and custom settings can make me more settled instead of endless configuration. I only have the community plugins of maps and style settings.
Every time I hear anything about Evernote it’s to do with a price rise. It’s tripled in price since Bending Spoons took it over in 2023. I think anyone sticking with it can expect more price rises in the next year or two.
But whatever miracle, all of my renewals have been for the same $45/year I’ve been paying since I signed up for Pro over a decade ago. I keep telling myself that as soon as the price increase finds its way to me, I’ll bail (since I barely use it anymore), but so far it hasn’t. One of these days I may pull the plug anyway due to lack of use, but I haven’t quite brought myself to do so yet.
lol $15/month. They are living in a delusional world. There is obsidian, apple notes, notion, upnote and so many other apps that are either free or much cheaper.
This is just complete greed. They are basically leaving off the customer base that is not able to find the cancel button.
Not even mentioning the “€0/month for a week” dark pattern, the cheaper plan is basically a toy version (20 notebooks? 1000 notes?). There’s no way I’m paying €200€ on an anual basis for Evernote, specially when I’m not interested in the AI features and whatnot. They need to unbundle the pricing.
I’ve been leading a dual life since way before the BS acquisition and everything I keep in both Evernote and iCloud Drive just expecting this day. If Evernote stops grandfathering my account, I will drop it of course, no migration needed. I don’t get that much value from it.
Unpopular opinion - Obsidian is a terrible replacement for Evernote.
Craft maybe, Apple notes quite possibly (if you can sleep at night with that sync), Bear Notes (my choice).
To me Obsidian is good at text only/minimal images. Piling receipts into it or travel plans just - it’s clunky. And the mobile app for notes is not super.
I also agree with this, but it’s the only solution that can provide full ownership of my data and coexist with other apps (DT, even plain old Finder). So I use Finder if I need to browse for example my archived receipts. Technically they are in Obsidian’s vault, but I just ignore that fact.
Or, if things get really messy and I can’t find what I’m looking for…
I don’t love the way I phrased that. I also don’t love that I’m quoting myself now but here we are.
What I meant to say was “in my opinion” or “for me”. I just used Evernote for a lot of scans, documents, web clippings, photos etc, and to see all these “I just moved to Obsidian” folks; I don’t see it as that cut and dry. I think there are better replacements, but YMMV as they say.
Keep It (used offline only on the laptop) is better for storing and searching images, PDFs, ebooks than either Obsidian (never been able to make it work for “me”) or NotePlan (which I use, gladly)
Plain text-based apps work more efficiently with mostly plain text. Any other file seems bolted on, and not natural.
