I know this is short-sighted and ridiculous, but good lord is it expensive. And on first glance it looks even more expensive to sync to mobile. It’s kind of kept me out of the Devonthink mix.
The upfront cost is high, but you quickly break even compared to an annual EN subscription. There is no cost to sync to mobile. I sync via iCloud (but all documents are IN DT, not indexed). I have not run into any syncing issues using this approach. For my money, the excellent OCR, the file conversation capabilities, the good web clipper, the extraordinary search capabilities, and more make DT a great bargain. The weakest “link” in my view is DTTG. It is fine for referencing material and clipping articles to store in DT but I don’t like DTTG’s text editor.
I should add that the ability to send material to DT is very easy. For example, I ran across the quote below this morning. I copied it to Drafts, added additional information, and sent it off to DT to my research database.
Roman philosopher Musonius Rufus shares a lesson on long-term thinking:
“If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures.”
Source: Lectures and Fragments, Fragment 51
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I think it’s the closest we have to Evernote as being an “everything” drawer, a digital filing cabinet that can be organised well, but also go for a month being dumped into with random day to day life emails (kids activities / school stuff etc.) that can be easily searched and found.
Its search and OCR are better and quicker than Evernote, but it’s a clunky setup initially (simply unintuitive re: cloud) and a less visually anppealing app.
The good thing it does is a really quality import from Evernote system that takes about half an hour but does great. If a note has lots of PDFs it creates folders for that note and a nice hierarchy - it’s top notch.
I want to be the easy touch point for the family that’s got everything organised and accessible, with the odd note thrown in. I’m not a big “note taker” outside of things I want to remember, and this more than facilitates that.
Notebooks.app might suit your needs at a significantly less eye-watering price than DTP, and with a more pleasant UI and a less onerous sync set-up. (I use both apps, but for different things.)
Notebooks.app explicitly offers itself as an Evernote alternative:
In response to Evernote ‘s price changes, many users have been looking at Notebooks as an Evernote alternative. We have been receiving numerous requests asking for the best way to migrate from Evernote to Notebooks.
They also provide instructions for migrating from Evernote to Notebooks. I haven’t used Evernote in over a decade, so I can’t speak to how good of a substitute Notebooks is for the latest version, nor the feasibility of migrating from one app to the other.
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Hi, just updating things since my defense of Evernote from July 2023:
First of all, if you’re relying on a product as heavily as I do with Evernote, I think their pricing is quite reasonable. And I didn’t realize that they offer a Free tier for trying it out, seemingly indefinitely. But the point is: for involved personal use or professional use, this seems like a deal to me.
I’ve also had the chance to use their newish Task/List manager. What I like is that you can view and filter tasks that live in different notes throughout the app.
I also had forgotten to mention in June their web clipping feature: which allows you to save full web pages as notes in Evernote (even as a pdf of the page). This is particularly useful when websites change content on old URL’s that you’ve saved – and you want to save what was originally said or whatever images were in the original post.
I also hadn’t mentioned how much I use the Annotation feature, for screengrabs that I often end up sharing with clients. Unlike annotating images from your Mac’s desktop, Evernote allows you to edit and even remove old image annotations — even months (and I think years) later.
Better yet: I’ve only found that Evernote’s syncing has improved since they were acquired. I was also impressed to see their end of year blog post, in which they talk about all of the stability, security and other and backend improvements that they’ve focused on.
I feel that some people want to question Bending Spoon’s dedication to Evernote. But I recommend reading this post to see that they only seem to be stabilizing and enhancing an already complex and mature product. They also mention having 200 million users, so this is not a flash-in-the-pan app that will disapper overnight. That’s always a concern with me, when I’m considering software that I use as heavily as this.
Again: I’ve never been compensated or encouraged in any way by Evernote. I’m just a fan. And I’ve been a customer for 11 years (I just checked!).
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If memory serves, it had an “obfuscation” tool that was very useful for certain screenshots avoid sharing sensitive info with those clients. That the native macOS annotation tool does not have this feature is an ommission, imho.
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I just checked, and you’re correct about that feature. Every once in a while I use it, but for privacy reasons, I agree — why doesn’t Apple include that?
A workaround tip, if you are “just” using Apple’s annotations: create a white (or other colored) box over the area that you wish to obscure. It’s not the same as pixelating the image, but it’s better than nothing.
Another thing that I like about Evernote’s Annotations: if you start typing outside of the screengrab, it adds white area and increases the pixel dimensions of the image. I love features like this, where something that you didn’t think you needed suddenly become useful.