My Thoughts on the Current State of Evernote. Hint: It's mostly positive!

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I’m sure I’m going to catch all kinds of hell in here for this, but constructive debates among nerds are always entertaining, so I know you won’t take me too far into the alley before beating me up.

Here it is – I like Evernote.

I’ve been using their app for at least 7 or 8 years, maybe longer. In fact, I even have a t-shirt of theirs from back in my blogging days, but that’s neither here nor there. Like most of you, I began to get really nervous in the lead-up to version 10. The company had stagnated for years, and their apps were completely different on each platform resulting in a less than seamless experience moving from device to device. When v10 did drop, it was a website wrapped in an Electron app, it was slow, and half the features we grew to love were gone.

It was around this time I started seriously shopping around for a replacement. I settled on Apple Notes for my personal notes and OneNote for work, since we are in the Office 365 environment anyway. I had used OneNote a lot in the past for work, so I was quite familiar with it. This solution worked okay for a few months, but it became more tedious than my previous workflow using Evernote. Clipping articles or web pages was tricky with Apple Notes, I didn’t like how it just saved a URL to the page. What if the page moves or is taken down in the future?

Similar issues cropped up at work. I’d need to annotate a screenshot for a document (I work as an Analyst) and my annotations in OneNote weren’t part of the image, but rather a new layer created on top, causing things to move around all the time.

I gave Obsidian a long hard look over the past few weeks too… It’s certainly a very powerful app, but I don’t have a huge need to backlink notes, and I like to take screen clippings and code snippets – it just seemed “easier” with Evernote.

They’re now dropping regular v10 updates and the performance has improved greatly over the past few weeks/months. I have no issue using it daily now, and their new “Home” feature is really helpful.

I understand note-taking apps are person specific. If you’re a researcher with primarily text notes, Obsidian is probably a godsend. There are other use cases for Notion, Roam, Craft, Apple Notes etc.

I also know that David and Stephen say it’s really hard to get your data out of Evernote, but it isn’t too bad in my experience. Since I’ve “left” a few times, I have very few issues exporting the .enex files to OneNote, Apple Notes etc.

So yah - for my use, it’s been working great lately. The web clipper is handy, the mobile app is much faster than it’s ever been (granted, I hear Android is a little – not great – at the moment), and I find it aligns really well to how I work and how I capture information. I know they get run over a lot, so I thought I’d be an example of someone who still finds their app useful, and I wanted to let the community know that depending on your use-case, it might be worth another look. I think they’re taking a lot of steps in the right direction.

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I am keeping a watchful eye on EN. Their reboot really was needed and despite the app being Electron, they do a great job at hiding it.
If they were to add much better, more fluid linking capabilities, I’d really be willing to give it a serious try. The foundation they have is solid.

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@AppleGuy No flak from me on this. I’ve been an Evernote user for a decade, even if it’s been very off-and-on over the past couple of years. I just spent some time reevaluating my note-taking/reference system, and Evernote was a serious contender for me. I ended up settling on DEVONthink To Go, because DTTG is a better iPadOS/iOS citizen, an important for me as an iPad-only worker. Evernote isn’t bad on iPad, but DTTG is better overall. Although, I have to say, there are a couple of things that Evernote does better than anyone else in this space. Go with whatever works best for you!

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The woodshed is occupied so I think you’re safe! :slight_smile:

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It’s worth saying that, after all these years, EN’s web clipper remains second to none. It’s insane what it gets, and it can capture part of a page too. Capture, in general, is certainly EN’s strongest suit.

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Agree in the web clipper and capture, although capture on the Mac isn’t great outside the web clipper for me.

A general observation, putting aside the features the new Mac app is missing to date, it’s so odd watching an app I’ve used for over a decade get stripped down to bare bones, then receiving emails celebrating as it adds new features that are super old features trickling back in.

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Yep.

(Actually, OneNote’s is pretty good, but then it clips to an app that’s meh.)

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Huge Evernote fan myself. I am switching to Craft and DEVONthink right now for a couple of reasons. One, I can keep an offline vault in Craft for student notes (High School), and I’m about to back to school for my M.Div. I did my whole first masters with DEVONthink, and the primary feature is being able to markup in the same app. Evernote’s PDF annotation is not cool on iOS in my humble opinion.

TLDR: I wish I could get better privacy with certain areas of Evernote and better PDF citizenship on the iPad

P.S. Evernote 10 is a great upgrade.

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I just wish EN would give us Mark Down :frowning:

Thanks to Tim Ferriss, I’ve been a user since they beta’d. If they had MD, I’d forgive all else and not wistfully look at other note taking solutions.