I know this is against the trend, but I’m sticking with Evernote. I had canceled my subscription due the price increase and began searching for a replacement product that worked the way that I use Evernote, but got frustrated enough with the other options to resubscribe (using their discount offer to come back). The key features for me are the linking notes to calendar events (to include accessing the note from the calendar view) and embedding trackable tasks into notes. These functions work well for me for managing various projects. I had tried Obsidian and Craft, but Evernote just works best for me without a lot of tinkering.
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I’ve gone back to Evernote multiple times over the last few years but I finally moved to Apple Notes for good and I won’t be looking back. Bending Spoons reminds me of private equity taking over the many companies in the industry I work in. It sounds good at first and all the right things are said, then it’s downhill from there with insane pricing and lots of broken promises.
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I was just checking the Tasks and Calendars capabilities in Evernote last weekend and they are more powerful than I remembered. They are just a couple of iterations away of having a very serious time blocking tool if they come up with a view to allow for dragging & dropping tasks to the calendar views.
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I started leaving Evernote from 2020 when v10.0 was launched, the app with full of bugs which is unusable made me not believe it will be stable and reliable as most other native apps. 4 years later of acquisition and improvement don’t convince me to go back, but prove what I thought at that time.
Another deal breaker is that there are some people who support and even protect Evernote by deliberately overlooking users’ issues they are facing. Criticising those who raise the real issues, and even establishing a positive page to neutralise any thoughts they regard as negative or attacking Evernote.
When I was using Evernote, even before v10 was introduced, I felt like working for Evernote without getting paid and even paid for them. I was not using Evernote but to report any bugs I saw so frequently, and tried to reorganise my digital gardens as best as possible.
I deleted my account and still created a new to see if things improve, but no no! Yes, tasks with calendar and notes when they are integrated are so attractive, but I am a human not a robot which needs to be controlled and managed. And my whole life shouldn’t be devoted to Evernote. I needed tools just to make my life easier but not make tools become a part of my life and even take over my life. Just like I buy the best knife not to use 24/7/365.
And I don’t trust Bending Spoon much. They bought too many apps and platforms, and I believe now what they do is not really improving Evernote, but for marketing to build a beautiful profile in order to be sold to others with a good price in the future.
Would be odd if a purchaser would go on record as not caring about the product.
“Oh, I’m just in it for the revenue stream.”
Katie
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And they have acquired at least four additional ones this year and opened a new headquarters in Milan, A couple of years ago they were described as one of the largest mobile applications companies in the world.
I thought I was pretty familiar with the tech industry but they have been around since 2013 and I had never heard of them until they purchased Evernote.
Looks like a bubble being bigger and bigger, and… 
I used Evernote for close to 15 years from the mid 2000s for reference information. I had concerns about the direction things were going when the new client came along and I took on the time-consuming project of finding an alternative and migrating all my content. After evaluating a lot of options I landed on a combination DEVONthink and Obsidian which work well for me.
There were two thinks Evernote did really well from its early days:
- The web clipper was the best I’ve seen. Even now I find the DEVONthink web clipper pretty hit and miss. This is probably the only function regression I’ve experienced in shifting.
- Detecting text in images. I could take a photo of my handwritten notes (using cursive) and Evernote did an amazing job when searching that text. Apple has mostly closed the gap here with Live Text.
I’ve tried Evernote again recently because I need a good cross-platform rich notes app.
The app has definitely improved in 2 months, however there are a couple of major issues for me:
- Task notifications just don’t seem to work. I don’t get notified at the day or time of the task.
- There is virtually no integration with macos. I tend to copy email message links and hookmark links, but they don’t work. Worse still the task feature allows no link data in the description, pretty much ruling out links in tasks, which is exactly what I need.
Outside of those two issues it has been pretty solid.
I could really do with a cross-platform notes app (macos and android)
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What are your thoughts on UpNote? It doesn’t have full featured tasks, but you can add checklists and filter notes with to-dos. It’s cross platform too.
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+1
I’ve never used UpNote but it is the only app I’ve read about that might come close.
Linking emails to tasks, and notes to files, etc. and having that work on android and Mac would probably require Google Workspace. Or maybe OneNote and Outlook?
The only complaint I have with UpNote is it does not allow you save edits to attachments in note i.e. in Evernote you can open excel file / work on it / save - the file inside note is updated.
UpNote used to allow doing this, but when I checked last month, it said I had to download the attachment and then open it :man_shrugging 
For some reason, it is very difficult to find an app that is
- Offline first
- Allows attachment edits to be done in place i.e. open attachment from note, update and save which will save the changed in file inside the note
- Have a decent table formatting which allows to copy paste into email body (Google Workspace)
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Offline first requires syncing files via iCloud, Amazon, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Then, in this case, it also requires a native android app.
I don’t know how Evernote handled this. My guess is some local caching and download on demand. All I remember is it worked on my 16 GB iPhone 4S. I replaced Evernote with Google Workspace. All the apps work together and all documents have a URL. And search is excellent.
By offline first, I mean an app I can launch when offline and entire database is available
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Sorry, my mistake. I’ve been mobile first for several years. I can’t think of anything that would meet your requirements.
Syncing an app that relies on a database, whether to a cloud or to another device, is never completely reliable. Updates to the cloud can take too long, can get hung up, or the cloud or other device can be unreachable at times.
The developer of such an app often warns its users against even trying to sync because of potential database corruption.
The NotePlan app, however, does en excellent job of being available even when a network connection is unavailable. (The developer is a sharp coder!)
It offers syncing via iCloud Drive (not recommended) or CloudKit syncing (which works quite well). Even then, sometimes a dialog box is displayed warning that Apple’s CloudKit servers are unreachable for a time. But NotePlan always “catches up” when the servers become reachable again.
EDIT TO ADD: No Android, just Mac and iOS.
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An option to consider is the mail to Evernote feature. The email becomes a note and you can add a task if desired.
OneNote will sync everything, including all attachments such as images and PDFs (this has to be enabled in settings), and will then fully work offline on all devices, including mobile. It will sync when network becomes available again.
cc @A_R
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Thanks. I tried NotePlan after listening to your Podcast 
An amazing app and I was very very impressed.
The only issue in current setup is limited functionality of tables. But with update planned to tables as per roadmap, I’m really looking forward to it
I have been an Evernote user since 2008, and since my workflow has evolved along with Evernote, looks like I am being fussy.
Maybe I am the weak link in adjusting to different notes software 
One of the reasons for choosing UpNote is precisely because it does allow this. I’ve just worked on an attached Word document. When I save and close it, upon returning to the note in UpNote it says “Updating Attachments”. When I return to the Word document the changes are intact. The updated attachment is available on my other devices too.
There’s a setting in the Mac version to specify where files being edited are temporarily stored.
I’ve switched all my note taking to UpNote from Obsidian because it is so straightforward and simple (and inexpensive - it’s a low bar to entry to give it a try for a month.) I use separate apps for tasks and for long form writing.
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