I used to keep websites, document files, emails and notes in Evernote. Their migration to the Electron platform cause me to look for an alternative quite a while back.
I never found a drop in replacement for a price that I liked, so I moved to a hybrid solution with notes going to Obsidian , emails staying in the mail app, documents stored in iCloud, and website archives stored in DevonTHINK as web archives.
I won’t say that my journey is done, but that’s what I have had time to do so far. Spotlight makes it easy to find documents in most cases, and making Spotlight indexing a non-negotiable requirement for me. Also, as companies increasingly handicap free offerings and bump up subscription prices, that last thing I want to be is a member of a captive audience, so I avoid subscriptions as much as possible.
I’m curious where other people have landed after jump off the apparently sinking ship that is Evernote. EN might still be able to save itself with some smart moves, but switched from being a passenger to a onlooker watching to see if the listing ship sinks or not.
If you didn’t catch the announcement, here is a link to the post on Evernote’s site.
Some options with great user experience and data export options.
Upnote $25 lifetime (can do daily exports in markdown)
Obsidian - Free (unlimited customization and plugin) - Don’t go overboard, just use it minimally. The app provides great features out of the box
Bear - $30/year - Superb for Apple Ecosystem (has great spotlight integration)
I settled with Obsidian since moving out. I mostly use it for knowledge management. I moved quick note-taking to Apple Notes. I mostly have 100-150 notes in it and spotlight search works so fast (same with Bear Notes)
PS: Certain apps in the app store can export data from Apple Notes. But I’m mostly in the Apple ecosystem so I don’t care much about exporting.
I experimented with Evernote but never got hooked.
I used Bear for a few years and liked it. I still recommend it as a less locked-in (and to me, more enjoyable) native alternative to Apple Notes. It’s not free but it’s very reasonable.
Joplin is pretty good if you want a free (and open source) alternative to OneNote. I found it easy to E2EE sync for free between my MBP and iPhone via OneDrive, where I have plenty of unused space.
But I haven’t looked back since switching to Obsidian, which is still my favorite.
Btw, I never really warmed up to Notion, but a lot of people like it, and as I recall the free version is pretty generous.
There’s also OneNote, which I used for a long time before Bear but never fell in love with. I believe its feature set is similar to Evernote’s, though the interface and workflow are different.
I resorted to store everything on iCloud Drive as regular files within a custom folder structure, loosely based on Johny Decimal. For my notes I always use Markdown so any editor goes, but I favor Obsidian or DEVON (no sync, only indexed iCloud folders), Byword for light editing. Eaglefiler was another solid option but I’ve stopped using it.
When I’m out and about, Files.app is more than convenient for my needs.
I left Evernote a few years ago when things began to be clunky. I have been around different apps, but the past year I have settled into the following…
Obsidian - all my notes
DevonThink - all storage / references
@majorgear you mentioned storing emails, I store all emails in Gmail (until I one day leave Gmail), everything is neatly labeled and archived for retrieval.
My wife used Evernote years ago but just uses the file system now.
I never used Evernote, was big on Circus Ponies Notebook (and had used OneNote on Windows), now I’ve got a three-pronged approach (besides the file system):
Notes app which is getting better all the time, though I still use the predecessor (?) Stickies.
Scrivener
DEVONthink, which I’ve only had since Black Friday. Currently only use for archival referencing. I don’t see using it to replace Notes or Scrivener.
I went with UpNote as I need a good mobile app that can handle attachments. The only drawback is that UpNote does not encrypt my notes. I have DEVONThink, but the mobile app needs improvement and I can’t easily access stored files on iOS.
@FrMichaelFanous If I were limited to using a desktop, I would definitely choose Obsidian + DEVONThink.
I’ve moved over to Notion. I haven’t quite got my head around the whole thing yet, but so far so good.
I think it may end up being a little more pricey than Evernote in the end IF I choose to move beyond the basic package (which has so far proved all I need)… but I have no longer got ANY FAITH in Evernote after more than 10 years of using them.
I think what they have done and the way that they did it was not good at all and they should have had more respect for us legacy users in the community. They Didn’t.
Interestingly since moving to Evernote Basic I am bombarded on every screen with offers of a 40% discount.
I don’t know whether this applies to you, but Notion offers a free upgrade to students and educators Notion für Bildungseinrichtungen (I have no idea why MPU is translating the link into German, but it should take you to the English language site)
Btw, in case you ever decide to try Obsidian, the paid Sync service (which isn’t mandatory) has discounts for people in education (including students) and non-profits.
I moved on from Evernote some time ago. At the time, what motivated me to do so was that it was difficult to export/remove content from Evernote; it increasingly felt like my data was trapped in the app, and exporting it proved to be a substantial project. Ultimately I settled on DEVONthink, which is an excellent tool to “keep websites, document files, emails and notes in.” It’s far more robust than Evernote was (it’s been some time since I’ve used EN, however) and works well in conjunction with Obsidian. Exporting data is easy, so I don’t have that concern.
I also played around with Notion a few years ago, but I found myself concerned about that problem of not being able to easily export content from the app and, critically, that I couldn’t use app links like obsidian:// or x-devonthink-item:// within Notion. I rely on links between apps heavily—a kind of “non-negotiable requirement for me.” Not sure whether that’s changed in the app since 2019, however.
I store everything in iCloud Drive and let it do its syncing thing. On top of that I run DEVON with a local database (no syncing here!) that indexes files on that iCloud Drive folder. On mobile, iOS Files is convenient enough, or at least I don’t find I’m missing much for my uses cases when compared with DEVON’s mobile app.
I find that this setup works correctly because DEVON is not concerned about sync (do not use DT sync engine on top of indexed iCloud Drive folders ever). It just sees files appear/disappear magically in the filesystem, but it works (files are downloaded on demand if they were evicted) and in the end the source of truth is what the filesystem sees, so on desktop I just use DEVON as a glorified Finder/Markdown editor with superpowers that is compatible with Obsidian (that iCloud Drive folder happens to be a Obsidian vault).
I know I’m missing quite a lot of DEVON goodies --specially I don’t have the capability of sharing taggings across my two desktop computers, which do not share the DEVON database (they are local), but the thing I appreciate the most from DEVON over Obsidian is the proper Mac UI.
