Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise | Hacker News Reader

Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

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230 pointsMereruka185 comments

If Evernote hasn't found a set of features people would be willing to pay for in their ten years of existing, I doubt another round of funding is really the solution. I'd much rather see them reduce their staff to an amount they can afford given their MRR, and focus on fleshing out the features that people are actually willing to pay for.

Evernote is not a product, it's a feature.

Hence why you have equivalent or better software from other companies

Also, it also struck me as not very user friendly and a tad bureaucratic

Maybe I’m oblivious, but I’ve never heard bureaucratic applied to software. I’ve got to say it fits perfectly in this case.

JIRA also fits the bill.

"enterprisey" is a word I've heard used to describe jira a few times. Its meant as an insult.

Enterprise software:

- Slow GUI

- Horrible Java thing

- Complicated

- Weird patching process

- Doesn't integrate with what you want (or does but costs more)

- Bought and mandated by somebody that doesn't need to use it

JIRA out of the box is fairly sane. The problem is it’s so easy to customise and project managers go crazy with statuses and custom fields and mandatory transitions.

The MySpace effect.

I was a paying customer for a couple of years. Their failure to make cutting and pasting bullet lists, intuitive, despite many people complaining for years was enough to make me leave.

I just snapped one day and walked away, never looked back.

I really did like their OCR features. I guess I like lists more.

OCR is their most important feature, and that is mainly what I pay for. The clip extensions for browsers and Skitch are nice too, but not as essential.

> “In the past three months (June, July, August), Evernote has been downloaded 2.5 million times worldwide,” a spokesperson for analytics firm Apptopia said. “After store fees, the app has brought in revenues of $2.9 million through in-app purchases.”

That seems like... not a lot... for a company that has raised $300 million in funding.

Yeah I remember commenting here a few years ago with surprise that they were a "unicorn" with ~$30M ARR, and nobody seemed to find that valuation unrealistic...

$1 per download isn't enough to pay the bills. That's not much more than a 99¢ game. It means people don't actually value the product enough to pay for it.

I spent my last two years of residency taking my notes in Evernote, but they really fall short in the transition between hand-written notes and that shift to research where you need to make high-quality handwritten notes over a PDF, like Notability, and then move those PDFs to the bibliography phase of databasing. Now that I'm out of training and doing my own work, that like of integration with my future self really killed EverNote for me. Now I need to figure out how to ensure all my notes are saved somewhere.

These knowledge management systems really need to think about a human through their education-training-research-job lifecycle. I think DogPile + Notability + Evernote would be a great integration.

Geez, that's disturbing. To think Xournal does it more or less for gratis & libre!

Xournal comes so, so close.

You gotta roll your own out of app organization/tagging scheme, which isn't a big deal in keyboard mode, but when my machine is in stylus mode, totally sucks. (I used folders to organize Xournal files. Hard to navigate via stylus. Compare to say onenote with good stylus/touch us)

Also, the UI is just funky. Switching colors of the pen requires carefully tapping an extraordinarily tiny colored box. No way to paste images, you gotta clipart them in (so no roll-your-own stylus screenselect +paste functionality like onenote + windows 10). Scrolling only works sometimes, and leaves little penmark dots usually as it takes a second to understand that that wasn't my stylus.

It only recognizes one of the buttons on my thinkpad stylus.

If you're in putting text and want one word to be a different color, that single word needs to be an entirely different textbox, which is nearly impossible to do so close to other text. Also, no bold, italic, underline.

Gotta roll your own sync, which doesn't bother me because onenote sync is so terrible it actually makes the software worse.

Xournal is an incredible software but it's just soooo cloooose. I keep meaning to hunt around to see if it's open source and see if I can start contributing to get it how I want it.

http://xournal.sourceforge.net/manual.html

Yup, that there sure is the manual.

>The font and point size can be modified using the "Text Font" command in the Tools menu (or the toolbar button).

Yup, just like I said.

>Alternatively, images can be pasted directly from the clipboard (without having to select the image tool).

Nope, non functional on Ubuntu 18.04, have tried countless times.

One huge problem is that there’s a lot of competition that provides most of the same core features for free—like Apple Notes, for example. It’s also easy to repurpose apps like MS Word and Google Docs to achieve the same functionality. Obviously they’re very different apps designed for a different purpose, but many of my friends don’t seem to mind. They just want a reasonably functional way to take notes for free.

OneNote is a direct competitor and honestly a better one

I swapped from Evernote to OneNote for all my note taking needs years ago. I can dump all of my random notes and thoughts into one notebook then structure them better than I ever could with just tags. Not sure if that's changed on Evernote, but lacking the option for both structured and unstructured notes is what drove me away from it initially.

The OneNote web clipper is a disgrace compared to Evernote's. How do you get around this problem?

Not my use case I guess. I use it for my own notes and lists and sketches rather than a repository of stuff from other sources.

Evernote was fine at the start but it seemed like they could never figure out what they wanted the UI to be, so they stretched it in too many different directions.

Evernote's Skitch was absolutely fantastic and I still haven't found a better replacement

Nice little program, but Evernote's main contribution was buying it and killing the iOS/Android/Windows versions. I liked it better as an independent app that cost a couple bucks instead of a freebie that died for not fitting the "core Evernote experience."

I don't use a web clipper, I use copy/paste. It pastes the content and a little footnote about the source with URL at the bottom.

I used to be a regular user. I never paid because they never gave me a reason to, not because I didn't value it. I'm not going to go out of my way to figure out how to give them money when I'm already getting everything I need for free.

Agreed.

The closest they've come was when they started limiting app access to the account to two devices. I almost pulled the trigger. If they lower it to one device, I will strongly consider paying.

There is one big thorn in my side though. It is their synchronization. Way too often I end up with two conflicting notes. They get sent to different places and they are not linked together. Before starting to pay, I will give on the of the Evernote alternatives a try, solely because their synch sucks. I understand that synch is a difficult feature, but at least try to make the post-conflict user experience more pleasant. Cross-link the conflicting notes at least.

Another problem for me is their text handling of lists. Eery so often, after I paste something in, bullet points appear or disappear. Things get merged in and are impossible to de-indent. It feels lie Microsoft Word from 1998.

I would expect everyone who was in market for Evernote to already have Evernote installed. They've been a big name for close to a decade now. I got their Android app in... 2013, if memory serves.

I mean, is this the point where Evernote realizes products eventually reach market saturation, and you need to start playing some bullshit business games like planned obsolescence or recurrent payments to keep up the growth curve (or, alternatively, realize you've done a good job, and move on to do something else)?

Evernote U-turned pretty quickly from the commitment they made just last year to not taking VC money: https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/13/never-say-never-evernote-...

I've been an Evernote user for a long time, but it's been ages since I've felt that they're actually user-focused by way of improving holes like poor functional parity across their apps(1). As a outsider, a huge amount of energy felt squandered on a shotgun-strategy of special-purpose apps while a stream of core app rebuilds launched, none of which significantly moved the functional needle.

I've been exploring alternatives, but so far nothing has stuck. Last time I looked at OneNote it seemed promising, but the lack of tags (seriously?) was a showstopper. DevonThink Pro was interesting, but the Mac experience and UI is archaic to the point of being unusable IMO. Esp. the way that DT bakes a really terrible styling onto imported Evernote notes.

I'd love to hear migration success stories from those of you who've moved on.

(1) One example: Want to create or modify a table on the iPad app? Nope. Baffling.

I'm still writing some notes in Evernote on my mobile, but on desktop I've just switched to markdown notes in a Dropbox folder. I have a vim plugin now that generates a html preview as I type.

I think markdown is the most future proof technology for the moment because you can just use pandoc to convert it or most note systems will accept markdown as an input format.

I'm not sure how tags would work in markdown, I guess you can create links manually but that's not really what you want.

I suppose the set of features I need covered include:

- Web clipping. Evernotes browser plugins are pretty darn good here.

- Notes with attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). Some of these are mixed-media notes, where text, images, and/or file attachments are mixed to create a comprehensive document about some topic. Others are "pure" attachments, e.g. "store this PDF where I can retrieve it by search".

- Note taking. This, in isolation, is the easiest.

- Note syncing, mobile and desktop. This gets a bit harder.

- Search. Let's be clear, this was the first and biggest killer feature of Evernote. Notebook and tag organization are important, but rather than just providing direct hierarchical/taxonomic organization, they're largely there to support search with user-defined search facets.

I'd also love good Markdown support – that's one of my most-wanted features from Evernote in the first place.

So, you feel search in Evernote is good? Personally I've found it severely lacking. I can't tell you how many times I've searched for something that I know is there (and that I do find after manually looking for it), but search comes up empty.

I think you have found most people's problems, not just with Evernote, but with all other clipping services: it's write often, read once (if at all).

Yeah I prefer ripgrep with a bunch of markdown files.

That's interesting, and absolutely not my experience. Search has been robust, finds what I need, and absolutely worth having. Might be worth a support request -- maybe there's some undetected lossage in your account's search indices and they need a rebuild. (Or maybe you can kick that off self-service?)

> Note syncing, mobile and desktop. This gets a bit harder.

The dropbox text editor works 'ok'. It's not great, but it's clean enough that I can edit my markdown notes and they'll be synced with dropbox.

What vim plugin do you use?

https://github.com/euclio/vim-markdown-composer

Requires a rust compile of the code in the plugin, but once that's working it works well.

>so far nothing has stuck.

Have you tried diigo.com and it's apps? I highly reccomend it to everyone looking for Evernote alternative, especially for web clipping and organizing.

Not yet, but I'll definitely have a look. Thanks!

Personally I use Ulysses which has been great on desktop & mobile (supports code blocks, markup & more). However I'm not sure how I feel after they switched over to the whole subscription-model thing...anyone else have any success with similar alternatives?

I used Ulysses but I ended up moving to Bear[1]. It's still. a subscription fee, but much cheaper ($1.49/mo). It's lightweight and perfect for what I use it for - taking notes.

If I was going to suggest something for longer-form writings (e.g., journaling, blog posts) and you find that inadequate, I've heard good things about iA Writer[2].

1. http://www.bear-writer.com

2. https://ia.net/writer

If you live in the Apple ecosystem, I highly recommend mweb[1]. It ticks all the boxes I've been looking for:

  - intuitive UI: lets me see 1) raw markdown syntax or 2) formatted preview... no weird in-betweens
  - sync to/from mobile, with preview & edit support
  - markdown support with nice preview and support for code (similar to github style)
  - search
  - support for folders (and potentially tags, if I ever find a good use case for them)
  - pdf export
  - no subscription model

Alternatives I've tried which haven't done as well for one reason or another:

  - Bear: confusing preview/editing mode
  - Evernote: no markdown
  - Ulysses: subscription model shift
  - Standard Notes: confusing/buggy UI
  - Quiver: poor mobile support

[1] https://www.mweb.im/

I would be happy if Evernote was "done". I pay for a subscription, I am not interested in paying for new features, I would simply be happy if it went into eternal feature freeze and only did security and compatibility updates.

Of course this kind of thing won't happen but maybe it says something about the optimization pitfalls of our economy.

This would never happen for numerous reasons, but imagine if you could fork a company somehow. Take the existing state, but just take it in an entirely different direction.

For companies that don't produce physical goods, this would actually be somewhat doable..

Isn't this kind of what Alphabet did?

I once worked at a company that had a successful product ($40M in sales, $15M in arr via support plans). They did a rewrite, that of course went a year long and was poorly handled by sales and marketing ie it was talked about freely with customers and prospects; contributed to sales drying up while they all waited for the new hotness.

I knew the rewrite was going take a lot longer than they were saying, both due to common sense and because there were conflicting goals from ceo and cto.

I went to the ceo and made a case for a back up plan, myself and a few others could continue on the old busted version; bug fixes and minimal enhancements only, insurance if you will. I really thought about buying it but had no way to finance anything like that. CEO didn’t bite and was in process of selling the company to a PE firm.

I left when the new version finally shipped with half the features and twice the bugs. The PE installed CEO wrecked the sales org and sales never recovered.

As a side note, a foreign firm had pirated a much older version 10 years prior, rebranded and was #3 with it in that market.

Netflix did something sort of like that when they split off shipping dvds into a completely different unit.

They announced it (Qwikster, I believe), and then they immediately canceled that plan after massive backlash.

It’s back. DVD.com is Netflix’s DVD by mail business.

Really? I wonder how it will compete with Redbox? We rarely watch movies (we don't even have a Netflix subscription), but when we do it is a spur of the moment thing so we just run around the corner to redbox and grab something. Waiting for a movie in the mail? That's so 2010 ;-)

Netflix still has almost 3 million DVD subscribers. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/250940/quarterly-number-...)

They compete by having a larger library.

But before you get too smug, the idea of going to Redbox to get a physical disc is not exactly cutting edge compared to just clicking on a button and renting a movie on demand from your cable provider/Apple/Amazon/Google/Vudu.

Sorry if I came off as smug. Wasn't my intent. We typically spend about $1-2 a month on Redbox. Any streaming movie rental would be at least four times that amount.

Usually $3.99-$5.99.

I’m lazier than I am cheap.

But honestly, most of my movies fall off the back of a truck onto my Plex server.

And I was just giving you hard time about being smug.....

> We rarely watch movies (...), but when we do it is a spur of the moment thing so we just run around the corner to redbox and grab something (...)

I find it fascinating that this is core idea that made Netflix so successful, they just rely on much lazier customers than you!

Their library was far bigger than any storefront. Even if you never used the more rare stuff, it was a selling point.

Yeah, that is a good example of a company making a badly timed business decision and ultimately recovering completely unscathed (although it seemed like they were in hot water at the time).

> but maybe it says something about the optimization pitfalls of our economy

Of the tech economy, perhaps. Or perhaps that's what you meant by "our", this being a tech site.

A huge amount of the workforce is engaged in work that doesn't change much at all. Construction workers, skilled labor like service plumbing or mechanical maintenance, engineering, retail work, etc. It's fairly optimized and if it changes, it changes in reaction to something or because new technology opened new opportunities. Really, it seems like mobile and web applications are the most stuck into this loop of having to add something new. An emacs users who used it 25 years ago could still use it today.

Seriously. I will happily keep paying for EN without anything more than maintenance updates, I like knowing I'm helping the servers stay on.

I'm the same. Happy with current functionality and the current price.

It doesn't need to be the only product or have the most users it only needs to be functional and make enough money for it to be worthwhile except with vc funding it has to constantly chase growth and returns.

This. I've paid for it since 2012, my world would be rocked if they shut it down or modified it significantly.

It does make you start to question why you are paying for a service whilst locking yourself in when the rug can be pulled at any minute.

Mostly agreed. But the reality is that EN isn't a "lifestyle" company, but instead took a ton of VC investment. AFAICT, this generally means a future of terrible mismanagement by a board looking for an exit on a company that didn't turn out to be their darling unicorn.

That’s what I like about SimpleNote. It’s done. It is just text, tags, and search. It works on any device. It’s rock solid.

I really like it but the lack of a native Linux client is what stopped me using it.

> a huge amount of energy felt squandered on a shotgun-strategy of special-purpose apps

Never mind random apps, what about socks? [1]

1: https://mashable.com/2013/09/26/evernote-market/

that was just a marketing gimmick, it's not like core engineers will be busy knitting the socks.

I doubt core engineers were working on Skitch either (for one, it was an acquisition), but GGP still points out that Evernote lacked (still lacks?) focus. Selling branded stuff (they also did business card holders and bags) is another piece of that.

Both Evernote and Quip were such great apps when they did "one thing well"... keep multiple devices synchronized on simple notes and checklists.

I'm a happy DevonThink user (but not a super fanboy, so I won't lose sleep if you don't like it as much as I do). What did you think was archaic about its UI? It has several different layouts to choose from. Do you think they're all bad? I won't disagree, but maybe because I've been using it for so long I don't really notice it. Also, what does it do to the Evernote imports? I've never used that so I haven't seen that before.

That said, it's really good at filing and searching. I'd highly recommend trying it long enough to look past the UI to its capabilities. I'd hate to be without it now.

Also long gone from the company: the Skitch founders.

They "sold" their company to Evernote for stock in 2011-12. Let's just say that didn't work out so well for them.

Not that it's clear they'd have been much better off had they stayed independent. They had millions of users but no revenue.

Startup life can be brutal.

https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/advice/skitch-c...

That was a nice read.

I have been using Evernote for over 10 years now. The core note taking experience has never been close to good, but two things have made me stick by it through the years (powered through the nagging for business subscription)

1. Web clipper, which I use as a bookmark replacement, as well as for keeping copies of articles. Great for searching and knowing that I will always have a copy if a site suddenly disappears.

2. PDF ocr / search. I store a lot of receipts, contracts, invoices, manuals and other docs in Evernote, most of which are in PDF. I find the search-in-pdf feature indispensable.

I would love to move to something simpler like Bear (http://www.bear-writer.com), which has a superior writing experience. However, the two points above always make me come back to Evernote.

Edit: Also forgot to include the ability to take unstructured notes and sketches using the Apple Pencil on an iPad, while a bit cumbersome in Evernote, at least works.

My biggest gripe with the clipper when used on pdf's is the lack of any metadata searching in the pdf for a title suggestion.

I hate that I have to type in the title of the pdf as the title is usually "PDF - www.example.com".

Yeah, it seems like it would be pretty easy to grab a meaningful title. Hell even the filename would be better in most cases.

OTOH, it's the best web clipper -- even with the stupid PDF name thing -- of any of the notetaking apps. So I can see why they don't put a lot of developer time into it... they're already beating the competition.

If OneNote had a decent web clipper that was on par with Evernote's, I'd probably switch: EN has done some shifty stuff, killing features and then selling them back to users as premium-tier stuff when they get pressed for money, and I can imagine that's going to happen again soon.

I agree, but I'm ok with adding a title manually.

Speaking of missing features, what I do miss though is the automatic title naming based on current calendar events. It was a perfect way of tracking meeting notes, but that feature has been removed.

I have been using evernote since it practically launched. I only use Evernote these days because there is no competitor I like a lot. Not because it's good.

The app crashes, it takes forever to open, and the company has not improved anything in a long time.

Now they even changed the logo making it harder for my mind to locate the app.

Total disaster at Evernote.

I can't believe Microsoft hasn't bought it yet.

I can't believe Microsoft hasn't bought it yet.

Why on earth would they want to? OneNote runs on everything, ties in well with Office, and covers the big ticket features that Evernote does. I'm a vimwiki user for the most of what Evernote/OneNote cover, but what I can't believe is that Evernote users haven't saved Microsoft the trouble, and just switched to OneNote. I mean, if you're going to go walled-garden, Microsoft has some nice landscapers.

I use OneNote - it's really great. Until it suddenly decides it doesn't want to sync anymore.

I would pay to be able to make onenote only use the local filesystem and not be allowed to connect to the internet at all except when I manually decide to. Their syncing is garbage! Lord forbid you find yourself on a plane. Suddenly all your notes, inaccessible, even if you synced them an hour prior.

Maybe it is because we are still using onenote 2010 but we have one note books on our network drive and just sync to that. Works great for a team of 6.

It doesn't sync custom tags anyway.

https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-wind...

Evernote on windows is horrible. My two biggest annoyances were: - No auto capitalization, - no highlighting multiple words (wanting to change the font of specific words in different lines)

I moved over from onenote and decided to move back, maybe it's just more comfortable for me. They were both free versions anyway.

The same reason every mid-sized company gets bought: to obtain the users. Evernote was there first, and has an established market through nothing more than inertia. Their product is terrible. Someone will buy them, absorb the userbase, and get rid of the existing product.

Have you used OneNote? It is definitely a comparable product vs. Evernote and is integrated with Office365 which makes it part of all existing enterprise subscription packages.

THey also have a free version which is pretty good.

They had Outlook and still bought sunrise.

I still miss sunrise.

> OneNote runs on everything, ties in well with Office

Not for long.

https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-wind...

Well, that's one of the reasons I just settled on vimwiki despite having used OneNote since it was an internal build when I worked at Microsoft. I'm tired of chasing it around. Included with Office. Not included with your version. Runs on Mac, but only online and no local storage. Doesn't have that important feature the Windows version does. Had shared notebooks for ten years, permissions system still sucks goat balls.

And now they're going to axe the "good" version. Lemmee just alt-tab back over to vim here and make a note of that...

Would you then bring some light on how the such thing happens actually. That was really breakthrough product - the ultimate one, combined with Microsoft technologies like Tablet PC, and handwriting recognition - and now, after the 15 years since Microsoft invented all that, they are chasing after Apple with their iPad Pro?

edit - after twenty years!

> In 1999, original equipment manufacturers released the first tablet PCs designed to the Microsoft Tablet PC specification

Would you then bring some light on how the such thing happens actually.

I worked at the same company, didn't work on OneNote. Doesn't matter, I'm a tech guy and these decisions have nothing to do with the technology.

Didn't Microsoft buy Wunderlist?

Didn't MS already buy Wunderlist?

Has anybody tried Joplin? https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

On paper, their feature set looks great, with various synchronisation options (Dropbox, WebDAV, OneDrive) and apps on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS.

Well, I will now.

Boostnote is another great alternative, though it currently lacks a mobile app.

I love Boostnote too. It seems like they had a mobile app but the maintainer left a while ago https://github.com/BoostIO/boostnote-mobile

>> open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks. The notes are searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified either from the applications directly or from your own text editor. The notes are in Markdown format.

Was going to sit down and Google something with this exact set of features. Thanks for saving me the time!

I'm another one of the "long-time but unhappy Evernote users" club.

I've been using it for many years, and have a lot of stuff stored there. I don't know of a competitor that does everything I want, although it's entirely possible that I haven't searched enough, since switching costs are huge in this case.

That said, Evernote is pretty bad. I mean, the experience has gotten marginally better over the last few years, but there are so many random bugs, so many random differences in behaviour of the same features across different apps...

And I'm not talking about non-core features. I'm talking about things like tags, which is as central to Evernote as anything. Just as an example, there's an open bug that if you type in a dash "-" in a tag, it will auto-complete the tag. So if you have tags like "t- something" and "t- something else, writing "t-" will auto-complete one of them. Since many people use tags with a dash to structure their notes, this is incredibly annoying.

The bug has been open for 3 years.

I'm more annoyed that we cannot encrypt our full notes/account and they only offer selections of text from inside a single note.

I fondly remember Evernote talking about being a company that lives around for a hundred years. It had really great leadership, smart staff, a desire to be as independent as possible, keep data as belonging to the user as much as possible, and away from subpoena, and then a vision to help people become more productive.

Sometime later the vision floundered and staff became bored. Lots of people left for something more exciting. And the product went through its dark period.

Now the flaws are too many to mention and too well known too repeat but my question remains the same: what is there to do as a company that it makes sense to last a hundred years independently?

No. More than that. How can a company become so important just by collecting thoughts and memories?

FB survived because they had complete open access to how users were using the product. And they pivoted from their earlier promises.

Evernote stayed loyal. They suffered.

>"Susan Stick, another recent hire (June 2018) who is the company’s general counsel — a role that appeared to be vacant for two years before she joined — is expanding her role to include people operations as well."

So they have a lawyer being asked to take on what are essentially HR duties? If that's not the sign of a sinking ship I don't know what is. I wouldn't expect that individual to be there for much longer either.

Also "People Operations" is a load of shit, another Silicon Valley invention that seemingly all startups now feel compelled to have. I've had a few People Operations departments in jobs past and their duties largely consisted of brining the credit card to company "drink ups" and ordering dart boards and ping pong equipment for the office. The bar for this role is even lower than that of regular HR.

Ugh, the company toys and bullshit. I market my team to candidates by saying that we don't have any of that garbage.

HR is the most critical part of a corporation, but I've never worked anywhere that seemed to treat it seriously.

I dont know, why there is soo much hate for evernote in here. I understand , the valuation seems crazy. I have been using evernote for years and it suits my needs. I write journals daily and tag them with keywords. That way, i can read my past journal and laugh at myself.

Do you pay for it?

I journal on and off like parent and yes, I do pay. Might be planning to offload to iCloud given the news though...

I used them for years as a paying customer, and though the apps were also a bit slow and buggy I thought they were worthwhile.

I only cancelled when they changed their terms to allow engineers to read your notes to improve their ad targeting. Though they eventually walked that back it soured me enough, now I get by with google docs instead.

I replaced Evernote with Dropbox Paper and haven't looked back.

Dropbox Paper is a good Evernote replacement- cutover one year ago, very satisfied. Great note taking tool, markdown engine has very efficient keyboard shortcuts to generate inline blocks and other useful formatting (incl code blocks), easy to drop photos or files inline, good search, good sharing, reliable sync, and a “Save to Dropbox” icon on IOS (send to from Safari) to use as a replacement for Evernote webclipping ( clip as pdf, then insert pdf into Dropbox paper doc).

How have you gotten around not having a desktop client? I've thought about moving to Paper, but the lack of desktop client bugs me a bit for easy shortcut stuff.

I finally subscribed to Evernote a month ago but hadn't considered Dropbox Paper as an alternative. Very interesting idea. What do you do for web clipping on your desktop?

Can't recommend notion.so enough as a modern replacement for Evernote.

You could recommend it more by linking to the thing: https://www.notion.so

what's better about it?

I prefer notion because it enables powerful structures around individual notes. From when I used evernote, it was limited to folders of lists of notes sorted by some not very useful criteria (towards the end I was naming my evernote notes with certain prefixes to try to instill more structure), or sets of notes grouped by tag.

In contrast, notion allows notes to coexist with other notes within a single "meta" note, ad nauseum. You can organize them in rows and columns and insert arbitrary text or whatever other content to label notes, for instance. One particularly powerful structure is using notes in a kanban or trello like setup, while enjoying the full evernote-like features provided within any individual note.

Just downloaded the app. Do you know if it can OCR pdfs? I miss that from Evernote.

I’m on the fence after using it for about 4 months. Initially I was drawn to Notion due to the features, templates etc. - it made me feel like I was running a legit business, with sections for company vision, expense reports, meeting minutes etc!

The multifunctional nature reminded me a lot of Lotus Notes, empowering users to build new functionality and database (not a bad thing, though leads to silos and lock in).

Two main things ended up frustrating me about Notion that I went back to Bear and other tools:

- For pure text editing some of the shortcuts drove me insane. The syntax was kind of like markdown but not quite, and the shortcuts for moving between levels of indentation were different from pretty much every other app I had used. The rich content was cool, but ran into so many issues with embeds only working on certain platforms, and rendering blank or crashing the app on others. - It was surprisingly easy for team members to screw things up. I’m talking about cluttering tables with blank records, moving documents around and causing them to disappear into the ether for other users. There just didn’t seem to be very good controls or audit trails.

Would love folks to check out our app, Notejoy, at https://notejoy.com - an Evernote alternative with apps for Mac, PC, iOS, web, and Android coming soon. Complete with markdown support, integrations with Slack, Trello, G Suite, and Office. Powerful search with snippets & highlights. Great for team collaboration as well, with real-time editing, threaded comments, and more. Would love your thoughts!

This looks much more like a competitor for Asana than for Evernote.

Appreciate the feedback! I assume you got that impression because of the homepage's focus on collaboration as opposed to just individual productivity? Turns out we've focused a lot on individual productivity features and have lots of folks using it that way, but we leaned into the collaborative notes messaging for our homepage since that's what truly makes us unique in the space.

I actually want to move away from Evernote but you guys dont have Android which is a deal breaker for me.

The Android app is almost ready! A preview: https://twitter.com/sachinrekhi/status/1036844114841493504

As someone who dropped Evernote several years ago in favor of OneNote, did they ever improve the merging behavior? I gave up on Evernote due to daily merge conflicts that I got tired of manually resolving.

Not really. I've heard they're getting ready to release some updates soon that will address it in part, but who knows.

It's sad because it's a genuinely good but rusty product. I've tried all other note taking applications - OneNote, Notion, Bear etc. and each has their own problems. I don't like OneNote's strict "notebook" organizational structure. Notion also forces you to put notes into notebooks, the interface is annoyingly slow, mobile app is just a web app that's packaged for your device, no Chrome extension, no handwriting support etc. etc. but it has a TON of amazing formatting features that I would love to see in Evernote. Bear, Google Keep etc. in my opinion are just toys.

To me, Evernote would be just perfect if it could combine the handwriting flexibility of OneNote with the advanced formatting features of Notion. Also, is it really that hard for the Evernote team to add templates?

Thanks, you made me switch to Notion. I've been hating Evernote since the start, the limit on 3 devices and the excruciating way it handles fonts, yuck. Notion looks perfect for me so far!

I think it's apparent that Evernote and similar single-feature companies pproviding these single features like notes or reminders or to do lists or contacts are doomed unless they get bought by one of the big players.

I'll happily pay $10 / month to Apple or Google or MS, assuming basic privacy, to deal with everything - my email, notes, sketches, brainstorms, files, bookmarks, reminders, calenders, contacts, etc.

But I'm not paying ten separate companies $1 each for the same features, even if the individual companies are better than whatever the large providers include.

I just don't want to deal with more subscriptions, credit card bills, and the potential for surprise charges - been shafted too many times by companies that became shady as things became financially desperate.

What does that say about DropBox?

I've been using Evernote for a few years (I got it for free back when Apple was doing app of the week). I've never signed up for a subscription. Frankly I have another note app that I prefer (trunk notes) and use for important things I want to save. The main thing I like about the other app is it does auto backups to dropbox, the notes are in plain text (markdown), and I can easily email a zipped up backup to myself. Supposedly you can download notes from Evernote, but after reading the instructions I didn't bother to do it. Its not anywhere near as easy to do. I've seen too many cloud services go belly up over the years to trust my important notes to Evernote.

Oy.

I use Evernote because of its excellent image markup. You can mix images and text in notes and really document an image-based or figure-based data flow. Not sure if there's any alternative that does this as well.

You might look at OneNote

The new Apple Notes app does all this beautifully.

This. I used Evernote off and on until the Apple did a big Notes update. I didn't even install Evernote on my newest computer.

Evernote user for a bunch of years. Then switched to just using Atom + .md files. A couple months ago tried out Ulysses and fell in love. (https://ulysses.app/)

Typewriter mode, .md syntax, customizable themes, sweet tagging and filtering / organization (way better than Evernote). And you can save directly to native file structure. Haven't tried out the mobile app yet, but can highly recommend the desktop app.

ulysses became popular on their version-based pricing model. now they’re subscription and I think there’s a split between users who are okay with that and users who are looking / waiting for a replacement. I’m in the latter.

I never really got into Evernote. It's me, I'm horribly unproductive with so called productivity apps and end up abandoning most of them. But I get that the product was hugely popular back in the day and had a loyal group of users.

My impression when I last tried it a few years ago was that it was a product that lacked focus in a bad way. Basically they were bolting on everything and the kitchen sink. The UX wasn't particularly good either. It was trying to be too many things at once; none of them particularly well.

To make this work, they need some fresh ideas and focus. More of the same is not going to cut it: they have to do something different. So getting rid of the CTO, CFO, and CPO sounds about right since clearly things weren't working out with them in terms of technical vision, monetization, or product focus. The question is of course whether there's a better plan now or whether this is just stepping stone towards inevitable acquihire of whatever remains.

I wish them well. I was a paying customer for many years but a few years ago I backed up all of my notes and cancelled. I noticed that I spent much more time creating and curating notes than ever using them. Now I use org-mode and occasionally Apple Notes and Keep.

I re-evaluated the utility of long term curation of notes and working material.

Same here. I stopped paying since the only premium feature I used was the PDF indexing.

Personally, I’ve seen more people using Bear recently than Evernote... which is starting to feel a bit ancient. Its biggest strength is that it has Windows and Android clients, where as Bear doesn’t.

I always thought Evernote was just a more updated version of Treepad.

Treepad was a way of making all these labeled leafs of notes and organize it hierarchically. But it ended up being really annoying to manage. It was easy to add notes but easier to never look at them again, rendering them useless. Search or typical tag-based approaches wouldn't solve these problems. I always thought it would require something innovative, perhaps a more atomic line-based input that self organizes as a large list.

I'm not sure Evernote ever really came up with a more innovative solution than an upgraded treepad + cloud + search + tags ?

Used evernote a ton for a long time, but their last major overhaul 18 months or so ago left me behind. They switched their UI, process flow and more. It took it from a tool I found indispensable to one that tried to force me to their will.

Eventually, I grew tired of trying to fit into their new methods and moved on.

It doesn't surprise me they haven't been able to grow their paid base.

What tools are you using now? Also looking to move away from evernote.

Still haven't found anything better than Orgzly on Android syncing to the PC and other phones with Syncthing.

For an encrypted and open source alternative to Evernote, feel free to check out Standard Notes: https://standardnotes.org

It focuses on simplicity and longevity, and isn’t backed by VC. You can also self host both the server and the web app.

I mostly use Evernote to save/tag interesting articles for later reference (it sure beats trying to re-find stuff via google). Any good cross-platform replacements for this use case? Especially ones that run as a desktop app and/or are self hosted? I want a solution I can stick with.

I use Zotero for the same purpose and it's been great so far: https://www.zotero.org/

Open source and developed by a non-profit! I'll have to take a look, thanks!

How do you save websites on zotero, as pdf?

I think I misunderstood what the parent meant by "article". I use Zotero for academic journal articles and books. I think you can import website links too, though.

I was mostly talking about non-academic websites, not just the links, but the content too.

I’ve been a long time user of Evernote and have a love/hate relationship with the product. It really doesn’t know how to handle merge conflicts. I’ve been too lazy to switch but I’m starting to feel enough pain that I may make the leap. Edit:typos

ugggghhhh same

Seems like a good time for people to backup any documents that are only stored on Evernote.

Well, their Android app on ChromeOS is amazing. I hope these people can pull it together.

Any self hosted alternative to Evernote? Never used Evernote, but sounds nice.

I haven't found good alternatives for my use cases, but depending on your needs, you can host Paperworks[1] on Sandstorm[2].

Synology also has a DSM app "Note Station".[3]

[1] - http://paperwork.rocks/ [2] - https://sandstorm.io/apps/index [3] - https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/note_station

note station is actually decent enough. there's a web clipper, desktop app, mobile apps, and its pretty much a complete clone of evernote. they even managed to add text highlights before evernote did.

the only thing stopping me from importing everything into it is that there is only 1 export option. they need to add a html option and maybe plaintext

Joplin is a good open source alternative. You can sync it to a self hosted backend like Nextcloud though.

I use Tiddlywiki and Resilio Sync: https://philosopher.life/

Check my https://notes.sciter.com/ - it is not using external storage but your own hard drive.

Just in case: I am one of three initial Evernote developers who implemented the idea of Stepan Pachikov : https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

Well crap, I've been using EN for a while. Paying, even. Hope it doesn't vanish; guess it's time to start investigating alternatives.

I'm a fan of SimpleNote, which is plain text only and therefore limits the time you spend fussing with notes so you can get back to work.

Evernote’s founding CTO, Dave Engberg, Berkeley and Stanford grad, left in 2016.

I would gladly pay lots of money for a backup feature.

i hope i don't lose Skitch. that's a decade or more worth of screenshots and convenient annotations...

Let this be a lesson against relying on proprietary walled gardens.

Open source companies could run on a blockchain and one could have a smart contract to release the source code or access to one's proprietary data upon company going out of business..

They could just as easy use a flux compensator to mangle with the time continuum and use the Bermuda triangle as a energy source for their servers.

Let me know when you ICO.

The ICO closed in 1985. Did you miss out?

Not if you have a flux capacitor.

Strap it on to your computer and start downloading blockchains at 88Gbits a second!

Like this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_comp...

This wouldn't work. Flux compensator blocksize capacity can't support the throughput of a mangle tangle even with Merkle pruning. That's assuming that the Bermuda triangle would even come close to providing enough energy for your servers.

The Mister Fusion company made a Mister Blockchain companion product and it solves all those problems.

Well, they will have made it in a few decades, but you can preorder it now, and they'll send one back to you before you preordered.

> could run on a blockchain

git is literally a "blockchain", and has been since before "blockchain all the things" was cool.

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about in the rest of your comment.

You know how there is a trend of open businesses? Basically people who open source their metrics?

I think that things have the potential to go even further. A business could open a bank account and have its transactions viewable at any time or its balance queried.

The business could encrypt customer data and then release the customers' keys to the customer if the business's cash balance drops below a key threshold.

Do you even know what going out of business means?

Hint: It's not cut and dry. The Amiga company is still in business. Radio Shack still exists. MySpace isn't dead. GeoCities got killed, it didn't go out of business.

Smart contracts won't help you here. Blockchains won't help you here. This is a complex legal problem and you're suggesting it's easy, that the Magic of Blockchains will solve it.

Whatever man.

One could precisely define solvency conditions. "If cash minus liabilities exceeds $1million, perform_unwind_operation()" _Obviously_ these conditions could entail more complex business logic

Obviously this idea is getting HNmocked and I'm not going to be able to talk my way out of it, and yes I realize that ideas of property ownership and managing contract disputes are one of the cornerstone of the justice system and society itself.

In that way I am somewhat of a crypto radicalist and I'm talking my book as I do have a long crypto position.

That definition would make a lot of healthy companies arbitrarily bankrupt. Not many companies keep their assets in cash.

Plus this also presumes that people report faithfully, accurately, and that zero mistakes are made.

The biggest problem with immutable ledgers and smart contracts is simple: Shit happens.

This easily happened even for open sourced or unwalled gardens. The effort for recovery could be too large or too technically challenging.

I moved to Bookmark OS for organizing my notes and bookmarks like Mac OSX and have never looked back https://bookmarkos.com

Sad. What about alternatives?

Maybe it's because I code, and tend to prefer plain text, but I never understood mobile apps that do note taking.

I have always just really wanted basic plain text on an SD card file system, but locked Android phones and iOS actively throw up barriers to keep people out of the raw file system. Even Google ships non-rooted flagship smartphones without a default file manager, and like, zero support for core geek features like plain text, folder manipulation and zip files.

So then you have these note taking apps, and they aren't free, and they STILL don't provide these sorts of core geek features.

So then I have to attack my phone, break it with some local exploit, risk bricking it in order to reflash, and THEN maybe I get some of the traditional UNIX style file operations.

I'm not saying Evernote to the rescue, because, honestly, I don't expect that to happen. But FFS, having to nearly destroy a phone, or pay money to gain access with an aftermarket upsell, to add basic features that Linux provides for, native, as a matter of being an operating system, when using a supposedly free OS like Android is absurd.

So, if a CTO for a really popular app can't think of a way to help this situation, I'm pretty luke warm about what your company does for a living. How do your geeks use their phones at work?

A readily recognizable company like Evernote should have a clue about this kind of thing. At this point, I'm sick of scouring walled-garden marketplaces for no name freebie/ad-supported garbage apps, because I'm too lazy to crack my phone, and too cheap to pay. Why is there not some default solution. Even github created Atom because text editing is kind of bullshit, moreso than it should be in a lot of areas. Evernote could probably blast open some kind of mobile IDE/tooling offering, if they wanted to. Not branded as Evernote, but as a sort of power-user product worth paying money for, shipped under some other name.

Meh. Whatever.

I am so on the fence about Evernote. I have used their product for years, but found that they didn't lean into the whole "organizing a zillion things" well enough. I really wanted a replacement for my Franklin Planner that went out in the early 2000's with a fizzle.

Chris if you're reading this email me (contact in the profile) would be happy to share my thoughts on next steps.

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