Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

I find it weird that no one is mentioning that this article is written by an EN competitor.

I've been an EN user since 2010. Yes they have had some problems and I have even tried to jump ship (as recently as last fall when I gave DEVONThink a go). I keep coming back though. I've yet to find anything that touches it in terms of features and functionality. Only ones that come close are OneNote and Notion. OneNote is fine but I don't like they way it handles organizing data. I prefer a nested hierarchy which I can get with tags in EN. Notion covers most of the bases but its an electron app and its SLOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW if you have a lot of notes in it. Takes 30 seconds for the mobile app to open and be useful for instance. Thats a dealbreaker for me. I need to be able to get a piece of knowledge on the go fast. If you can't give me what I want in less than a few seconds you go in the bin.

EN has the advantage of being available on Mac and Windows (and Linux w/ Wine), allows you to capture from literally anywhere and has a fantastic and fast search. You can encrypt notes. You can schedule notes. You can make todo's. Capture emails. Scan documents (and then find them with OCR). It's got a very usable api to integrate it into any part of your workflow they don't cover. I dunno, I've tried em all and EN is still the best IMO.

ps. I've been using org mode lately too. That _might_ be what finally gets me off EN but the mobile experience just isn't there yet. Beorg (iOS) is great but still pretty short on features. Especially capture and search.

Due to some weird bug in Evernote, I lost about 10% of all my notes. Some of them critical. This happened about a year ago, and I never found out the actual cause. I think it was some kind of bug triggered by the combination of syncing from/to the mobile app and the desktop app. But I completely stopped trusting Evernote after this and stopped using it.

I tried using it years ago over the span of a couple months and found syncing to be absolutely atrocious. It'd delete pages of notes if they didn't exist on the other computer I was syncing to and then they were simply gone forever.

Dropbox was getting huge around the same time. I started just saving my text notes in a dropbox folder. Never had any syncing errors, deleted Evernote, and never looked back. I'm sure they've improved since then, but it's hard to go back after such a sour first impression.

Also i know, at least for me, that when i find myself wanting to take notes most is whenever its a spur of the moment kind of idea that i dont want to lose.

In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the idea.

Its just too hard to get into the habit of remembering you have a note taking app on your phone that you can use whenever the good idea has just hit you.

You are too excited about the idea and trying your hardest to recall all the key details and keep them freshly in mind to be able to navigate to the app, wait for it to load up, press the + button, type in the idea using your thumbs, write in a title, save it, shit the app just crashed, load the app back up, great my idea wasnt saved, guess ill try writing it again, damn it i wish these notifications would stop popping up and pinging me, uhhh crap what was the clever angle to my idea again? Damn it.

Plus if im pulling out my phone, why not just use the voice controlled virtual assistant to record my ideas?

Not only does it have speech to text recognition but its actually quicker and more reliable than pulling out your notepad, flipping to an empty page, and hoping your writing utensil doesnt break/run out of ink.

We contacted Evernote in 2012, 13, 14 begging them to try CRDT based synchronisation.

First, it might have fixed their sync glitches. Second, that would make the client a full copy of the data, very much like a git repo. You can't lose data that way. Third, that would be a step towards collaborative features.

We got brushed off. We used personal connections as well as official channels. In 2014 we annoyed them so much, we're got a very confident response: sync is not a problem. Ironically, in a couple of months that "bug ridden elephant" post was out with all the reputational consequences.

I have over a thousand notes in Evernote.

One day I noticed that one was missing shortly after I created it. Eventually I discovered that the convenient new-note shortcut was failing every time with a database corruption error - but the error only appeared in a system log I was unaware of. There was no indication to the user that the notes were failing. To this day I have no idea how many notes I lost due to this bug. It was a traumatic experience.

It also sometimes simply doesn't sync for days on end, until I notice and trigger it manually. This leads to conflicts I must resolve manually.

What do other people use that has similar:

- Low-friction global shortcuts for creating and searching.

- Organization (tags and notebooks, or something similar).

- A UI that handles large note bodies well.

- Is at least on Windows, macOS, and Android.

I'd love an alternative, but I've yet to find one. And I don't even use most of its features.

I haven't seen too many people mentioning the onslaught of Microsoft One Note in developing a great note-taking tool, that syncs well in the cloud, and integrates with several of their other tools like Word and Outlook.

Personallly, as a early Evernote User, once One Note came out for Mac, I switched. And then getting a job somewhere where we used Windows PCs, just solidified it for me, and I never found the need to go back.

After I noticed that their forum thread [1] about requesting LaTeX-style math notes was almost as old as my Evernote Premium subscription, I came to the conclusion that this is just a ripoff. I paid all these years only to keep my access and for the occasional design update but the core experience stagnated.

Dropbox Paper already provided a better note-taking experience and with Notion.so I finally found a full replacement. The product is in active development [2] and I don't feel like I am just paying to keep the servers running.

[1] https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/16445-request-support-...

[2] https://www.notion.so/notion/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45...

I'm a paid customer of Evernote, I must say that it works great and it has no reasonable replacement.

I use it for all kinds of notes, like for example short tutorials on the command line, issuing commands that are hard to remember, TODO lists (both at work and for grocery shopping), meeting notes, listing pros and cons, everything.

In meetings I like the ability to record audio, or to add pictures I take with my phone, which isn't necessarily a capability of your average open source alternative.

Its search capabilities are also great. I have a ton of notes in my Evernote and I never have issues finding what I'm looking for. Compared with Google Docs for example, which is terrible.

My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port, I would have liked for example periodic Markdown backups to my Dropbox. Also support for encryption is weak. Apps like Evernote can be end to end encrypted, there's absolutely no reason for Evernote, the company, to have access to my notes.

I also worry about Evernote, the company, dying on me like many other startups before it.

Like many others in this thread, I lost data due to Evernote bugs; I also found their app incredibly slow to use, and then combine that with the price increases as perfectly fine alternatives (OneNote, Apple Notes) were still free or much lower price (Bear plus Drafts on iOS are my current replacement)---I cancelled my account last year.

The headline makes this seem like much more of a mystery than it is. "Offer an unreliable product at a high price" isn't a recipe for commercial success, not unless you're a monopolist (it works for the cable companies).

The problem with both Dropbox and Evernote is that their minimum pricing tier is too expensive for what they provide - particularly when both functions are provided as part of the Microsoft Office package with is the same price as Dropbox alone. I used both for years and would have happily paid a couple of dollars a month as I do for the basic tier of Google Drive. I abandoned both when the 2 device limit came in.

"To Pachikov (one of the founders), Evernote wasn’t just another app or a way to capitalize on Silicon Valley’s burgeoning obsession with personal productivity. It was an extension of the human mind itself that would let users remember everything."

TFA made many good points about distractions into merchandise, missing the group discussion opportunity, etc.

But the critical element that killed Evenote is it's unreliability and data loss/corruption.

If anyone actually uses Evernote as intended -- the tool to extend your memory -- the sync and storage functions simply can NEVER lose or corrupt data.

Absolute reliability is more critical than any other feature.

Yet they failed on this one key function.

My anecdata is that while evaluating apps for gathering info & taking notes, Evernote's feature list came out on top in nearly every comparison -- but it had significant reports of unreliability. Disqualified. Period. Never looked back and no regrets, especially since it is still evidently not fixed.

Developers must distinguish between general usability features (e.g., supporting platform X or data format Y) and critical functions.

General features will lose you some users, but you can get them once you get around to implementing.

Critical functions failing or missing will keep people away no matter what you do, forever. And beyond that is the general damage you'll cause to other people's lives by, in this case, corrupting their highly valuable data and memories.

Am I the only one just using the stock MacOs Notes and Reminders? Does the trick for me. Never lost a thing. Does pictures and text and has basic grouping.

Mac only of course.

I've been trying to retain / sync / archive / etc my electronic notes since the mid 1990's - starting with one of the early Palm models.

It's always been a fraught experience, especially if you're relying on someone else's algorithms to give you peace of mind.

The most recent experiments were using Evernote, later Nixnote (because Evernote didn't care about anyone using free software operating systems) I've now moved to a breathtakingly basic platform of Google Keep + script that reliably syncs between several devices, and allows me to pull in all my notes nightly, pop them into git, and propagate to 3 hosts / 2 sites. The same server pulls in and archives my Trello boards nightly, along with a bunch of other more mundane backups.

I've never felt so relaxed about my data.

For me real simple: Evernote works only on Chrome, at least the new version. And the Evernote team was quite smug about it.

Since I do not use Chrome, i canceled my premium account.

I don't think Evernote need(s/ed) a team version, but I do think its not sufficiently better to current alternatives for note-taking and bookmarking. I use Pocket for tagged bookmarks and OneNote when I want more context.

Where there is a gap in the market, tying notation to memory and productivity, would be some kind of notation context and intelligent reminder (e.g these web tabs, that note, this tag) tied to some event or place where it would be useful - you're in the workshed and picking up some old project; its someone's birthday you wanted to remind them about xyz. Now that would be a genuinely useful memory aid.

Evernote is still the only accessible note taking solution to offer OCR + related notes search. I've tried moving away from Evernote many times, but I always come back because of this.

Example 1:

1. Snap photo of document on table

2. Seconds later: Open in Evernote and see related documents

Example 2:

1. Take notes on laptop at lecture/meeting

2. Evernote presents photos of slides and handwritten notes about same topic

If it wasn't for Evernote I would never revisit my handwritten notes, ever. And I would have lost countless important receipts, bills, etc. I have tried various open source home made setups but nothing has come close to the portability and ease of use of Evernote. This is why I keep using Evernote to this date.

I just wish they would fix basic issues such as slow, or completely broken, search on mobile, etc. I think if they can strengthen their core product they still have something unique that I think many people would use, and possibly pay for, if they knew about it.

Evernote isn't perfect. That said I've used it forever since the days when it was just a desktop application and have thousands of notes. I've never lost one. While it shocks me, after many years there is still no real alternative to seamlessly synch all the documents I am reading and filing across all my computers and my iPad. The product is feeling a little stale as if active development has stopped but it does work fine as it is.

Honestly, who was sitting there in the middle of a CS class at Standford taking notes and found themselves so absolutely bored to a point of absurdity that they frustratingly sighed out loud,

"man, if only there was a way more exciting way to go about doing this.";

Which prompted the "ahah" lightbulb moment of the guy sitting just within earshot, one row over, who just so happened to be jotting down his own notes on some promising startup ideas?

I've been using Evernote for a while. But since the time MS made a shift to the cloud and has put a lot of effort into OneNote and Office 365, OneNote was doomed to decline in use. Why would you pay for it when you already have Office subscription? On top of that I was struggling with the UX, it didn't fit my habits.

Still using Evernote. Haven’t had the sync problems some describe. Still storing everything I put in it. Still isn’t trying to cram my rich tech notes into Markdown, still isn’t a web view pretending to be a native app.

I’m not using it for the original grandiose attempts to Remember Everything. It’s just my notebooks. It’s great to have all my notes for a project in one shareable place. And I’m still paying for it, like I’ve been doing for most of its lifespan.

Every now and then I look into the competition and nothing feels worth the hassle of trying to switch. I’ll do it if Evernote collapses as a company or if I end up working somewhere I’m forced to use a different collaborative note platform and end up liking it more. I got too many other things to worry about to hassle with it until then.

What a strange article. It's a note taking program. It has search. The author called it brilliant. Huh? As a long-time (no longer avid) user, the screenshot of the old version made me nostalgic, but I don't remember the search as different to a standard search function.

I used to love Evernote, but for some time it felt like they were hyperfocused on adding features I had no use for (collaboration, business integration...) while making the stuff I did use slower and buggier. The last straw when I emptied the trash and it perma-deleted over 100 of my non-trash notes. From the comments here it sounds like that sort of shit wasn't all that uncommon.

Once I found out that OneNote had launched Mac and Android versions, I switched immediately, and found that OneNote just feels sleeker and more usable to me anyway. My one annoyance with it is that the Mac version of OneNote is fairly stripped-down, where EN had feature parity across all desktop platforms. But I'm using my MacBook less and less these days.

Is there an OCR out there that is better than Evernote?

It is the one feature that impressed me (searchable hand written notes, etc.), but that was years ago.

This is the problem with taking on lots of venture capital - the pressure to grow and meet impossible expectations. Evernote could have been a great small-medium sized software company, making it's owners and employees nice money and satisfaction. But instead they needed to make moonshots to make VCs happy.

The shift to business and all the bloated features in the core app became a big turnoff to me.

I switched to Bear, happily paying for it, and haven't looked back. A nice focused app that hopefully will stay focused. https://bear.app

I use Evernote for anything that is relevant to others in my family. We can keep each other up to date on things like shopping lists and trip planning, family events or projects. Plus take notes. It’s one of the only apps I use and pay for. Chose it because it works on all devices and is simple. They could handle syncing a little better, when a change is made on two devices at once. But the almost unforgivable sin is that they don’t have a calendar. It’s hard to use a tool to organize your life that doesn’t have a calendar.

I hope they stick around.

Early and longtime EN user here. In addition to bloating the app with little features and collaboration tools —and the distraction of selling desk accessories and a food app— one of Evernote’s failures was in not helping users put the information they captured to better use. For example, if I was collecting code snippets, my IDE could hit the API and have access to them. There are many ways they could have similarly helped users better leverage the information and become more valuable in daily life.

I switched to Bear Notes long ago. The hash tagging feature is pretty powerful and allows for really nice, complex structures for your notes (or simple, really it's up to you).

It's absolutely crazy some of the reasons stated for evernote failing to get investment early on. Today people would be clamoring to invest in a company that was bringing in users by offering the product for free. The sell is so compelling "Get our users to write everything in evernote, build a huge userbase and then you can start to monetize because you've got a fantastic way of keeping them". I feel like that's one of the most common uses of VC money today.

I will continue to use Evernote however it has two major flaws:

1- No way to resolve the conflicting changes. It puts the conflicting document in the conflicting changes folder and you're on your own to find out what changes are conflicting. They don't provide a side by side comparison. Any developer knows what I am talking about. A way to resolve merge conflict resolution.

- It doesn't do partial text searches. Say you have a phone number like 9067372823 and you only remember the first 3 digits. You search for 906 and you get zero results! It's a lame search Evernote uses. I heard excuses from other users about performance issues. Screw that excuse. Users don't have tens or million of text they are searching for. Computers are very fast in searches.

We've been complaining about these issues for YEARS and the heavy lazy ass Evernote company hasn't done anything to add these important features. Everytime I get an update hoping they have a fix and they don't.

I've switched to plain text notes synced via google drive. There are a bunch of great apps. I use The Archive, but nvALT is open source and looks great as well.

https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

If Evernote will pursue the "Spaces" route, it's going to end up like Google+, trying to be like others without truly understanding why.

What they should do, is double-down where the puck is going in the context of individual productivity.

What is interesting in cases like this - it's all there, in their own forums. A roadmap vector based on their own WHY in a form of their userbase voice.

That being said, I still use Evernote. For existing Evernote users there are no real alternatives to it atm in my opinion (yup I'm using Notion, but for diff purpose). It's astonishing how much bullets can an original purpose-driven WHY take over the years and still keep going.

P.S I just build a tool for Evernote (https://neuracache.com/) just because these are the things that were missing for me the most. Again it's all in their forums, just as an example in the context of my own itch : https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/82427-spaced-repetitio...

I'm working on an Evernote clone for markdown. I find that almost all my notes are text. I hate the buggy EN editor, it's where I constantly think the app could do better and wonder what the heck all those engineers are doing... Here's the gist of my idea: Similar UI like EN, but designed along UX experience of VSCode. It's an Electron app using Monaco as the editor. Also uses a similar concept like VSCode's workspaces. Each workspace is indexed for quick search and has a powerful tagging system (just like EN has). The idea is to support different file types for notes over time, but it will be first and foremost designed for markdown. For me, it is essential that I can use Dropbox, GitHub, or a different provider to sync my notes and that I don't have to trust my note taking tool to do that. Anybody interested? (I know there are different tools like this already, but nothing that a) tracks EN's UX closely, and b) is comparable in usability and hackability to something like VSCode.)

Edit: notes are simply text files. ".md" or whatever you want.

Yea...I don’t understand anything Evernote has done that’s new since I’ve been using them. I also never understood why they charge based on upload volume vs total storage, say 1000 notes or pictures, like every other storage provider, or don’t fix the syncing errors. Like others have mentioned I’ve never had syncing errors with google drive or box or Dropbox like I’ve had with Evernote.

The author is painting doomsday all over Evernote, but honestly I don't see it. They are like Dropbox, they do one thing and do it very good IMHO.

I've been a subscriber for 2 years and use it daily on desktop and Android without complaints or data loss.

If there is be a thing to complain about it's their api. It's rather quite annoying to work with and some of the language SDK's are outdated.

I think the nail in the coffin for me was lack of support for Linux (this was years ago). I know that Linux is a tiny subset of their potential users, but I needed my notes to be everywhere, not just on the main platforms.

Ironically, I'm not using Linux as much now, but going back to Evernote was unappealing. I'm now using a combination of Bullet Journaling and Notion.

I used Evernote for a bit years ago, but only for scratch notes I didn't care to lose. Mainly because I saw there didn't appear to be any way to export/backup my data from Evernote in a format that was not some proprietary storage mechanism that only works in Evernote. I figured the end-game was always to lure people with freemium and then dramatically increase the prices later, holding your data hostage. And it appears that is exactly what happened.

It looks like you still cannot backup to an open format:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005557-How-to...

"The Evernote XML (.enex) file generated by the above process can be used to import notes or notebooks back into Evernote. This process can help you move notes between Evernote accounts or restore lost notes from a backup."

I’ve been using Evernote since it came out and have about 19,000 notes in it. They’ve been slow going at adding new features or at least making it super stable and it’s starting to feel dated.

I’d like to see: ability to put tags to sections of other notes, ability to put links to notebooks within a note, collapsible/expandable text blocks, recurring reminders, Apple Pencil support for iPad where you can freehand draw instead of having to import from Notability/Goodnotes, quicker access to text colors on mobile and desktop.

I’ve tried all the competitors and keep reluctantly coming back to EN. Notability was the one I liked the best, but it is super slow and it can’t be used offline on mobile. Evernote has gotten a lot better on iOS in the last year and I’m still paying to use it until something better comes along, which I don’t anticipate will be long. I hope they step it up.

OK.. this is the second time today I've dropped a reference to Polar. Not trying to spam HN I sware :)

Polar is sort off like Evernote but mostly (for now) focused on book annotation (PDF and web content).

https://getpolarized.io/

I'm trying to nail the work flow where you read a book on your computer and can easily annotate highlights as 'notes' and then those can become sort of like notes as in Evernote.

I think we're about 95% of the way towards having something killer and I'm still putting on the final touches.

Right now you can read and annotate amazingly well, create flashcards, highlights, and comments.

The remaining things I need to polish are to add support for annotating area highlights and to have better management of the annotations.

We have web and mobile is coming along too.

Comparing Evernote to Dropbox is interesting to me.

Evernote had a bad rep for reliability, and was messing about with very questionable enhancements to its product line. I switched to a Good Enough competitor after being an Evernote customer.

Dropbox has a great rep for reliability, and is messing about with very questionable enhancements to its product line. I have plenty of OneDrive and iCloud disk space, but I pay for Dropbox because it just works.

To me the lesson is make sure your primary product works and remains best in class. "Fly the Aircraft First" [1].

[1] https://www.faa.gov/news/safety_briefing/2018/media/SE_Topic...

I travel a couple of dozen times a year for both business and personal reasons, and I've found Evernote to be a good tool for handing travel related documentation.

For each trip, I create a new notebook, and anything relating to that trip goes into that notebook. Screencaps/PDFs of my hotel and flight reservations, boarding passes, etc. If I'm on a business trip, I scan my receipts with ScanBot and sync the scans over to Evernote, where I move them into the proper notebook for that trip.

Being able to add in my travel documents on my computer, receipts through my iPhone, and retrieve the receipts back on my desktop is exactly what I need, and so far Evernote has been the best tool for the job. 2,604 notes and counting!

For the history, here is photo of initial EverNote team:

https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

Yet, I think the article is incorrect about the role of Phil Libin.

First production ready version of EverNote contained all basic components and ideas. Phil was far from EN at that time.

Role of Phil and then CTO Dmitrii Stavisky was to transform initial startup alike environment to formal "enterprise" thing. And the result we see.

I used to use Evernote when I was using a "digital ink" product (that also never caught on). I used it for several years and it worked well.

But then Micosoft's OneNote got very, very good. And I switched.

Are there any good self-hosted alternatives to Evernote/OneNote etc?

Evernote is very frustrating and yet I can't fully move over to something else. It feels like they are swinging between being indifferent to paying customers and outright hostile. I particularly dislike that they display ads in the product when I am paying for it. I have been a paying user since 2010 and I have got 3901 notes in Evernote. Last year I started using Zoho Notebook and I have been quite happy with it for note taking, but I am still stuck with Evernote for the webclip function.

I have doubts about the accuracy of this article. For one thing, products like Evernote Food probably didn't take much resources to build so aren't as big a deal as the article suggests. For another, the article doesn't mention the acquisition of Skitch and Penultimate, while chastising the company for a lack of vision. Those aquisitions might not have turned out well, but were more related to Evernote's core product than Evernote Market.

So, with all these sync tools, there is a potential problem. We do not know if any data is lost until we look for them.

Recently, my apple notes were not getting update in Yahoo Mail(Its the way apple notes works). For a long time, I thought it was Yahoo mail problem. I did upgrade to iOS 12 and lost my notes. It turned out that apple was not even sending my notes to yahoo mail for backup.

Some one needs to come up with the a service which monitors whether these syncs are happening or not.

Are there any good, preferably open source, alternatives to Evernote/OneNote? I like Markdown but plaintext is not enough as I need support for pictures, tables, ...

Evernote and most note-taking or knowledge repository solutions are pretty solved problems for those willing to do a bit of self-hosting. Personally, I host a Tiddlywiki server on a cheap VPS I own that runs other things. A cron job regularly backs up the entire TiddlyWiki to a git repo, and the contents of the repo to cloud storage. TiddlyWiki is responsive and works fine on mobile, and I am assured that all my data is backed up and private.

I use Evernote, and like it. (Mostly for to-do stuff, in a way I can tweak it in a way I like + sync with phone.)

For the other alternate solution is text notes (in Markdown), which I use a lot (when I don't need to sync stuff + want to enjoy distraction-free environment without Internet).

The only real annoyance of Evernote is that each time I click on an external link, it asks if I really want to leave Evernote (anxious attachment?).

I liked using Evernote for myself, but we subscribed to the team version or whatever they call it, and didn't enjoy it.

"I put that in Evernote. Did you see it?"

Turns out you have to add it to the right notebook. Then you have to explicitly share it with your team members.

THE WHOLE POINT IS SHARING. It should be default. It's too much work to do the one thing I want to use this for.

I've been using Evernote since September 2008. There's lots of things I would like to improve, but overall it's invaluable to me. I've tried Apple Notes and OneNote and they both lack some of the organization features. Some people say it's bloated, but I actually find it quite simple.

Notion has been getting a lot of hype recently as Evernote, Trello, Todoist, etc., killer. Switched to it recently. It has a bigger learning curve compared to the other apps, fetlt unconfortable at first a bit but now I'm glad to have everything in one place with less confusion.

Evernote had (has?) five different client implementations:

1. Windows desktop

2. Mac desktop

3. iPhone

4. Android

5. Web

5 and 1/2. Mobile web

While I haven't worked there, I feel this must have created a huge burden on development. Any client feature has to be re-implemented 5 times! This must have made it very difficult to keep up with competitors that supported just 2-3 platforms.

I have thousands of Evernote notes and have been an Evernote user since 2009. I’ve often thought of switching to Apple notes but I stick with Evernote. If I could change things, I’d make searching better and I’d find a better ways to create utility from old notes.

I love Google Keep. It's simple, syncs great and overall it's a great tool for keeping notes. But I am trying to switch to something else. I don't want to wake up one morning and see a blog post from Google saying they are shutting it down.

Evernote and Dropbox would have made a great start for Apple iCloud. Convergence is the future.

NotionHQ is simply better, less bloated, and their free tier beats Evernote in functionality.

I think they need to bet the farm on collaboration. Maybe focus on building a solution for the education market.

Perhaps even roll the dice on AR applications.

I say this as someone who has wanted to love Evernote, but has ultimately stuck with pen and paper and occasionally Google Keep.

I think Google Keep killed it. I'm part of the user base that hardly takes notes, so for me, none of the advanced features of Evernote appealed to me. Once Keep came out, I just stopped using Evernote because Keep was more convenient.

Does anyone have a solution for notes that include equations? I don’t want to spend the time on LaTeX for simple math notes for myself. Something that I could just type in “sum” and a summation sign would appear?

I paid for Evernote for in-pdf and -docx search. It was too slow, though. Too slow, too slow.

Nowadays my personal notes are all written in paper and filed in cardboard boxes. My work stuff is all in gmail somehow anyway.

The web clipper is still the best I’ve seen (though also buggy, sigh). Do any of the EN alternatives have something like it?

I’d be happy with Apple notes if I could restrict a search to a folder.

I used Evernote for all of college but it just became clunkier over time and some workflows were just not optimized.

I recently gave Notion a try ... wow. It's everything I ever wanted.

Evernote was never simple to use, and its design was clumsy. I have always wanted to use it but never enjoyed the product.

Makes me miss del.icio.us. So simple and useful.

I would pay big money for one single feature that's for some reason is missing in their premium tier: backups. What's up with that?

>> They say that elephants never forget, and Silicon Valley is no different

I'd say this statement is both incorrect and accurate.

I've been a paying user of Evernote for years and love it. Use it daily.

The problem with Evernote (and most of desktop apps) is that, it requires a bunch of RAM and CPU usage to use it. (Can relate with Slack desktop app, or Github desktop app).

Just like user/customer could blame your web app if it starts too slow. The same applies to desktop apps, too.

very sweet design for your blog post, if OP is the owner — even leaner than Medium!

>However, the real brilliance of Evernote was its search functionality

I'm surprised this is supposed to be a selling point. Search has rarely found what I am looking for and I almost always have to go hunt for the note I am looking for manually. I've even been known to export all my notes as plain text files and use an external program (even the OS!) to search for something I'm looking for.

Frankly I've had so many many problems with Evernote. The synching is terrible. I can't tell you how many times I've been working on a lengthy note when it will try to synch and have a problem and it will trash everything I've written since the last synch and revert the note back to what it was before. This has happened to me so many times that I've started to write my notes in other apps and then copy and paste the text to Evernote when I am finished.

I've tried other note taking apps, but they all have problems of one sort of another. My ideal note app would have the following features:

* The ability to export all of the notes with the click of one button to plain text Markup files. Ideally any folder structure within the note app would be maintained and the notes would be zipped up and could be either saved locally or emailed to me. I have seen so many cloud services go up in flames suddenly that I have less than zero trust in cloud services. I want my data to be available in a format that I could easily move it to another service and I can back it up locally. Evernote doesn't really do this. This is the primary reason I only trust it for notes that I don't really care about. Anything really important I keep in other note apps that do let me easily export the notes. Unfortunately those other apps have other downsides that keep my coming back to Evernote.

* The note app can store notes of just about any size. I have some really really long notes that I don't want divided up among multiple notes. Evernotes doesn't appear to have a note size limit, I've found that most other note apps do have a limit that is far less than the length many of my notes already are.

* I want seamless and automatic synching across platforms. It needs to work well and not lose any of what I have typed (Evernote fails in this regard). I shouldn't have a ton of duplicate versions of my note with timestamps because the synching has gotten all out of wack (Evernote does this a lot).

* It should be easy to create a new note. This is basically Evernote's number one benefit from what I've experienced.

* It should be easy to create links between notes like a personal wiki. I have one (unfortunately no longer being developed) note taking app that excels at this. So far I haven't found how/if this is possible in Evernote. It's certainly not easily discoverable if it is possible.

* It should use Markup as the underlying formatting engine. This goes back to the first point about being able to export the notes in a non-propietary format.

tl;dr, "Silicon Valley company with strong vision and passionate founders takes too much VC funding and loses its direction under the pressure to grow at all costs."

Reading these comments reaffirms my position that I've had for years: I only trust plain text. For this reason alone org-mode is the only note taking system worth using. But it's also good for other reasons. You should try it.

Evernote is a pig. It's the single biggest issue. It's slow to launch, slow to respond, doesn't follow Windows or Mac OS UI/UX standards, and is just clunky.

Note apps need to capture thoughts and objects seamlessly, quickly and with very little friction. Evernote doesn't do that. Launching Evernote feels like launching Excel or Photoshop, when it should feel like clicking on your Wifi menu.