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Comment by pantulis | Hacker News Reader

I understand that this allows you to manage collections of notes in Markdown format backed up to a Git repository. This is nice and I consider this to be useful, but I would suggest not to position it against Evernote but against knowledge management tools for teams (internal wikis, confluences of the world, etc)

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Agree: Knowledge management, not EverNote at all.

EverNote is all about dropping random files into it (images, pdfs, etc). It's where you store your bills, your receipts, your photos of wine labels. It also has a very handy web clipper extension to save web pages (whole pages, sections, or bookmarks).

I'm sure plenty of people use it differently, but I'm also quite confident (from how I've seen others describe it) that one its primary use-cases is as a big shoebox to dump everything into. You then search for that stuff through titles, tags and OCR in photos.

I use it in a fundamentally different way from Obsidian.

yeah I agree. This is really the knowledge management tool

When I presented Obsidian to a friend, and he told me that it was just a note-taking app, I was quite shocked by [what I consider to be] such a lack of consideration. Because I really use Obsidian as my second memory [marketing definitely worked on me, it seems :)].

Anyway... I have never used EverNote (==note taking?). And, as you have read, I am reaaaaally in Obsidian (==knowledge management?).

Can any of you elaborate of the conceptual difference between both?

Evernote positioned itself as a "second brain", but turned out to become an awesome Digital Vault. You can throw anything at it and Evernote will happily ingest it. You have blazingly fast search backed by Evernote cloud services, and even have some note linking capabilities but they are rudimentary when compared to a fully fledged PKM like Obsidian, DEVONthink, or others. These newer PKM tools allow you to reflect and reason on the content you have and massage it in ways that surface new ideas and allow you to follow unexpected relationships (hence being a true second brain). This is much more harder to achieve with Evernote.

Both are valid and powerful tools but the use cases are different, maybe just because the definition of "second brain" has moved since Evernote was conceptualized on the 2000s.

If you like Obsidian, check out Logseq. Both handle plain-text Markdown, so you can use them interchangeably. Logseq also handles Org-mode files, if that’s your thing. Everything is local, but works well with cloud storage. There’s also an iOS app. It’s worth a look. (No affiliation)

https://logseq.com/

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