I’ve used Evernote since about 2005 or so. I collected over 6000 notes in that timeframe. I’ve found those are rookie numbers. Some people have tens of thousands of notes. But these are mine. They’re websites I’ve clipped for future reference. Journal entries. Planning. Ideas.
I left Evernote at the end of 2016 when they said they’d allow employees access to notes in personal accounts. I have some very personal notes in there, and that spooked me. I switched to OneNote, but came back to using Evernote in 2022.
Bending Spoons bought Evernote since then. That didn’t bother me. Then they laid off all the original Evernote staff. Then it seemed like they were neglecting the product, which had gotten very slow. A lot of users fled for other products like Notion or Obsidian during this time.
Bending Spoons eventually started providing updates, and sent out a communication that they had to overhaul Evernote’s foundations to make it future proof. It got much more responsive. But they also jacked up the price to $129.99 a year for a Personal account, which is the plan I’ve been on for many years. It used to be around $30, then got raised to around $60.
I was due to renew in January. At first I thought about keeping it because I’ve been with the product for so long and it does its job well. But then Evernote started crashing on my iPad when I tried to edit any note. I reached out to support, but they stopped responding after I sent my activity logs. For my workflow, I’ve got to have a product that works on my iPad.
I attended a Meetup for a professional topic and tried to take notes in the browser. When I got up in the morning, I had a note with a title and no content. At least I took screenshots of the slides so I could stick them in the note along with what I could remember. But this was an intolerable failure of the product.
But where to go? There are many options available. The Keep Productive YouTube channel maintains a Toolfinder website: https://toolfinder.co/ Take a look and see how overwhelming this can be.
I tried to get Notion to import from Evernote earlier last year. It only imported about 400 of my notes in my main notebook. I tried to get another import. It actually did it twice, but with a complete export of Evernote I use Notion now. The webclipper doesn’t work (at least on Safari) but so far I’ve been able to copy and paste anything I went to keep into Notion.
I started exploring Tiago Forte’s PARA methodology. Notion seems to work well with it. I think Tiago also completely left Evernote for Notion.
If you’re curious about Notion, there are more videos on YouTube about it than you could hope to get through in this lifetime. It’s a very powerful product. Maybe it’s overkill for my needs, but I can grow into it.
