Web Clipper is broken, useless, sloppy. Looking for an alternative.

[Tesgin 3]

I have LOVED Evernote for years. My most used app.

Latest iteration on Mac OS no longer has tabs

Android web clipping is a mess.  Same for clipping from my MacBook browsers.  No longer the neat, slick, simplified clips of the main content on the page; now it copies every link, formatting is a mess, all third-party ads and links are clipped.  Unusable.  Awful.

Support is crappy.  I'm a paid plus member. VERY dissatisfied.

 

I'm exploring alternatives.  A great loss.  Never saw anything l like it. THey had a great product.  Would've done better to just leave it alone.

[Jeremy England 141]

Are you just complaining to complain or do you want to look for solutions? 

Do you do the article clipping or simplified article clipping? I find that doing the article clipping and then choosing only the sections I wants goes a long way to helping alleviate some formatting issues. A lot of it is the dynamicness (awful word I know) of the previewing in Evernote now. I think you'll be hard pressed to find anything much better out there. But maybe Evernote just isn't the app for you any longer. 

If you're on Mac, the popular competitors are Devonthink Pro (huge learning curve), Keep It (extremely simple), Apple Notes (not as robust), Bear (primarily text based and organizes only on tags), and Notion (cross platform, but has some pretty big outages the past couple of weeks). 

 

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Clipping on my Mac works as before.

There is an issue on iOS, but really: iOS clipping was never really good, if one needed a solid clip, it was always move over to the Mac and do it there.

[Tesgin 3]

Thanks, Jeremye.

I guess I'm complaining a bit 'cuz it's VERY frustrating. However, I do want a solution and have spent several hours today trying to find one.

I've downloaded and tried several:

OneNote - nice, but web clipper does not work at all on my Android phone

Nimbus - clips only a copy of the link to the page

Joplin - clips only a copy of the link to the page. Also, I really prefer WYSIWYG

DevonThink - doesn't have an android app

AmpleNote - possibly has potential

Bear - looks great but no android

Supernotes - no webclipper

Obsidian  - no webclipper

Keep It - nice, but no android (and no clipper?)

Notion - checking it out now. Interesting. Has trouble syncing some pages. Some apps not supported for syncing

 

 

The desktop version works "most of the time" but has begun having a lot of difficulty with the simplified clipper.  Includes a lot of junk.  "Sometimes" works fine.  The android web clipper has become unusable. Sometimes now it cannot clip at all (I just got an error that said it cannot load www.  Strange). More typically it includes everything on the page -- third party ads.

I've loved this app.  It gets worse with more updates.  Not sure what to do.  It's the clipping feature that's making it untenable for me, esp on Android.  However, I've not been successful in finding alternative.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

What I do on iOS when I just need the content (this will not contain active hyper links):

• Open the web site, switch to reader mode
• Open share - print (probably different on Android)
• Instead of printing I now create a pdf (iOS does it from the Print preview - Even lets you select the range of Pages). I share this pdf to EN.
• If I want to grab the URL as well, I simply copy it from the browser before I start the printing.
• Open EN, let the new note be created, open it, place the copied URL into the new note.

It work without reader mode as well, but then it depends on the web site whether it looks o.k. when grabbed. Reader mode works nearly always.

[h3artbe_at 21]

I just came off replying to a similar question before I saw this topic. Personally I'm very content with EN Legacy and have not experienced the issues you mentioned with the web clipper, but am still phasing EN out, out of principle and because no tab functionality in future editions is a deal-breaker for me.

If it's not absolutely necessary for you to have your web clippings attached to a notetaking app, have you considered other tools with web clipping functions? For example, I now make a point these days to also 'save a permanent copy' when bookmarking web pages with raindrop.io (my bookmarking tool). Premium users get to use this. From the 'preview' screen it takes 1 button click to open/expand either the saved copy or visit the actual website. I believe a 'notes' and 'annotation' function are also in the roadmap.

I've also bookmarked Diigo to test out soon. Like Raindrop, premium users there also get the 'archived web pages' feature, but for now I can't vouch for this app yet.

PS: I haven't tested any of these on Android as I only make web clippings when working on a desktop.

 

[mr_riptano 1]

Tesgin, did you end up finding a usable alternative? I'm super frustrated with the buggy mess that Android clipping has been lately.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

WebClipper on desktop works fine for me.

If looking for an alternative, I would check Pocket.

On mobile there is no dedicated web clipper. The mobile app is using the sharing process provided by the OS. It works good on some web sites, less so on others. If you look at the virtual mess a modern website is build from (a lot of different building blocks, knit together by some code) I am surprised it is possible to clip them by „sharing“ anyhow. Sometimes switching to reader mode before clipping smoothens the result a bit.

[Roy Breiling 10]

I agree!!! No support from Evernote other than this forum, but they sure want you to upgrade so they can get more money.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Real support is done by real people, and real people cost money. It is a company decision to run a pretty open Free plan, but support it through general sources only. They could probably cut back on the Free plan (like limiting the number of notes, or setting a time frame), and provide personal support to all that are left. On Free it is basically take it or leave it.

Ot in shorter words: There is nothing as a free lunch.

[Roy Breiling 10]

I'm not on a free plan.

[Roy Breiling 10]

If you can't get support way stay subscribed?

[PinkElephant 8,117]

There are at least 4 ways for subscribers to contact support. I agree, some of them could be more obvious. This is the most direct way:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

[Tesgin 3]

I did find a solution. Check out Nimbus Note! Amazing app. Evernote on steroids. Better support and less expensive. 

 

Honestly, blows Evernote out of the water. Did so much more than EN. Similar workflow. Much more powerful. 

[mr_riptano 1]

Unfortunately that is incorrect, especially with respect to this thread. Nimbus doesn't even try to do web clipping on Android, it just throws the URL into the note and calls it a day.

[Tesgin 3]

12 hours ago, mr_riptano said:

Unfortunately that is incorrect, especially with respect to this thread. Nimbus doesn't even try to do web clipping on Android, it just throws the URL into the note and calls it a day.

Actually, while that was true a while ago, it is no longer true. Their Android clipper is great. Fully functional and superior to Evernote's.

What you say used to be true, but is no more. I lose track of time, but it's probably been 6 to 8 months, maybe longer, since they fixed that. Now you can select whether you want to clip your page as a link, as a bookmark (which would include a small description of the page that you're clipping to, along with a link), or the full page. It's a pretty solid product.

TBH, I switched to a paid subscription to Nimbus even before they had that fixed, because Nimbus is all around such a superior product. It just does everything that Evernote does, and has many more features as well. The layout is pretty similar in terms of workflow, in terms of what it looks like. But it's so much more versatile.

The other thing I'd add is that their support is marvelous. When I've had questions I can email them and I'll get a reply within a few hours. Very helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable. I would add also that not only do they say that they welcome suggestions for new features, but they have actually incorporated some of my suggestions and implemented them. In a timely manner too! Same with glitches. Sometimes I find a glitch, i report it, and they fix it.

Here's some more info, if you're interested:

https://nimbusweb.me/clipper.php 

You can even capture just a portion of your screen, instead of the whole screen, along with annotation tools and a capture tool that will record your mouse movements and a video of text you type, or lines you draw on the screen, etc.

https://nimbusweb.me/screenshot.php

Ha! This is sounding like an advertisement! It would be good for me to comment that I have no relationship with Nimbus whatsoever, other than just being a satisfied and paid subscriber. It's just that I was so stinking frustrated with Evernote, which I used to love before they wrecked it. But they also have not developed their product. So I'm writing this just because I am that thrilled with what Nimbus has done. Couldn't be happier!

[Tesgin 3]

12 hours ago, mr_riptano said:

Unfortunately that is incorrect, especially with respect to this thread. Nimbus doesn't even try to do web clipping on Android, it just throws the URL into the note and calls it a day.

Oh, Mr. R., Just a thought. When you use the Android clipper, it's easy to miss that there's actually a drop-down where you need to select whether you want to clip to a link, a bookmark, or an article. Make sure you have article selected. It's easy to miss. I've done it myself. If you don't happen to notice that, and have link selected, it will indeed only select a link. But, trust me, it's there!

Hope that helps.

[mr_riptano 1]

You're right, I did in fact completely miss that dropdown.  Thanks, I will probably switch to Nimbus now.