The year to ditch Evernote

[chevdor 0]

I have been premium user for 13 years... I loved the old versions of Evernote gladly paid for that. They were fast and to the point.
The issue is that they never **improved**. Sure there were updates... but they did not **improve**. They became bloated and slower over time while missing the real features that should have been added. Evenote proudly mentioned they native App at the beginning... where are they now ? Surely web based App are more convenient to develop but the experience when it is not done well is horrible and this the state today with Evernote.

Last year has been an horrible experience and I am still using Evernote 7 because I refuse the decision of Evernote to ditch local Notebooks. Remember those breaches ? may be not...

Now Evenote shoot in every directions with calendars and todos no one really cares about where the main function: taking notes is more slugglish than ever.The experience was better on my HTC Magic in 2009 than it is today with a flagship phone....
Today I woke up with my Premium account desactivated and Evernote unilaterally cancelled my Premium subscription. I am lock out of my notes.

This is the last drop for me, enjoy the last month of subscription you extort from me Evernote, I will be swithcing to another solution, likely Joplin. Not only they have the features Evenote lacks, but it is also open and there are tons of plugins making it wayyy better than Evernote. The product is also evolving very fast (technology wise).. unlike the Elefant (whose commercial departement is likely growing indeed)...

It is sad seeing a company like Evernote makes such a mistake AND not being able to repair it despite users' feedback and patience.

[chevdor 0]

Oh and the forum still sees me as Premium, nice....

[PinkElephant 8,091]

Don’t you see yourself as Premium ? You are sure worth it, as anybody is.

Good luck with your next decision. The market has evolved, and it is good for us customers we have a choice.

The same dynamics would have killed EN (at least commercially) if they would have prevailed on the sinking hodgepodge fleet of the legacy clients. The last years before v10 was released they were barely keeping it afloat  - sailing nowhere.

Good this spell has been broken.

[chevdor 0]

I am glad EN fixed their commercial problems... on the back of a poor resulting technical solution that impact paying users daily...

I am not saying a change was not required, I am saying the change they made was definitely not the right one.

One of the main issue I see is that EN is NOT able to guaranty security (no E2E encryption). That means any data that is online is at risk. And the risk is real, there were breaches in the past and very likely some we never hear about....

At least, in the past, users could keep their confidential notes offline to mitigate this risk. This was a nice and fair solution.
I find it unresponsible from EN to not solve the security issues and at the same time force users to put everything in its cloud (ie remove the local notebooks).
I may be wrong but I am pretty sure local notebooks were dropped because it was difficult to handle from a web App.

Security of the data should be #1 prio. Not shiny buttons, nor calendar integration, todos etc....

[ehrt74 240]

8 minutes ago, chevdor said:

I am glad EN fixed their commercial problems... on the back of a poor resulting technical solution that impact paying users daily...

I am not saying a change was not required, I am saying the change they made was definitely not the right one.

One of the main issue I see is that EN is NOT able to guaranty security (no E2E encryption). That means any data that is online is at risk. And the risk is real, there were breaches in the past and very likely some we never hear about....

At least, in the past, users could keep their confidential notes offline to mitigate this risk. This was a nice and fair solution.
I find it unresponsible from EN to not solve the security issues and at the same time force users to put everything in its cloud (ie remove the local notebooks).
I may be wrong but I am pretty sure local notebooks were dropped because it was difficult to handle from a web App.

Security of the data should be #1 prio. Not shiny buttons, nor calendar integration, todos etc....

You can encode parts of notes if you wish. 

-- slightly off-topic rant --

I'm not a fan of E2E encryption for most things because it just makes life more complicated. for example i recently got a new phone and transferring the history of the 15 chat apps we all use nowadays was a pain. Apart from google chat of course, because that doesn't have E2E (and it has a total history of all the chat messages i've sent using the Google messaging service going back to 2006. Just log on in the new phone and everything JUST WORKS (TM)). I think services can offer E2E for people who want it, just don't come crying when things which used to be easy are suddenly very difficult (sharing a note with somebody else for example).

[Jon/t 1,281]

1 hour ago, ehrt74 said:

I'm not a fan of E2E encryption for most things because it just makes life more complicated. for example i recently got a new phone and transferring the history of the 15 chat apps we all use nowadays was a pain. Apart from google chat of course, because that doesn't have E2E (and it has a total history of all the chat messages i've sent using the Google messaging service going back to 2006. Just log on in the new phone and everything JUST WORKS (TM)). I think services can offer E2E for people who want it, just don't come crying when things which used to be easy are suddenly very difficult (sharing a note with somebody else for example).

Yeah.... E2E also stops any of the fancy machine learning, so called Ai search stuff going on as the software can't read what's in the note. All advanced searchy things and predicting stuff would have to be done at the client level which wouldn't be possible.

[ehrt74 240]

5 minutes ago, Jon/t said:

Yeah.... E2E also stops any of the fancy machine learning, so called Ai search stuff going on as the software can't read what's in the note. All advanced searchy things and predicting stuff would have to be done at the client level which wouldn't be possible.

You could do the search things at the client level. That wouldn't be technically impossible. the problem would be synchronizing information between devices.

[Jon/t 1,281]

31 minutes ago, ehrt74 said:

You could do the search things at the client level. That wouldn't be technically impossible. the problem would be synchronizing information between devices.

True... I think one of the reasons they moved to Google Cloud was so that eventually they could take advantage of the Google machine learning and Ai API's but all this would really need to be done server side.

Will be interesting to see what they're cooking up... I like the move to an all in one productivity hub but folks have been trying to combine notes and tasks for 20+ years now and no one has really done it well!

[ghon 78]

I think Joplin is a great tool if you mainly work on the desktop. It lacks of a lot of functionality if considering the mobile or Web version, definitely there is no unified user experience across platforms as EN has implemented. 

Therefore, as always it depends on your use case and working style. For me, EN has a way better product with V10, especially regarding IOS and Web.

[chevdor 0]

...14 years and the last one was the cherry on top:

• Evernote force degraded my account from premium to personal while wanting to increase the price as well
• The perf keeps degrading (I could snap picture quicker with my old HTC Magic than Evernote new ++ web junk is doing with my Pixel 7 Pro...)
• there is still no (real) encryption... which is really scary (don't tell me about the gimmick symetric scrambling your call encryption)
• local notebooks are no longer a thing so users are at the mercy of the next breach
• user requests are ignored, where are all the requested fixes? backlinks? queries in notes? etc...
• recently I realized that ~20% (1910 / 10800 notes) of the data of my notes is gone and Support has no idea
• the answer from support was to provide the logs.... which provide TONS of private information... so either you provide private information or you get no support... great

I would like to thank @ghonfor pointing out to Joplin, suprisingly I did not know about this option at the time and it ends up a much better option that keeps improving.

The funny thing is that I would probably keep paying the sub if:

• the UIs did not became slow and sluggish
• The note snapping workflow would not have been broken to make it webified
• the local notebooks were still supported

My 14 years with Evernote are over, and I don't feel sad... I feel finally relieved...

[PinkElephant 8,091]

Can you explain your choice of the words „degraded my account from Premium to Personal“ with one single feature you lost ?

Spoiler: You can’t ….

From what you tell EN is not matching your personal use case. Then 14 years of use are either a lot of inertia, or a lack of alternatives. Good for you when you now found a better match.

[bmcl26 488]

On 1/13/2022 at 9:26 AM, chevdor said:

I have been premium user for 13 years... I loved the old versions of Evernote gladly paid for that. They were fast and to the point.
The issue is that they never **improved**. Sure there were updates... but they did not **improve**. They became bloated and slower over time while missing the real features that should have been added. Evenote proudly mentioned they native App at the beginning... where are they now ? Surely web based App are more convenient to develop but the experience when it is not done well is horrible and this the state today with Evernote.

Last year has been an horrible experience and I am still using Evernote 7 because I refuse the decision of Evernote to ditch local Notebooks. Remember those breaches ? may be not...

Now Evenote shoot in every directions with calendars and todos no one really cares about where the main function: taking notes is more slugglish than ever.The experience was better on my HTC Magic in 2009 than it is today with a flagship phone....
Today I woke up with my Premium account desactivated and Evernote unilaterally cancelled my Premium subscription. I am lock out of my notes.

This is the last drop for me, enjoy the last month of subscription you extort from me Evernote, I will be swithcing to another solution, likely Joplin. Not only they have the features Evenote lacks, but it is also open and there are tons of plugins making it wayyy better than Evernote. The product is also evolving very fast (technology wise).. unlike the Elefant (whose commercial departement is likely growing indeed)...

It is sad seeing a company like Evernote makes such a mistake AND not being able to repair it despite users' feedback and patience.

Your post is the complete opposite of my experience. I have been a paid user since 2011 and up until V10 only really dab my foot in he water, since V10 (Which I was not a fan of at the start) my use with the additions, you dismiss by saying "no one really cares about", have increased the functionality and Use of EN exponentially.  I now have in excess of 28,000 notes, all readily accessible on PC, Phone, Tablet, Laptop & Web.  I can count on one hand the  number of minor issues I have experience over the time I have been a user, most of which have been "self inflicted".  The few remaining have been promptly solved by raising a ticket with support.   I am sorry that this has not been your experience and wish you well in finding an alterative to better suits your needs.

[Wanderling Reborn 185]

A word of caution about Joplin: if you use any attachments, it may not be for you. 
When you insert an attachment into a Joplin note, it permanently renames the file with some random ID sequence. So if later you decide that Joplin is not for you, any meaningful attachment file names will be lost.

[chevdor 0]

Thanks for the warning @Wanderling Reborn. I do use many attachments but I am not concerned about their renaming. I prefer renaming to total loss... (I still did not hear ANYthing back from Evernote support... nothing at all after 2d....)

Picking the right solution is definitely a trade-off and I reacted here mainly because I am sad to see how the Evernote potenital is not pushed further and declines for years. I also shocked to see "enterprise" solution pushed where the infra to support those need is far from being met.

I understand and respect that some users are OK with what happens. I understand that some users never lost any notes. I did not lose any note, until that happened....

In the end, I did not lose any data because I had backups. But I paid Evernote precisely to take care of that and they did not. Mistakes can happen and it is more about HOW the issues are solved. In my case, the issues remains totally unsolved and I am in the dark.

In the meantime, FOSS solutions such as Joplin are making great progress and already address many of the issues I grew with Evernotes' strategical decisions.

But honnestly the ONE killer for me is security (or the lack of...). No one (not Evenote, not Joplin, not anyone...) can garranty 0 breach. Breaches did happen and will happen again. When that happens, the question is about what is in place to mitigate the issues... Joplin offers E2E (optional) and self hosting (users can mix and match). Evernote was breached already but nothing changed at all.... Users still had the option to NOT put some of their notes online with Local Notebooks. That was a fair mix to me as I kept sensitive data locally only. With Local Notebooks gone, that means users **have** to put everthing online, and users cannot use any (serious) form of encryption. This is calling for troubles...

I don't doubt that Evernote remains an ok solution (despite being much slower than it used to be) for people just clipping the web or tracking notes that are not critical. Users who don't fitting this profile may or not see it come but they are for a surprise sooner or later unless Evernote wakes up... I don't wish for troubles it but it is healthy for users to read between the lines of marketing and advocates and I perfer to be "gone" before issues happen.

 

 

[Wanderling Reborn 185]

Again, a word of caution...

Joplin's database is not protected on desktop. Only in transit and on mobile devices. The user is expected to provide their own desktop encryption solution, either as a whole disk encryption or storing Joplin database in an encrypted container.

Also, Joplin used to keep the encryption password in plain text on the desktop. Their excuse was, again, that the user is responsible for protecting the desktop and all of its data. They eventually fixed this on Windows, thanks to the user community outcry, but I don't know if they ever fixed it on Linux. This doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy about their whole approach to security.

I am not dumping on Joplin, it's an interesting project, but I realized it's not for me, for these and some other reasons.

If you only plan on only storing your data locally, then (depending on your OS) you may be better off just keeping it in file folder structure. On MacOS, the combination of Spotlight indexing search and file tagging makes finding the right record a breeze. I just recently switched to a Mac from a lifetime of Windows and Linux, and it's so much easier to quickly locate a record.