jasondunn

So it seems Evernote has decided to take their $50/year personal tier and make it 160% more expensive at $129.96 a year. 🤦‍♂️ And from 2022 to 2023 they already did a 43% price jump ($38 to $54).

I've been an Evernote customer for 15 years (!?!) and quite like the service. But It's apparently time to leave. 😢

What are some good alternatives that are $50 a year or under and support Evernote importing? I'm testing Apple Notes (import works great) but having a Pixel makes that kind of a tough option. 🤔

Thank you. The core issue is that in the last update for macOS, the setting for "Fit to window" was flipped to "Optimize readability". A similar thing happened a few updates ago where hardware acceleration was turned off. Maybe the Evernote devs could stop changing the settings customers pick when they release updates? 🫤

Previous to the last update, the content used up more of the width of the screen. PDFs could be read without opening them. Now my content is in the middle of the screen with wide swaths of white space on either side. And PDFs can't be viewed without opening them. Is this a bug or a new layout for customers? It seems worse in every way to me, so I hope it's a bug.

@gazumped Thank you, somehow the Hardware Acceleration was disabled. I've never seen that feature, so I definitely didn't tick that box and disable it, but the previous update must have done it. Everything is working now as it should, thank you.

@PinkElephant 😮 🫤 😂

I'm using Evernote on my Mac Studio and it's become suddenly so sluggish with the last update, it's almost unusable. We're talking 2 seconds of lag between loading cards, clicking from notebook to notebook requires multiple seconds. It's like using the app through a terminal window on an old modem. It's absolutely awful. I've restarted the app multiple times, I've rebooted my Mac Studio, and it's a very capable machine that up until recently ran Evernote smoothly.

Evernote support appears to be non-existent as their only support options are for account management and billing, which is insane they don't offer an option for the PRODUCT.

I've been an Evernote customer for 14 years but am wondering what I'm paying for if I can't get actual help when their product works poorly.

10.67.4-mac-ddl-public (20231204112355)
Editor: v176.32.0
Service: v1.80.3

On 1/10/2019 at 7:25 PM, Jens Schriver said:

It's really silly how awful the quality is. I'm writing a summary based on an audio recording of a meeting I had, and it sounds like the mic was in the bottom of a toilet while people were talking. Fix it, please!

What's so baffling to me is that, unless I'm mistaken, the issue would be fixed by simply changing the audio recording quality - which should be a variable in the code that already exists. It's not like the request is for OGG recording or something odd. Unless somehow the Evernote devs hard-coded the quality settings years ago...but that would be bizarre.

If you want to see this changed, please join me in lobbying Evernote support on Twitter and via their support form. I don't think they look at the forums for feature requests/pain points.

He's a great example of how utterly terrible the audio recording quality is on the macOS client.

Here's the iMac recording:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yh7m9yi64oi77nd/macOSAudioTest.wav?dl=0 

Here's the iPad recording:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p0m2pll5fk32567/iOSAudioTest.m4a?dl=0

I echo this request. Coming from the Windows version of Evernote, I was confused when I couldn’t do this on the Mac version. 

I used to think my iMac had an incredibly crappy built-in microphone, but I'd never used it for anything other than Evernote voice recordings. It sounded so bad (semi-garbled, a complete lack of sensitivity) I thought the microphone had debris in it, obscuring the recording. It wasn't until I downloaded another recording app and did a test that I realized it's simply Evernote setting a bit rate so low (16kbps? 8 kbps?) that the audio sounds like it's being recorded on a faulty microphone. Why exactly am I paying for a a Plus membership again? 

PLEASE increase the bit rate of audio recordings so they are actually useful!

A couple of months ago I decided to give up on them and moved over to DevonThink Pro Office and rendered my use of Evernote for useless webclips I come across while searching online for stuff. I must say this movement is causing me real trouble because I have information spread in two platforms and I guess I will little by little move away from Evernote totally, as it is quite a PITA my current setup..After so many years of being an Evernote advocate and supporting Evernote as a Premium User since 2009 (or 2008 I can't remember), my next step will be to downgrade my account. Too bad I did not remember to stop the automatic renewal I set back then with my paypal account.

Give Pocket a try. It's a great cross-platform tool for web reading - I used to use Evernote for that purpose, but ultimately found it pretty clunky. Pocket is really focused and fast at what it does.

I too am seeing less value from Evernote and may let my account downgrade - I simply don't get the value from it that I used to as I've moved more of my data to 1password. And I used to be a HARDCORE Evernote evangelist! 

As stated before, all should be encrypted, period, and it will be at some point in time, whatever tool we are using some time from now will have EVERYTHING encrypted, ALL the time, that's one. Now the question is what and by when will provide this functionality, personally i don't think it is a matter of prioritizing requirements, rather it should be perceived as a basic need. Ask yourself why you would want to post any un-encrypted data anywhere? A hand written note is un-encrypted, and that's ok, since only those few individuals in and around the "note" can read it. Take a picture of it and post it online, in the cloud, and suddenly it's ok that anybody can read it (after user names/passwords have leaked or ....), why is that? This discussion will appear strange a while from now, when all is encrypted all the time. 

Agreed 100%. Evernote has the choice to be a leader in this space, or a follower once the rest of the world is on board. There's a groundswell pushing toward "https everywhere", VPN for security (I just backed an Indiegogo product called Keezel that creates dead-simple VPN for all devices via WiFi), and there have been such an unrelenting stream of massive hacks and data breaches, digital security is something even casual users are starting to think about...but even if they're not demanding better security from Evernote, there's no reason why Evernote should wait around to deliver it. Users might not think what they have in their notebooks need securing, but with the prevalence of identity theft, even casual, seemingly innocent bits of information could be used against them.

Evernote's seemingly casual approach to security - there isn't even a password option on the desktop client - will not help them in the long run.

I'm wondering what more one might want from a security model than trust no one encryption with a multitude of multi factor login options.

And to add in LP enterprise, the usage logging across the enterprise is great, and much more useful to me than a personal decentralized model like keypass or 1password.

From my perspective, LastPass represents a massive target, and they've had enough near/partial breach scenarios that I wasn't willing to trust all my data to their security. They take security very seriously, and are good about communicating to their users, but this last attack was enough motivation for me to switch to something else (that, plus the utter awfulness of their UI).

I'm not a security expert, but I like 1password's approach: there is no centralized server to hack. All data is encrypted locally via individual data blobs. If you use Dropbox to sync your 1password files, like I do, these encrypted blobs are on the Dropbox server, but they're not linked to Dropbox for decryption. They have a good explanation of authentication vs. encryption that sums it up nicely: authentication (what Evernote uses for cloud access) is more flexible, but encryption is safer. 1password also has really strong stand-alone apps on Android, iOS, etc.

I use Evernote to store all sorts of events from my life, interesting facts, politics, and the more important feature: quick searches.

For high-security needs, I store my confidential information (passwords, account numbers, etc.) in LastPass.

And for highly confidential information (tax returns, for example), I store them locally, not in the cloud.

I used to use LastPass, and while it's great for passwords, I found it clumsy and ugly for other types of content (secure notes, etc.). I also didn't particularly like their security model. I have sensitive information in Evernote, because it's hugely advantageous for me to keep it there and have access to it from any device. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Evernote took security seriously enough for you to note have to use another app, or keep things offline, to have secure access? 

From a purely selfish point of view I think this is a great piece of information. For me the rationale of Evernote has always been a place where I can add information and then quickly find it again. Adding encryption greatly reduces this capability

So...you don't care about the security of that information?  I generally don't question when others want certain features in a product, but to not want more security is, honestly, surprising.

1password allows me to search everything, and it's far more secure than Evernote, so I don't see how/why adding encryption would somehow make Evernote less useful than it is today.

 

Hi everyone, I'm the head of security here at Evernote. I wanted to let you know that I understand your requests for full note and notebook encryption. I'm an advocate for expanding our encrypted note text feature to include one or both of those and I appreciate everyone's input on this thread.

As a few people mentioned, adding these features requires time and resources. Building these isn't a business priority for our product teams right now, so we don't have any plans or timelines to add those features.

Hi there Rich - great to see you joining this conversation! It's refreshing to see an Evernote employee participating here. I appreciate you telling us bluntly that it's not a priority for the product planners. I hope they realize that market leaders don't stay that way forever - when a company ignores the needs of it's core users (the vocal ones who want to see the product evolve), and focus on the wrong things, users will leave. I appreciate fully that developer resources are finite, and there are always more features than an ability to create those features...but I can genuinely say I haven't see a useful new product feature from Evernote in the past two years. I see the frequent updates, but none of the new features serve my needs. My needs, like those of here in this thread, are enhanced security. I want to rely upon Evernote to keep my information safe, and right now I'm not confident in the product's ability to do so.

Are the product planners willing to listen to the community and ask us what we want?

FYI, if it's only the occasional note that you want to encrypt and share across devices, 1Password has an always-encrypted Notes feature, that is accessible across all your devices via iCloud, Dropbox or direct sync. It's not a replacement for Evernote, but it works pretty well for what it is, and it's full-text searchable.

After finally admitting to myself that Evernote is firmly ignoring users who are asking for this - they've never so much as acknowledged the request as far as I know - that's exactly what I switched to. Consequently, I find myself using Evernote a bit less often. 

Still pretty frustrated by Evernote's seeming indifference to this customer request. Their social channel managers and CEO don't even respond to tweets about it. It's like they all just want us to go away...?

...but if an indie developer can do it, then why can't ms, google, and en do it? it's kind of weird, as if they don't see encryption as a critical feature. maybe they don't get the guardian or other newspapers there and they are living in a pre-snowden bubble

A lot of "the big guys" don't implement security until they're forced to - most big companies are not proactive. Look how long it took Facebook, Yahoo, Google, etc. to make SSL the default experience on some of their services. To a certain degree, you can understand it because it adds cost and complication on a massive scale. That's why smaller companies can usually take the lead on features and do things the "right" way. Then the big guys catch up eventually.

i think it is safe to say that implementing this change is a significant challenge. all things being equal, why not have encryption, right? the fact that only one or two services are able to make this work on mobile (voodoopad and filemaker?) suggests that it's not easy, but it is possible. microsoft onenote and google keep certainly haven't managed it, so i wouldn't say evernote is behind. yet. i hope they burn the midnight oil and get this thing done sooner rather than later. a simple ui (as suggested) and powerful features sounds like evernote's mo to me!

Absolutely, I get that it's not easy - and there would be some sacrifices (like encrypted notebooks not being searchable, or maybe they're only searchable after the passphrase is entered) - but it would be worth it. I'm truly a little scared of how much critical data I've put into Evernote and I'm relying solely on their security to keep it safe vs. real encryption. The benefits outweigh the risks for me right now though because it's so tremendously useful to have that data everywhere I go...I just hope I don't regret it. :-)

With all due respect you are confusing the effort to add a UI control with the effort in creating the underlying code required to carry out the function.  Changes would be required for each client that EN supports as well as server side changes to the service.  Notebook encryption would also require some user behavior education since encrypted notebooks would no longer be indexed by the service and users would need to understand how this may change their search behavior.

And you're confusing his request for how he'd like it to be used with a statement about how easy it would be to implement. I mean, come on...you can't honestly think that's what he meant, do you? You and BurgersNFries immediately pounce on people asking for this feature and defend Evernote's programmers as if they are gentle flowers that can't possibly cope with customer requests.

I've been involved in enough communities to know that you both see yourselves as being helpful (and I'm sure you answer a lot of questions elsewhere here), but honestly, from an outsider's perspective, you both come across as kind of hostile here to anyone who's raising their hand and asking for this feature. This thread is a bit painful to read. :-(

It's not your job to tell other Evernote customers why we shouldn't be asking for this feature. There's clearly a good number of people that really would like to have it.

It's not for me to say. But I'd guess if it were premium, it would spawn a whole 'nuther rant theme similar to the one(s) that offline notebooks should not be a premium feature.

As someone who really wants to see this feature, and having had interactions with others who are "freebie" Evernote users and feel like the free product is so good they have no need to upgrade, it's important that Evernote continue to add powerful and useful premium features to make it worth the money for people to upgrade.

As paying customers, it's not unreasonable for us to ask for features we'd like to see. If the leadership at Evernote wants to outright say "No!" to certain requests, they certainly can, but until they decline the feature request, people are going to keep asking. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. :-)