Stathis

@persiomenezes Evernote has a chosen a path that is better from a business POV. Their ‘Electron’ approach means that they now have to write code once and it would then build into multiple platforms, after minimal amendments. I have myself complained a lot about those changes, including features that are no longer supported, like EN Moleskine notebooks for example, which I had stocked for good or glitches and performance issues that got better but not completely eliminated. The thing is, the architectural approach will never compete with native apps, which is why I ended up switching to Craft since I am solely in the Apple ecosystem They are not going to change their path now, since they are highly invested in it. Maybe if they see substantial drop in user count, they might listen. This is why I recommend switching to one of the solutions that I analyzed in my post below

Farewell everyone ! It was a nice 10 year journey. I will be happy to return if EN comes back with a native app and a respectful -not luring- approach towards premium users. 👇 Below my transition experience

1 month later… After 1 month of using my new setup (DS Note for OCR file dumps, Craft for note taking), I can now say that I am glad I did the transition. I ‘d be happier if I kept EN for file dumps, but decided that expressing my disappointment by cancelling my >6 years premium subscription was far more important. Craft is a very accurate example of how EN really messed up. The note sync is not just fast, it’s blazing fast ! You can type in your iPad and see your changes almost instantaneously on your Mac and vice versa. In addition, it comes with great features that I just loved using from the very beginning, such as backlinks, workspaces, calendar notes, unlimited depth of creating notes without cluttering your note view and so much more. The only features I miss are : Clipping options Email note Tags Tags are coming soon and clipping options are easily handled using Shortcuts or SnagIt. I can live without e-mailing my notes to my note app, especially when compared to the performance and overall much higher value gotten. The app is only offered in the Apple ecosystem, highlighting the importance of building a native app, instead of a hybrid Electron. Another great aspect of Craft is its Slack channel. Enthusiast users like us chat about the platform and Craft founders, including devs, contribute to the discussions, adding features in their backlog, identifying bugs and helping users make use of their awesome features. Lessons learnt There are only a handful of note apps that support in-document OCR and even less supporting OCR in handwritten documents. Cloud storage services tend to support OCR, but you are losing the note aspect, which is obviously changing the use case Migrating data from EN is not as simple as it might seem. Notes that contain a lot of documents might not get migrated properly and new apps do not have a .enex import option. Bear seems to be the best tool to import .enex format, whilst DS Note was quite good as well. Markdown and textbundle are the most supported formats, both not supported by EN Your note app of choice needs to be ‘offline first’. When you need to grab your medical record number or your boarding pass, the information should already exist in your device Your note app of choice needs to be trustworthy, it is not acceptable to become unresponsive while taking notes during a meeting or a class Plan your switch, test it before actually making it Conclusion I strongly recommend switching from EN if your main use case is not dumping files. From my research I found that Nimbus and Amplenote are the best candidates for the switch, being the closest to the EN experience/features you are used to. If you don’t user all EN’s features, identify which ones you are using and which apps are matching those requirements. For me switching to 2 apps did the trick; DS Note for dumping files for OCR with note taking capabilities and Craft for my main note taking tool Notable Resources Keep Productive Tom Solid - Paperless movement Paperless X P.S. Amplenote founder sent me a personal e-mail requesting feedback. We ended up having a pleasant discussion of what a note taking app should be like with him explaining why they made some hard choices related to my concerns. This is an example of apps caring for their user base instead of disrespecting them with banners and limitations in premium.

Or written by the same person

Just tested the export, pdf documents are not exported, but anything else that is embedded is. Adding both pdf and docx examples, in the end of the document I added a sample.pdf document, which in docx is not showcased at all, in the pdf it appears as a block. PDF Export.pdf Export docx.docx

Good point, forgot to mention that ! In Synology Note Station, the only export option is nsx, a Synology format which is basically a zip file of all the assets. In other words, if you need to migrate from Synology Note Station, it will require a lot of time. Here is a post on how you can migrate away. In Craft, you got all the usual suspects: Markdown, Textbundle, pdf and MS Word. Craft is also very agile app, meaning I expect to have more formats available in no time. In addition, if you request a feature in their Slack channel, they will get it into their backlog if it makes sense for their users. But generally speaking, most note editors I 've checked, import markdown. In Apple Notes, again not a lot of choices; just pdf.

I finally finished transitioning from EN. The mistake I did last time was I was looking for 1 app that covers my needs in whole and initiated the transition without a plan. A. My Plan v2.0 1. Synology Note Station Only for document dumps, such as: Invoices Receipts Scans Bills Payments Supports OCR Plays well within the Synology ecosystem App issues are not important using it solely as a document dump Generally speaking, document dumps are 'cold' data, meaning it is not crucial for me to have an outstanding performance for getting access to those documents. However, this crappy, 5 year old app is syncing notes, which means every note you ever synced will be with your device The only downside is that this app does not play well in the iOS ecosystem, not providing a simple way to import a file directly to the app, but decided to go for it. I was between Evernote and Synology Note Station for that and Evernote is the correct app for this task, but I am so frustrated with Evernote that I decided letting them go is more important for me. Not out of spite, but mainly because I hope this great app gets back on track. And my way of enforcing it is showcasing my dislike by discontinuing my paid membership and posting here in the forums, so anyone knows I am sad, but still here. 2. Craft Anything but document dump Supports multiple workspaces, which is nice because I migrated all notes and plan to move notes from 'Evernote Archive' workspace to the appropriate one if needed. So I also clean up my 10 years old notes database. The workspaces I created are: Personal Work A Work B Evernote Archive Clean, powerful, beautiful app, with outstanding users communication (Slack channel) and performance 3. Apple Notes Initially planned to use Drafts for this purpose, because of the limitless capabilities of integrating notes to whichever service required. I decided to go with Apple Notes though, because Shortcuts is filling this hole for me, and the speed of jotting something down in the Apple ecosystem has changed dramatically with the latest iOS/macOS updates. Just Jots Scribbles Anything that it is not a note yet and if someone deleted it I wouldn't care. B. Migration Process 1. Synology Note Station I have already described the migration process in Synology Note Station in a post above. Amazing process, as painless as migration can be. The automatic import doesn't work or I didn't gave it the required time. The enex import is great, you basically select all notebooks and imports it in a batch. Really amazing ! 2. Craft Unfortunately, migrating to Craft was far less exciting than DS Notes. The only way to migrate notes from Evernote to Craft including attachments was: Import notebooks 1-1 from Evernote to Bear Export notes from Bear in textbundle format Import in Craft Whilst importing from Evernote to Bear was easy, basically similar to Note Station, with the difference that Bear won't import .enex files as a batch like DS Note. You need to import notebooks 1-1 and in the process rename the #evernote tag to #notebooks/YourNotebook if you want to keep your notebooks organisation. Then, importing to Craft was similarly bad. Craft has a limit of 2000 items, including notes' assets, which means depending on how many assets per note, you need to import in batches of 300-500. In addition, files bigger than 10000 characters (maybe close to 10mb ?), can't be imported. So basically, you need again notebook by notebook to import and if a notebook is big, do it in batches. Don't forget when exporting data from Bear, to check the options base64 images; export attachments After a long process of migration, you are complete, away from EN and the migration is complete in two apps actually: Bear and Craft. So, you can test your options thoroughly until you complete the move. That's it folks, migration complete. Farewell elephant

It's ok @RobertJLee, I am more than happy to take this, it's just proving my point even more. Sorry @PinkElephant, but it wasn't an iOS, nor internet connection thing. It's easy to blame others when your home is full of garbage. Downloaded 1 season (12 episodes 45' each) in Netflix in 20 seconds. Evernote was still grasping to download 3 notes of a total size <0,5mb. I am fully aware of the app states iOS has, the app was not in the background nor inactive. I was looking it at it for more than 5 minutes to allow me access my note. Wasn't syncing 3 notes, wasn't allowing me to abort it, could not view the note in the app I don't care about the price, I am already the neighbour that has everything better than you. The price has changed in the past, but that's not relevant. What is relevant though is that 'Evernote Personal' is more expensive than Jira, Notion, Slack, Google and Microsoft Office 365, and the user experience a premium user gets is forcing to upgrade premium tier. Why don't they add some ads as well in the premium membership ? Why upgrade if I don't need the tier's offerings ? To be able to connect more than 1 Google Calendar; have more than 1 filtered notes card in the ***** dashboard and finally don't get the ridiculous badge. How confident can one be when the company that keeps your external brain is begging to get more money and also losing a gigantic flow of users ? The thing is @PinkElephant , leaving everything aside, one would expect a note taking app is good for note taking. For EN, that's not the case: You are taking notes for a meeting ? Evernote will lock your note while you are taking important notes in your NOTE APP. Hey important people in the meeting, could you please wait a minute until Evernote is back. You need to access a note in airport ? Sorry mate, you might not get access. Would be best if you kept your documents elsewhere as well. You need to clip a web page ? Doesn't work; What's your EN version ? What's your web clipper version ? Did you try uninstalling and reinstalling ? Could you send us troubleshooting log The conclusion for me is that Evernote can no longer be a note taking app, basically because a note taking app needs to be offline first. From what I 've read, this is also the only reason why users leave Notion. And this is why, if you look around, every respectful note taking / paperless expert is not recommending Evernote for anything but saving documents/receipts; a document dump.

Following my Is this a farewell ? and Not a farewell after all, I would like to share my newest dislikes about the elephant, hoping an EN engineer or someone who give a heckle pays attention. The app sucks, I was in the airport the other day, having all my flight related documents in my EN app and once again Evernote hung me. I had enabled offline mode for my literally 3 notes notebook and the whole thing stuck. It stuck that bad, that I had to open EN in the browser to showcase my travel documents. 3 notes notebook. iPadOS just sucks, buttons are not visible, shortcuts are very limited and so many other issues I have already enlisted in the blog posts above. Talking about EN hanging you dry, I have also experienced dozens of times, being in a meeting and my note getting a circle of death, not letting me edit my note. I took the time to report it and after EN support requested logs and videos and e-mails etc, they replied that they are aware of the issue and they are currently fixing it. Well, if you are aware of the issue, why waste my time asking for more information ? As explained in the Not a farewell after all, I tried several other apps but found none providing the features I was looking for. So, how do you call this situation where you have no other option but to stick and pay a ***** service that hangs you dry ? Captivity This is what describes my user experience with EN. What’s most disturbing of all, is the fact that they are now pushing to get premium users to the higher paying tier, by limiting ***** functionality and adding this kind of distractions I am already paying ffs That’s just another example of EN delivering freemium user experience to premium users. 10 years premium by the way. I have started searching again for a candidate to transition to, hopefully this time I won’t repeat the same mistake, transitioning before using it. The 3 candidates that are now on the top of my list are all great apps and somehow managed to miss them in my previous and first attempt Nimbus Amplenote Craft I am currently researching those 3 apps in detail and I will come back with a report. Thankfully by the time I do the report, Craft will have introduced tags, a functionality currently under construction. If anyone has transitioned to Amplenote, it would be very helpful if provided some feedback Merry Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year

I use and strongly recommend Bitwarden. 1. It is free 2. The paid tier includes one time passwords generation and it is so cheap for what if offers 3. It is the proper place to store passwords

Quoting from Twitter

Just wanted to share my feedback to Evernote staff @Shane D. and @Scott T. From a user engagement perspective, it is at least humiliating to your loyal premium users offering a service but limited. It is essentially creating a freemium experience to a premium user and this is definitely not creating an engaging, loyal customer. After all, tasks, widgets and viewing your calendar in a widget are not functionalities to make a tier out of it. Assigning tasks to another person, yes that would make sense. You are not professional, you don’t need to assign tasks to others. But, widgets and calendars ? Come on ! So, I am allowed to get 1 filtered notes widget but not 2 ? 1 integrated calendar, but not 2. You make me feel like a child that can get 1 ice cream, but not 2. 👎 👎 👎 👎 👎 👎 👎 👎 👎 👎 P.S. How about you integrate to more calendars before asking more money ?

Howdy everyone, Following up my Is this a farewell ? post a couple months ago, I thought it would be nice to share why after wasting a gigantic amount of time, I am back in EN. Applications I tried to migrate too OneNote Synology Note Station Bear Obsidian Joplin Drafts Notion Also, I would like to outline my use case, so readers understand what I am looking for in the note taking app [Personal] Bills & Bills’ payments [Personal] Family’s documents [Business] Meeting notes [Business] Clients’ information and notes [Business & Personal] Knowledge base [Business & Personal] Saving web articles OneNote I was very close at transitioning to OneNote, but I eventually decided not to because of the difficulty finding staff and the crippled tagging system. What I liked: The iPad app, including its free hand annotating capabilities OneNote notebook databases are stored files Notebook > Sections > Pages give an extra depth of organization Ability to write anything wherever on screen, endless canvas Integrating options What I didn’t like: Migration tool didn’t work Could not find my content OCR not supported in attachments Crippled tagging Microsoft ribbon Sharing only available with a Microsoft account Synology Note Station Really awesome functionalities, being a proper Evernote copycat. It also has a tasks feature, that EN just introduced ! Despite not ending up in it, I am keeping it as a local backup of EN, sadly this includes manually exporting and importing notebooks. What I liked: Self-hosting The ability to create parent/children tags Part of the Synology ecosystem, meaning all my backup strategies apply to my notes too All functionalities I need What I didn’t like Limited shortcuts, very hard to discover Attachments were not inline, but hidden in a popover Tasks could not be viewed in a summary, but again hidden in a popover iPadOS app doesn’t work, it is crashing The app has a lot of annoying glitches 0 integration options Bear What an awesome app. Beautiful, amazing organization -only by tagging- system, full markdown support, amazing exports. Still keeping it as a markdown composer, but not as a note app. What I liked The UI Tagging Archiving Full markdown support Export to html What I didn’t like Deployment; The app is using a sqlite database syncing to iCloud Just a markdown editor after all No OCR to attachments Obsidian, Joplin, Drafts & Notion Won’t make the comparison, because I didn’t use the apps a lot. Mainly, I didn’t like the UI. I am keeping that Drafts app though, because it offers unlimited (no joking) integrating capabilities Why I came back While testing the other options, EN fixed its abysmal performance to a point that it is -almost- functional and introduced the Tasks feature, offering a functionality I need. The most important reason why I came back though is experiencing the hard way that keeping a lot of productivity apps is the biggest productivity killer. EN is far from great, but it is a one app fits most for me. Keeping 1 app ended up being my most important criterion, so came back to EN. Why I am frustrated, again Cannot create 2 filtered notes snippets in dashboard, because I am not paying the highest tier !! Cannot add 2 calendars, because I am not paying the highest tier !! iPad app is still crippled, including a frustrating issue where while being in a client meeting, EN locks my editing capabilities while writing in a note !!!! Only Google support for calendars and documents Tasks is great, how about focusing in other functionalities now that aren’t That’s it, from my experience transitioning is a painful and time consuming process and I strongly recommend analyzing the transition app a lot before moving forward. Most important thing to avoid is keeping multiple productivity apps, ending up in a situation where you don’t know what to use for what, searching where you saved what and struggling to find a way to integrate where most note taking apps are still crippled at that section. It’s sad for EN, because it was the most integrated app a decade ago. Happy note taking !

😂

The files imported appeared the next day !

The ability to create children tags, where parent can show all notes tagged with children. For example take tag #travel and it is child tag #travel/europe Notes tagged with #travel/europe would be visible when searching #travel and #travel count will showcase the total of Notes tagged with #travel + Notes tagged with any child tag #travel/******

Well said. Imagine the performance I got to decide making such a downgrade. I am not sure whether it supports OCR or just extracting data from digital pdf, but it works without any further workarounds. Just a setting. In which sense ? A simple notebook with a pen and some stickers could compare if fits the purpose. From my POV, DS Note is an EN copycat and its performance is rapid fast in contrast to EN. Yes, it is because it is local, but in my case 99% of the use is local. There is also extra functionality, like supporting nested tags (not just grouping) and note encryption where EN fails to compare. Yes, EN search is phenomenal and yes it DS Note needs hardware and the app is previous decade. Does it compare to EN ? Yes, if you got a Synology NAS and for me it wins.

The conclusion Sadly, elephant no longer exists in my dock. None of the apps I tested was a match to Evernote legacy, but at least their performance is acceptable. I ended up using DS Note, but I am also keeping Bear on the side as a markdown editor. The reasons why I ended up with DS Note are: UI/UX, functionality same as Evernote legacy I host my data Data source is not a single sqlite file backed up in iCloud Attachment search support Up to this point, the DS Note has numerous "special behaviours", which I ended up deciding that they are acceptable. The only thing that makes me really uncomfortable using DS Note is not having the ability to migrate from it. I hope I will never need it, otherwise I am pretty much screwed as there is not tool migrating from DS Note Some alternatives I also tried are: Joplin -- I did not manage to install Joplin server on Docker and iOS app is ***** Clover -- Seems promising, it is similar to Notion. Current iOS app is available only through Testflight and the iPad version -boy oh boy- is amazing Obsidian md -- Looks great, it is just not for me Apple Notes -- Same as Bear, I don't want my data to be available only through iCloud. Also not accessible from web browser. I also tested the above apps in iPad. Apple Notes is of course the big winner here, where DS Note gets constant crashes whenever the Apple Pencil touches the surface. Already reported that as an issue, hope the will be able to fix it. Bear, once again, delivers Overall, I found Bear the best alternative, with the markdown being a versatile tool able to serve content wherever needed. The minute they offer an independent data source that is not sqlite, I am all in. So to answer to my initial question - Yes it is

I found Bear to have the best organisation system. Only tags, infinite nesting (well tried up to 5). I just created a #Notebooks tag for the notebooks I used to have in Evernote and #Notebooks/My Notebook would be the tag for notes that existed in My Notebook notebook. In EN I used to do something similar to what @DTLow is doing: 2 Notebooks for personal use: Inbox; Archive and all others for sharing purposes. Bear also tackled that too, because they automatically create an Archive section for all archived notes. This is why I found Bear organisation far superior to any other note app I have tested. In addition to Notebooks, I used a manual tagging system that worked great: Nesting using dots, e.g. welcome; welcome.organize; welcome.organize.level_3 and so on. Then manually drag & drop to group them together. Overall, I had the same result since when assigning or searching for tag, the indentation system would filter the desired values thanks to the above convention. There is an article around that suggested this or similar system Here is a screenshot of how that looks like in Bear... Also great functionality, yet so simple, when there are 0 notes of a tag, tag gets deleted automatically. Another cool feature is the icons that they auto-populate if they find a keyword they find relevant or you can select your icon among a selection.

Never experienced such an issue. Maybe because of the free tier ?

@WilliamL Apology accepted. I understand I am being harsh and unreasonable condemning Ian, it is because of the nostalgic, emotional feeling I got moving from EN. Truth be told, I work professionally in -let's say- technology and never would I thought an app would give such a hard time (emotionally) leaving. I believe it's the socks. I don't believe it is entirely unfair though (condemning Ian), maybe a discussion for another time.

You think it is ungracious of me to be mad for a service I am paying 10 years now (8 of which happily), for the extreme total of 1,5GB data just to find out 1 day that I get a lagish, buggy, slow app ? Or maybe ungracious of me that I don’t want to be a prisoner to a product that doesn’t work, just because I got 1,5GB data uploaded ? Maybe yes, maybe not. Maybe the new EN works great in the US or wherever EN has servers and I am experiencing those issues because of my location. Maybe clipping is not a great deal to you, whereas I got clipping success and nothing was imported. Maybe you never bought EN moleskine notebooks and ending them in 1 version update is not a great deal to you. Maybe you should not be judging frustrated people online, just because your use case scenario is different ? If it was just me, I would not have gotten several pms with more suggestions and info, would I ? Anyhow, I respect and value everyone’s opinion and having wasted a crazy amount of time I think it is high time I withdrew from the discussion. The weird thing about EN is that migrating from it, gave me a nostalgic feeling, like breaking up with a young love kinda of thing. Anyhow, over and out, don’t hesitate to contact me in a pm if you want to

Agreed. The think is since Phil left, the EN ecosystem is deteriorating. The new CEO will never have the passion a co-founder has, and his main concern is making money. The problem here is CEO without passion will have very tough time discovering new revenue streams and this is probably why EN experienced severe downsizing and lost some of the best of their stuff. If not possible finding new revenue, then downsizing and decreasing product cost is the way to go. I really hope those c-level guys did a risk analysis on how much revenue they are willing to lose because of those changes. I bet they see a 10 year paid subscription and they consider renewal a sure thing. This kind of assumptions are the ones that bankrupt companies.

Correct

Great comment. Encryption is important especially when storing sensitive data that might also be under compliance schemes. And your comment is also correct, while 3rd party might get your data, if it is encrypted, it will take a very long time to unencrypt, based on their hardware and your encryption password complexity. Of course everything is hackable, but the logic here is if you make it very expensive to hack and you don’t store CIA data, then no hacker (or government) will have (or allocate) the interest and resources to get your data. That’s the only bulletproof way. There are also other ways using “cold” backup buckets using only uploading/downloading. What this essentially means is -if the configuration is appropriate- the worst case scenario, if your data is attacked by ransomware, is to lose all data since prior backup. Last caution here is you need to supervise your data, so if that occurs you recover it before they all become the latest encrypted version. What if Evernote gets ransomware? I know a situation -that did not get public- of a respectable service that got ransomware attack and lost data of nearly 10% of their user base. And the thing is it happened exactly as you describe, the backups were encrypted also ! Very unlikely for a tech giant, but not 0%. And EN is not a tech giant, is it ? Since before v10 I relied 100% on Evernote, meaning if that happened I ‘d be literally screwed. Ironic considering I am aware of all those concepts and the importance of my data ! If your time machine is always mounted, then ransomware can encrypt it no problem. If you want to be really safe, you should follow @PinkElephant recommendation unmounting or even better unplugging your time machine drive. However, getting ransomware on a macOS client that does not have external access is very unlikely, especially if you stick on using apps notarized by Apple, which in latest versions is complex not to.