Now that Evernote limits free users to just 50 notes, it's time to jump ship. And there are some great alternatives to Evernote, ranging from simple note taking apps, to ones that let you make your own wikis.
It's Time to Ditch Evernote for One of These Alternatives::undefined
I boost Joplin on here every chance I get, so please allow me to do so again now! I run it with my own sync server and a small userbase of about 6 people on a cheap VPS. I could not be happier; between the webclipper, sharing, encryption, embedding of pdfs, photos, even mp4s, ease of selfhosting, it’s an amazing project! It’s been (knock on wood) rock solid!
They list Notion, but IMO Obsidian is the better path. Lack of offline access to data is a big risk to using Notion, and what made me switch to Obsidian after being bit by internet access issues keeping me from being able to use my notes during a critical meeting. Hard no for Notion ever since.
I really love Obsidian. It is a perfect fit for my needs. I just hope they don't do the creeping subscription bullshit like Evernote did. The $96 a year is reasonable for those who need it (I don't need it).
Crossing my fingers that the usual greed doesn't give them brain rot. I probably should have gone with Joplin, but I'm too invested in Obsidian at this point (and very happy with it). I guess if they do go over to the Dark Side, I could freeze it at the last good release for a while then switch.
This dumbass article is about 8 years too late. I ditched it back when they cancelled all free accounts and deleted everyone data who didn’t pay. Fuck Evernote
Don't go to Notability. They went full asshole at the top of this last semester. Changed the entire interface as people were starting their first week of class. They nuked features that made note taking for class nice. They clearly don't respect their users and will most likely do the same thing again.
you don’t need to collaborate in real-time with your notes (you can share them after the fact and there is a way to give multiple accounts edit access to the same note, but it looked complicated and I haven’t explored it)
you primarily use a keyboard - mobile counts, even if you’re using speech to text or Scribble on iPad - rather than wanting a canvas to draw on.
you’re not trying to upload documents and annotate them
StandardNotes has the following going for it:
it’s FOSS
it’s easily self-hostable
it’s also offered as SaaS, and if you use that your notes are e2ee
if you self-host you can still use the official mobile apps (but those are open source, too)
it has a web app, mobile apps, desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux
I’ve been using StandardNotes for a few years at this point (as a paid user on their 5 year plan, which no longer exists as far as I know) and have also developed an editor plugin for it.
I was pretty happy with EverNote until it started to feel like they were ransoming my content against sudden price hikes and enshittifying reductions in basic function
Fk those guys
I'm giving Obsidian a try and I'm liking it, but I still use freebie Notion for a lot of work things.
I do ~6-12 month contracts, and have found that publishing notion pages is a really easy way to share stuff quickly with the team and keep it live-update-able by all parties. That feature suits some fast-paced environment needs.
I never really used evernote tho. I think i first tried it years ago before they allowed dark mode, so it automatically failed.
I think I'm a bit of a dinosaur, but I've been making all of my notes in Zim for over 10 years. It's not much to look at but I find the hierarchical wiki structure easy to navigate, and most of the functionality (todo lists, equations, version control integration, etc) is implemented by simple plugins.
in my opinion, a lot of these programs are too complicated - I tried Joplin for a while but I ended up spending more time organising my notes than I did making them.
I always felt that Evernote was a confusing mess line OneNote I would try to use it every couple years thinking it would different only to give up a little later and go back to Notepad++
I use the marksman language server with my neovim configuration. It makes a navigable wiki-ish system ., especially when you set it up with completion.wiki.style = "file-path-stem" in the .marksman.toml ( see: here for what that does.
What most note taking apps ignore is OneNote's strong drawing tablet capabilities, but Obsidian is here to save the day with the Excalidraw plugin. In total it is not as user friendly as OneNote, but the data portability cannot be weighted in gold.
Joplin is very nice if, like me, you don't like product lock-in. The notes are structured and organised, but under the hood its basically just markdown. So exporting your notes to something else is no fuss.
Neither Joplin nor Obsidian do everything I want. Both have that feeling of pita open source app like Gimp. I still use Joplin but it isn't anywhere near perfect.