Evernote Review

There are a lot of good competitors in the Notes area. However after trying a few of them nothing beats Evernote as the premium note taking solution.

Note Apps that I’ve tried are

There’s probably a few others as well that I’ve forgotten to mention. It’s probably worthwhile to mention how I take notes.

For long form writing I use text. I have a Dropbox folder and use iA Writer on OSX, and 1Writer on iPhone to edit long form. I use Git for versioning control and then keep a remote repository on Github . Dropbox has a nice to have feature that keeps file history for 30 days should I need it, however since I use Git it’s not something I will use.

For short form notes and collecting information I use Evernote. I'll try to explain why below.

I use Readwise to collect notes from books, magazines, and X (Twitter). I need my notes app to be able to sync with Readwise. Not only does it need to sync but the implementation of the sync needs to be right. Once the notes are imported from Readwise into Evernote, I need to be able to move the notes to appropriate Notebooks in Evernote and know that Readwise will keep updating that note. Thankfully the Evernote implementation does this! This is one of the main issues that forced me to abandon other notes applications.

I need the application to be cross platform. As much as I’m wedded to the Apple Ecosystem, I’m not opposed to changing in the future and I want to be able to up and leave with all my information. I’m a big Linux fan and if I could find a laptop built as good as a Mac, I’d probably change.

The Optical Character Recognition needs to be good. I store a lot of images that contain text and it’s really useful to be able to scan images, PDF’s for content that I’m looking for. Evernote has a great OCR in built. This was one of the letdowns with Obsidian. The plug in for Obsidian was below average.

Version control would be nice as well. Luckily, Evernote keeps a record of all changes on all notes.

It’s not perfect but with the Bending Spoons acquisition of Evernote the features have been coming in thick and fast.

I hear people complain about two main things with Evernote. The pricing and End-to-End Encryption. Both are fair points. Pricing is expensive no doubt. However for a premium product you need to pay a premium price. I’m happy to pay it. Encryption? Yes would be nice to have, but then OCR would be crippled like Obsidian. Do I care if there is a data breach and someone access my personal content? Yes for sure. Is any of my activities illegal. No. It’s the risk we all take to work in the cloud.