Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641

by baron816 • 3 years ago

1025 614 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Its acquirer (Bending Spoons) has taken over operations. They’ve also hiked subscriptions prices and told customers they intend to use new revenues to pay for new features. How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

If you’re still using Evernote, probably a good time to stop.

yuppie_scum• 3 years ago

I just copy pasted all my notes into Obsidian, which doesn’t constantly nag me to subscribe

echelon• 3 years ago

I really love Obsidian, I still have some major blockers.

The git plugin is dangerously broken. I've had pushes from different computers overwrite one another. It doesn't show merge conflicts - it's happy to plow forward. I've reduced my usage since that happened. This is a huge problem. I need to have confidence the backups and merges aren't destroying notes.

There's no easy way to open multiple workspaces simultaneously. I want to start using Obsidian for work, but I'm not going to share or subset my private notebook. If I want to switch to the team workspace, I have to close my personal workspace. Only one can be open at a time, and that's awkward.

If these two problems get fixed, Obsidian will become my end-all, be-all organizational software.

I will pay a lot of money ($100/mo!) for this to work right.

(Final minor nit: I'd like to include multimedia, but use Git LFS or another cloud storage system. I don't want them in git.)

jfim• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, what's the rationale for using git? Is it to get a history of notes or just for sync? If it's the latter, I believe obsidian has a paid offering for that, or one can MacGyver it with syncthing.

tmaly• 3 years ago

I have obsidian on my iphone, ipad, and windows desktop all synced across devices to a single private github repo. You do not have to use the git plugin. I use Working Copy app on ios devices and the free github desktop on Windows 10.

If you want multiple workspaces, you can create a separate vault that is backed by a different private github repo.

browningstreet• 3 years ago

Vaults are workspaces and you can open multiple vaults simultaneously. You can also copy the .obsidian folder over so you don’t have to rebuild from scratch. But you do have to maintain manually.

guiambros2• 3 years ago

Genuinely curious: what's the problem you're trying to solve with Git plugin that the official Obsidian Sync [1] doesn't solve natively (besides cost)?

I've been using Obsidian Sync for a year, and it works flawlessly for my use case. Is syncs not only notes, but also configuration, plugins, allows creation of multiple vaults, works on mobile, fine-grained control over which folders to sync in each device, and even allow controlled sharing with collaborators. Oh, and full encryption with user-provided key, which is a must. All for $96/year.

[1] https://obsidian.md/sync

firexcy• 3 years ago

The git plugin allows you to disable it on certain devices. I enable it only on my main computer and sync the vault among devices with syncthing, which I find much more reliable than wholly relying on git.

johnwalkr2• 3 years ago

Could you perhaps change something in .git to fail in case of conflict?

What do you mean by using git lfs but not wanting files in git? Generally you should be able to use git lfs with any note app that supports git as long as you are able to enable lfs on whatever server you are using and are able to edit .gitattributes. It's just git with a bit of logic to only download the needed revisions of binary files instead of the whole history. But as far as I can reason, there's no practical difference if you're not often editing the binary files which you add because there's usually only one copy/no patches for the binary files.

marvin999• 3 years ago

This is sad. Evernote was phenomenal and I really loved it, years ago.

eimrine• 3 years ago

Especially when it was a C++ application, not C#.

birdymcbird• 3 years ago

Why did they rewrite?

timetraveller26• 3 years ago

And to think that at one point Evernote was THE note taking app. So much wasted potential.

0cf8612b2e1e2• 3 years ago

On the other hand, it should be possible for software to be done. I have never used Evernote, but I am not sure how much innovation is required in the note-taking space.

ktta• 3 years ago

Software is never done if the software it runs on is never done. Making that transition is not easy, and tech debt can accumulate to the point where you have to make substantial changes. In the meantime, UI standards/tastes change. Now you're at the right spot for a re-write

Kadin2• 3 years ago

Perhaps, but setting aside the philosophical point, Evernote was nowhere near "done".

Their 'new' client software (Electron-based, of course) never even achieved feature parity with their 'legacy' client software. The mobile app wasn't exactly screamingly performant, to put it nicely. Really basic core use cases, like creating a note, typing in a title and some content, tagging it with a keyword, and saving it, required a lot more clicks than it seemed to me like it should. Hierarchical tags, while technically supported, seemed like a weird add-on that never got full support. And Penultimate -- their tablet-centric app that stored data in your Evernote account -- hasn't been updated in several years; I'm actually impressed it continues to work.

There's plenty of room where they could have built new features, if they'd wanted to. Off the top of my head, I'd have liked to see Markdown support instead of their quasi-HTML WYSIWYG editor (some versions of the thick client had a subset of Markdown-like syntax but others didn't). Penultimate would have been great if it had on-device OCR / handwriting recognition, or even just a way of tagging specific pages or page-regions with keywords.

I think there's a lot of room in the notetaking space. I'm still waiting for an app that isn't a glorified text editor or a drawing program, but also doesn't lock your data into some unparsable binary format or obscure graph database behind the scenes. I want to take notes, using a pen, on a tablet, that might or might not be text, and then I want to annotate the shit out of those notes and keyword them and cross-reference them, and I want the whole thing to be searchable and I want the handwriting recognition to not suck, and I want all of this to be encrypted at rest and in transit, and I want native clients for all major desktop and mobile operating systems.

So, yeah, I don't think notetaking is done quite yet.

Gigachad• 3 years ago

Any note taking software that was “done” quickly becomes not done when users requirements change. Taking notes is no longer enough. I now want to talk to my phone and have it find the note that included the info I want. Not just basic text search, but it should understand the meaning of the notes.

miked85• 3 years ago

it should be possible for software to be done

Not if you ask product managers

ilyt2• 3 years ago

Well it was clearly too "done" coz they decided to rewrite everything in Electron

wkat42425• 3 years ago

Yeah and now we only really have OneNote, the web version of which still really sucks. You can't even search a whole notebook, just a section. And it needs to reload every day.

ycombinete2• 3 years ago

OneNote 2016 was revolutionary for me. Since then I’ve found it less and less usable with each new update.

I think the tension between having a good web app and a good desktop app with the same interface is difficult to resolve.

fastball4• 3 years ago

I think it was mostly THE note-taking app because it was effectively the first serious contender. In retrospect it was never a particularly inspired app.

teeray• 3 years ago

The new features will be feeding everyone's notes into an LLM and then screaming "AI!" at the top of their lungs to investors.

shusaku2• 3 years ago

You can already do this with Evernote in fact, it’s called “AI cleanup”. It’s not that good now but I like the idea of having an AI format everything cleanly

sneak• 3 years ago

Do you like the idea of OpenAI logging all of your private notes for all time (and receiving a copyright sublicense for them from Evernote)?

majani2• 3 years ago

Sounds like spellcheck with write permissions to me

notyourwork• 3 years ago

And for that reason I'm out. What a shame.

julianz3• 3 years ago

I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?

https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-gua...

slg3• 3 years ago

Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced at the recent Le Web London conference that the company will soon set up a protected fund and include a legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years

That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions. A lot has changed regarding how we talk about data in the last decade.

xeromal• 3 years ago

Is it a threat to commit a crime if it was posted before the law existed?

starfallg• 3 years ago

GDPR was not designed to target service providers providing a data service storing and processing data that the customer explicitly contracted for. That would be under data processing which has different rules.

Unless the guarantee was for Evernote to hold this data for 100 years irrespective of what the customer wishes and for example after the customer has ended their contract for the service, this angle doesn't apply.

Animats2• 3 years ago

That announcement was in 2012.[1] Did they do it? I can't find any indication that they actually implemented it. Which was a good reason to get off Evernote a decade ago.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2012/06/21/tech/web/internet-data-everno...

some1else• 3 years ago

Better start burning down the libraries too then? Preserving customer data with their explicit consent isn't related to data retention rules in privacy laws.

ArnoVW• 3 years ago

In legal terms Evernote is not "data controller" but "data processor". They are not responsible for ensuring conformity with retention rules.

ano-ther• 3 years ago

legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions.

It’s (or was) the promise for you to be able to access your data for so long, provided you agree. Not hoarding private data against your will.

heywhatupboys2• 3 years ago

So much shit here against GDPR which is basically:

1. if you want your data removed, companies HAVE to remove your data

2. if you don't want your data stored, companies CANNOT store your data

and then a bunch of if-when-then-else-must-cannot-time-dependent-legal-stuff

dheera• 3 years ago

legally binding guaratee that users’data will be maintained for 100 years

This sounds mostly like a PR stunt to use the word "legally" to try to instill a false sense of confidence in users when in reality, "legally" doesn't mean much. Legally binding to what? The corporation? The corporation can run out of funds and die in 2 years, and then the contract isn't bound to anything.

Legally binding for 100 years has NOTHING to do with staying alive for 100 years.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

I’m reminded of a quote from Tommy Boy about guarantees.

Ted Nelson, Customer : But why do they put a guarantee on the box?
Tommy : Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me

stubybubs• 3 years ago

Tommy Boy quotes? A true scholar of the old school.

andsoitis2• 3 years ago

a legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years, even if the company itself is bought or ceases to be.

If you ain’t got the cash, your words don’t matter

jhanschoo• 3 years ago

I see that the article says "will", but CEOs and their companies will square the circle every time they are drumming up publicity and impressing potential investors. If they have squared the circle it would be such a feat that there will be a press release talking about it in the past tense, not the progressive or the future.

jsiepkes• 3 years ago

I wonder if this eroding trust with startups and companies will become a real problem for them. I mean by now things like "lifetime subscription" have little meaning coming a commercial entity.

Well, I'm off enjoying the last few weeks of my lifetime HBO cheap subscription.

thathndude• 3 years ago

I’ve been delighted with my “lifetime” Plex pass, but I worry the day will soon come when I discover the end of the lifetime.

Marco Arment has occasionally complained about lifetime, one-time Overcast premium subscriptions and how he’d really like to rug pull those. But, to his credit, has no present plans to do so. However, it’s more because he doesn’t want to deal with the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do is honor “lifetime.”

DeathArrow9• 3 years ago

I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?

I wonder when did such a bold guarantee work in practice?

SanjayMehta2• 3 years ago

They lost the plot when they suddenly reduced the number of devices for the free tier.

There was a time when iCloud wasn't reliable. When that improved, Notes became a simpler free alternative.

parker_mountain• 3 years ago

Notes isn't as good as Evernote, not even close.

However, it's "good enough" for most people, and free.

One of the greatest bag fumbles in SV history imo.

dhosek• 3 years ago

The increase in subscription pricing was the thing that got me to cancel my subscription. Hearing about the layoff of the staff makes me glad I did. Notes works just as well if not better than Evernote for my needs.

CharlesW• 3 years ago

For anyone who may not be aware, Apple Notes can import Evernote .enex files. The process was mostly painless, and I’m glad to be rid of the Evernote dependency.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793

scarface_74• 3 years ago

While I happily sing and prance in Apple’s “Walled Garden” and have done so for over a decade, I feel uneasy about putting all of my notes in Notes with no easy export option.

yabatopia• 3 years ago

They lost the plot when they started selling Evernote-branded socks (and other accessories). No bugs smashing, better search or faster/more reliable sync: flush with VC money, the smart guys at Evernote decided that Evernote-branded socks was what their users really wanted.

I still have a few Evernote-branded Moleskine notebooks lying around. They came with a 3 month voucher for Evernote Premium, I think. Anyway, heavily discounted on Amazon, it was almost cheaper to combine the notebooks with vouchers than to subscribe online.

And then you had all the different apps, like a recipe app. My God, all the apps. Complete waste of resources, complete lack of focus.

When the VC money dried up, the penny dropped. Prices were hiked, new subscription tiers with artificial limitations were introduced, management changed, but by then the writing was on the wall and I switched to alternatives.

Being one of the first 1000 Premium users, I still feel bad about the loss of my second/forever brain, though.

SanjayMehta2• 3 years ago

I can't wrap my head around socks as "merch." How madly visible.

And an Evernote branded physical note has to be some kind of ironical statement. I'd hang on to that as a memento.

prewett• 3 years ago

How they intend to do that without any staff

Contractors from cheaper cost of living countries, I expect.

baron8162• 3 years ago

They laid off all the employees based out of Chile too.

ElFitz3• 3 years ago

Bending spoons is based in Italy. So probably, yes.

hackernewds• 3 years ago

intend to do what? acquirer probably has no intention of keeping the app running. just reaping whoever subscribes as profit, and having no opex

bighi3• 3 years ago

They probably intend to keep the app running. And nothing else.

Douger• 3 years ago

For the last 5 days I have been actively trying to cancel my Evernote personal plan. The site would break every time I navigated to manage my subscription or try and reach support.

I guess that's one way to reduce customer churn.

thsksbd• 3 years ago

If you have an apple card, just change your number.

tbihl• 3 years ago

I canceled mine maybe a week ago. So hopefully it can be done for you, too!

For anyone not jumping ship, you can reduce your price hike to only 78-ish total per year by clicking through the cancelation menus.

0cf8612b2e1e2• 3 years ago

What happens if you try to sign up for a new account? Similar level of malfunction, I assume.

I am so sick of this reality. Endless dark patterns to get your money. Nearly impossible to get out. Why ever make a good product when you can just seek rent and fall into that perfect optimum of cheap-enough that cancelling is not worth the pain.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

Assume away, but to play devil's advocate, how much testing do you think is done on the close account procedures vs add new account and accept money from that account? i'll bet it's not even close to being even

pyeri2• 3 years ago

There have been stories of how convoluted and practically impossible the unsubscribe process from Amazon Prime is.

At almost every step, the system sort of nags you with "Do you REALLY want to do this?" almost with a trolling attitude!

If this is the case with proper big tech capitalist, think what will the scenario be with smaller pleb capitalists like Evernote in this grave recession.

goldpizza44• 3 years ago

This is what virtual Credit Cards are for... Each site gets a separate number and I can expire them as needed. Unfortunately, if they get popular vendors will figure out a way to detect and refuse.

spookybones• 3 years ago

I believe you can inform your credit card provider and have them freeze payments for the company.

stevenhubertron• 3 years ago

I just canceled and it worked fine. Where are you getting stuck?

polynomial3• 3 years ago

You canceled without logging in?

meling• 3 years ago

Can’t you just do a chargeback on the next subscription charge? If enough people do that, the card issuer will probably hit them with fines of some sort.

bithaze• 3 years ago

I think, in general, you can always file a chargeback if you're prepared for the possibility of losing access to your account and data.

jrm42• 3 years ago

At the risk of I told you so, it was always a stupid idea.

Any service like this that "requires the cloud," but is personal or individual and could be replaced by completely non-cloud software WILL go obsolete.

Obsidian, et al understand this.

emodendroket10• 3 years ago

Services that rely on local storage are vulnerable to their own data loss scenarios as well as being much less convenient.

system22• 3 years ago

If you can use a basic hosting with backup features, you can simply use a $5 droplet to sync almost everything possibly you can think of. Or OneDrive / Google Drive if you are using Windows based applications with databases. It is really not that difficult to keep data safe and backed up.

Falkon1313• 3 years ago

Or much more convenient, given that the data is local and almost always available without the vagaries of an internet connection and remote server (except if/when all the bad local data loss scenarios happen at once and you need to restore from your cloud backup).

jrm42• 3 years ago

It's so odd that comments like this actually still get made on Hacker News; this is SUCH a solved problem, and yet people still make it likely because it pays someones bills, despite being trivially easy to solve.

Anyway, syncthing, among others.

cryptoz• 3 years ago

Evernote lost my note when I tapped on an email notification in Android in ~2011. Nevernote for me ever since. How. in. the. heck. do you call it Evernote if it loses your note when changing apps?!

riffic• 3 years ago

obsidian is worth looking at imo

revskill• 3 years ago

We do have Notion (and alternatives), who needs Evernote now ? Evernote should have an exporting tool to import into Notion instead.

wkat42425• 3 years ago

Notion is markdown formatted text only right?

Big difference with a full wysiwyg notebook with attachments. Afaik notion only does images. Devs love markdown but regular users don't.

But it's been years since I tried notion so perhaps this has changed.

mbo• 3 years ago

But it's been years since I tried notion so perhaps this has changed.

It has changed dramatically.

kstrauser5• 3 years ago

Not that I doubt this, because it seemed inevitable to my outsider eyes, but do you have any proof of that?

I’d recommend getting off of Evernote anyway due to trends. However, is there evidence that this is newly urgent?

baron8162• 3 years ago

Heard directly from impacted employees. 30 to remain of ~300 pre-acquisition. 98 laid off today. No press release, which is why I’m saying something, but you should be able to find people posting on LinkedIn about it.

kstrauser5• 3 years ago

Wow. Assuming that’s all true, good luck, ex-Evernoters! I hadn’t used your stuff in ages, but I’m sure lots of worked hard to make something nice.

vzaliva2• 3 years ago

Personal journey: I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but encountered a bug that the developers were not keen on fixing promptly. It was then that I realized the importance of personal notes surviving beyond companies, apps, and formats. Quickly after, I switched to a collection of plain text files using org-mode markdown and have been happy ever since.

lb4r5• 3 years ago

I've been doing the same for the past few years, but have yet to figure out a good way to sync things between my devices. Not that it bothers me too much, but sometimes I'd like to have that convenience.

vzaliva2• 3 years ago

I use dropbox to sync.

OriginalPenguin• 3 years ago

Git? Syncthing?

mplanchard• 3 years ago

I use Dropbox and symlink my notes to ~/org

hu33• 3 years ago

Try https://github.com/laurent22/joplin + cloud drive of your choice (I use One Drive).

See my reply to your parent commenter.

GivinStatic• 3 years ago

I'm syncing between my devices with Resilio sync

hu33• 3 years ago

That's why I use https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

It's markdown, open-source, free. With desktop and mobile support.

Syncs notes to any cloud of your choice for free. (I use One Drive)

Optionaly you can pay them to sync your data on their cloud. So they even have a compelling business model!

BaseballPhysics6• 3 years ago

Personally, I just use markdown text files+vimwiki on my laptop, along with Markor for Android, and Syncthing to get my notes where I need 'em, but in the end the principle is the same: Own Your Damn Data!

Zetobal2• 3 years ago

Joplin will be unusable until they give up on obfuscating the md files.

anta40• 3 years ago

Hmm... another Electron-based app (already have VSCode, Postman, Beekepper Studio).

But oh well, let's give it a try :D

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

I need to be able to sync my notes though, I use more than one device. I'd like for them to not be lost if a phone or laptop is stolen.

Ideally, it'd just sync to webdav and I could use Nextcloud. But I've only ever found a few that did sync with it, and there were always all sorts of weird limitations or bugs in those.

never_inline• 3 years ago

I have a private github repo for this. I don't have a commit discipline for any of this, just using github for storing some MBs of plain text.

Having a log maybe useful some day, though.

Brajeshwar3• 3 years ago

A tad similar story with my experience.

“Plain text is a powerful universal tool that is almost zero cost, work across platforms, are light enough to work remotely over poor connections, doesn’t go out of date, and is quick to learn.”

https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/

kunjank3• 3 years ago

Did you export the Evernote into plain text?

manca• 3 years ago

I remember when Evernote launched and everyone was super hyped about it -- even some of the biggest VC names promoted them. Not to mention the funding they raised ($290M). It was literally iOS Notes on steroids. I even used it for awhile, but somehow it didn't stick.

They hired bunch of great people and had some good backend tech -- sad to see this happen to them.

jimt12343• 3 years ago

Didn't Evernote precede Notes? My understanding is that Evernote was the first "notes" app, but I'm old; I could be making shit up in my head.

dboreham• 3 years ago

Older than...Lotus Notes?

seltzered_• 3 years ago

Yes, it preceded iOS Notes. Evernote started in 2004.

staticman23• 3 years ago

Evernote preceeded the Iphone, the product was originally a non cloud small business that I think was sold/ spun off into a venture capital funded company.

Evernote is older than the Iphone.

I just checked and I found a review of Evernote 1.0 from 2007, but I think the product predated that review. I found a web site saying the first Evernote Beta was released in 2004. I remember using Evernote in grad school in 2008.

SamBam• 3 years ago

I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a combination of OCR and tags.

Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?

cweagans2• 3 years ago

Apple notes. The ocr is pretty good.

wahnfrieden• 3 years ago

Apple stores these unencrypted with government access by default, FYI. Opt into e2ee to disable that.

allarm3• 3 years ago

For single use Notes is ok. I’ve been struggling sharing notes with my wife. Some of the notes would never appear on the other device, and it’s been like this for many years, regardless of the devices model and the OS version.

chazeon• 3 years ago

I think now Apple’s Notes app does this right now.

evolve2k• 3 years ago

Evernote alternatives for your 'digital shoebox'/'paperless office'.

JOPLIN:

Browsing through alternativeto [1], seems that the obvious replacement for a hosted 'non-tech' offering is Joplin [2] - a free, open source direct evernote competitor which includes Evernote import feature and cloud syncing.

PAPERLESS-NGX:

For the whole paperless office, scan/store receipts and PDF paperwork, I've been seriously looking at Paperless-NGX [3]. Downside is that you need to sort out self-hosting. Upside it's free and looks amazing for achieving a 'paperless office'.

Found this on exporting from Evernote to Paperless-NGX [4], but its not definitive.

Has anyone done this already? Would love your advice. Demand is out there for someone to write up a good guide on this.

REFERENCES:

[1] Alternatives to Evernote - https://alternativeto.net/software/evernote

[2] Joplin Open Source Evernote Alternative - https://joplinapp.org

[3] Paperless-NGX (Selfhosted paperless office) - https://docs.paperless-ngx.com

[4] Discussion Evernote to Paperless-ngx - https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/120mmo1/evernot...

staticman23• 3 years ago

Joplin doesn't have OCR built in. There's third party Joplin plugins for OCR but I don't know how well they work.

staticman23• 3 years ago

On phones Microsoft lens has free pdf OCR scanning. That and Onedrive would probably work. Instead of tags you just put keywords in the file names. I'm not sure how well it would handle photos of wine labels.

BaseballPhysics6• 3 years ago

If you're willing to self-host, I've found Paperless to be quite good:

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

Rebelgecko• 3 years ago

I've been using Stack for a few years and like it a lot. Downside is that it might go to the Google Graveyard someday. Partially mitigated because the app mirrors PDFs of all my uploads to Google Drive, but not sure how much metadata that includes.

Zetobal2• 3 years ago

If you are on Mac/iOS devonthink is good alternative for it.

11235813212• 3 years ago

What is your source for this?

jimt12343• 3 years ago

Not sure of OP's source, but a friend of mine worked there for several years and can confirm. He got let go, too.

11235813212• 3 years ago

Thanks. Sorry for your friend and to see a longstanding company devolve into this situation.

travelhead3• 3 years ago

I invested $25,000 into buying secondary equity shares of Evernote about 1.5 years ago. In January, I got an exit check back for $120 bucks after the sale to Bending Spoon :/

squirtlebonflow• 3 years ago

Why would you invest?

mangosteenjuice• 3 years ago

How did you buy it?

travelhead3• 3 years ago

EquityZen

BaseballPhysics6• 3 years ago

Let me guess: options were going to expire?

travelhead3• 3 years ago

No options. It’s secondary equity from EquityZen.

fastball4• 3 years ago

Here is an (incomplete) list[1] of random note-taking apps that you can try if you are leaving Evernotes.

Or you can try ours, which is based on Markdown (not open source) and a nested notecard format (not documents). Heavy emphasis on getting out of your way and just letting you write notes, though still with plenty of power if you need it. It has plenty of other cool features[2] and we're prepping for a pretty big 3.0 release in the very near future which should be exciting.

Yes, this is a very shameless plug. But in the spirit of Threads capitalizing on the upheaval at Twitter, I suppose I can do the same for Evernote.

[1] https://supernotes.app/alternatives/

[2] https://supernotes.app/features/

zwaps• 3 years ago

I can't see on your features page whether you have a proprietary format and to which degree I can easily export my notes & data.

Evernote being a cautionary tale, I think you understand why no one would or should move their notes to closed system.

Being based on Markdown means notes are stored somewhere in the file system, like Obsidian?

fastball4• 3 years ago

The actual content of your notes (we call them cards) is Markdown and is stored as such, but the source-of-truth for the notes themselves is our servers (not in the file-system), as our priority is providing a seamless experience on all your devices (or anywhere with a web connection), so the app was actually originally built to be "online-only". It's become much more offline-friendly over the years (your entire card collection actually is stored on your system for offline use / search is entirely offline / etc) but offline is still not 100% there yet, which is what the upcoming 3.0 release will enable.

Within the app we provide comprehensive export options[1] (you can export as markdown or as the actual JSON representation of a card that we use under-the-hood).

We also have a public API[2] that allows you to do whatever you want with your cards at any time with an API key. Currently the docs for this are still only an OpenAPI spec (and not an entirely complete one at that), but again that is something we are improving with the 3.0 release / subsequent releases.

So I wouldn't really describe ours as a closed system in the sense that Evernote was. In the case that Supernotes is ever acquired / shutdown / other black swan event for users, you should just be able to dump your cards into something like Obsidian and it will work pretty well, as we almost entirely respect the CommonMark spec.

[1] https://docs.supernotes.app/en/articles/3068672-printing-exp...

[2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger

msoad• 3 years ago

I never stopped using the Notes app in my Apple computer and phones. I know it lacks a lot of features that typical HN reader thinks is a must-have but the fact that I don't have to worry about feature creep and crazy monetization schemes is a strong enough motives that keeps me on this ecosystem. Plain text FTW!

fastball4• 3 years ago

You also don't need to worry about running it on Windows or Android!

But yes, if you are already locked in to the Apple ecosystem, free and pre-installed can be hard to compete with for a large set of users.

swayson• 3 years ago

Obsidian.md for the win. I used to use evernote way back when they started, was cool software, then they started scaling and added worst search UI I have ever come across. That day, I deleted my account and went markdown with my own storage. Don't see the benefit of why your notes should be controlled by others.

emodendroket10• 3 years ago

I mostly use Google Keep, which works pretty well. Though the "clippings" feature saving Web articles is pretty cool and doesn't have much of an analogue with that product.

freedomben• 3 years ago

Google keep us awesome! Very underrated. I use logseq most of the time but keep when I'm on mobile and I'll sync them later. There are scripts to hello transfer but doing it manually is pretty easy.

But on it's own keep gives me everything I need, except for the local markdown file database.

D13Fd2• 3 years ago

Just wait until they shut it down.

etrautmann• 3 years ago

+1 for Obsidian. So much faster that Notion and does what I need, with amazing plugin ecosystem if you want specific features.

xvilka2• 3 years ago

It's not open source. If migrate from Evernote, at least it's better to migrate to FOSS. Sadly, most FOSS solutions lack mobile app support.

nilespotter2• 3 years ago

logseq is open source, but you gotta pay for (e2ee) sync. Joplin is open source and you can do e2ee with a joplin server or s3 backed. I didn't care for Obsidian. logseq for me.

vladiliescu• 3 years ago

Open source is not a cure-all you know. I prefer to pay for quality software than spend countless hours trying to compile a thing someone abandoned years ago.

Krisjohn• 3 years ago

The data store is just a folder tree of .md text files. You don't even need Obsidian to view them, it just makes navigating the links a little easier.

perryizgr8• 3 years ago

The notes are all in markdown stored on your disk. IMO that is more important than the app source code being open. I can easily take my data and write another app.

N19PEDL2• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611355

BigBar2• 3 years ago

I use Obsidian for quite a few things, but I view Obsidian and Evernote as different apps functionally.

I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things become inconvenient.

For text-only notes Obsidian is great. For web clips, emailing notes in, multimedia, I just find EN much easier than trying to jam everything into a text editor.

prepend4• 3 years ago

I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things become inconvenient.

I don’t care about any of those features. I care about capturing and organizing ideas that are almost always text.

It’s cool you like EN but I think that market is much smaller and EN was just reaching for super edge cases to please a few users and trying to get “regular” users to pay as well.

kepano2• 3 years ago

Obsidian Web Clipper: https://stephanango.com/obsidian-web-clipper

belthesar3• 3 years ago

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did.

Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feeling like what they had was being taken away from them spurned a lack of trust. Obsidian made the smartest play by giving you the editor, keeping the files outside of a database so that they're portable (so they feel safe if they ever have to move away), and telling you that if you want to own the sync story that you can, but you can pay to have the cohesive experience on every device.

TheMiddleMan• 3 years ago

Don't you think having so many competitors offering free notes apps is a large part of it?

D13Fd2• 3 years ago

He gave the Obsidian example, which is a great one, so no. Obsidian shows you can still do well as a noted app company if you are selling the right thing (sync).

bachmeier• 3 years ago

Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features

I don't think so. They had plenty of paying customers. They claimed to be profitable for a long time (eg https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/evernote-rai...). They had trouble with (i) implementing big price hikes, and (ii) a poor, bug-filled user experience. While that was going on, they were facing increasing competition, yet they acting like a monopolist. OneNote, Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, Notion, and so on were providing a quality product at a better price. The lesson is one that many HN commenters would never accept. It's possible to set your price too high.

briHass• 3 years ago

If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage.

Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been around longer than any other note-app, and it's still here as Evernote fades into oblivion.

weare138• 3 years ago

But this also seems to be another case of tech companies trying to have it's cake and eat it too like the recent reddit debacle. The freemium model comes with trade-offs and businesses can't have it both ways. 'Free' users should be viewed as free marketing and advertising for generating paid users not as lost potential revenue.

No business using the freemium model should expect to magically convert the free users to paid users and still retain the popularity generated by the free users. You would think as many times as tech companies have that shot themselves in the foot like this our industry might stop attempting to do this. When does this actually work?

proamdev1232• 3 years ago

It works when the free tier is usable, but highly limited. Then it effectively becomes a free trial, albeit with no time restriction.

For example, if Evernote had limited the free tier to 99 notes and syncing with 2 devices. That’s usable enough for a user to get a feel for whether they like it or not, but without an expectation that the free tier could support all their needs for note generation and storage.

The problem comes when the free tier is so restraint-free that people begin to use it as a daily driver without ever expecting to upgrade to a paid tier. At that point, the company has boxed themselves into a situation with users who generate costs but no corresponding revenues. Trying to convert _those_ users into paying customers is difficult or impossible, in my opinion.

PhoenixReborn• 3 years ago

Also Obsidian is a small team (< 5 people IIRC?) and they don't have to monetize as aggressively to make back the money that VCs have funded them with.

greggsy2• 3 years ago

They created a very robust platform based on a cross-platform framework (electron) with a healthy stable of open source add ons, and held off n a major release for some time. They really only need to water and feed it from there.

itsjloh• 3 years ago

Have Obsidian taken on any VC funding?

bakuninsbart• 3 years ago

I think this is the key issue here. There are a lot of VC funded start ups that have a good product and a solid market fit, but they were never supposed to become 500+ employee companies.

If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company.

In this context I think it is important to note that Ycombinator was founded in 2005. For the majority of its existence, and the general hype of tech startups, money was incredibly cheap. Now that the gears are switching, a lot of the advice given to startup founders does not work as well anymore.

ryanjamurphy• 3 years ago

The count depends on if you include the cat: https://obsidian.md/about

kdazzle• 3 years ago

Remember Evernote had those physical notebooks where you could write in them with real pens and pay the subscription and then take a picture and upload them with OCR? That was the only thing I remember that you couldnt get for free.

LVB• 3 years ago

I've used https://getrocketbook.com somewhat recently. Supports Evernote and other cloud services too.

janxgeist• 3 years ago

For me, it's an example of a company messing up the technical side.

I was a happy customer in the beginning. Until I didn't have an important note that I had prepared for a meeting, because it didn't sync to my phone. A few weeks later, it happened again. I lost trust in the app.

Then the Android App got worse and worse. It sometimes didn't sync at all. Notes would conflict all the time, and I'd lose work.

For some reason, Evernote (both android app and windows client) just seemed to get worse every year.

tempestn3• 3 years ago

Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable.

I kept hoping, as theoretically Evernote is absolutely perfect for my needs, if it would just work. But clearly the writing is on the wall at this point and I need to find an alternative.

lifeonlars3• 3 years ago

I paid for a subscription because I really liked what it did and I used it a lot. The Android app became so unresponsive that it was basically unusable. I stopped paying when I found myself making notes in email again to avoid opening the treacly app.

It has since got better but I haven't gone back to paying for it, despite using it a lot, and now I'll probably slowly migrate away as they progressively break and disable the free version.

srvmshr• 3 years ago

I would like to pick your brain about Notion for the reasoning you mentioned. Do you think Notion would be the next Evernote - in both the good and the bad way? Both the services are serving the same segment of the consumer market & both started out with generous offerings for free. I could be wrong how I see it but it would be nice to hear something interesting.

puszczyk2• 3 years ago

No the OP. I think Notion targets SMBs and maybe teams within enterprises.

When they started the personal plan was paid (after first 1k blocks or so), then in 2020 they’ve lifted that restriction[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786

randomdata• 3 years ago

Are they really in the same segment?

Evernote's killer feature was its ability to "scan" paper documents with a smartphone and to be able to search on those documents in the future.

Notion is just a Markdown editor.

belthesar3• 3 years ago

It's hard to say. In a lot of ways, they can address the same market, but from different directions. Evernote is a single-user focused app that extended to collaborative notetaking, Notion is a knowledge base app that can be used by individuals.

The market is different, and Notion has always had a present limitation of how much a free account can get away with, even if it is generous. There's a pretty stark difference in saying "have the whole enchilada for free" at first and then "now we're limiting the devices you can sync to" or "now these other features you had are no longer free", vs. "your usage is always metered, and there is a generous free tier". I do imagine there is some sense in that if the free tier threshold was reduced that would cause some pain, but setting the expectation of "lunch is free, all you can eat" and then pivoting to "lunch is still mostly free but now you have to pay for desert" is going to make anyone mad that they have to pay for dessert now.

ramraj07• 3 years ago

Sounds like Dropbox has made the transition just fine. If you’re gonna ask me to pay a tenner a month you better give me what I think is the dollars worth of value. Dropbox did. Evernote did not. At least not for the vast majority of people who barely take some notes on some rare days.

devjab2• 3 years ago

I think you’re both right because the original poster left out competition. It’s one thing to take free back, it’s another thing to do it when people can easily replace your product without paying.

Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use. At least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making it appear “free” but even if you host your own cloud storage you’re going to pay something for it.

Even if Evernote is better than notes on your iPhone, is it $10 a month better? Probably not.

benhurmarcel• 3 years ago

Dropbox never took away anything they gave for free though. In the beginning they handed out extra space like candies, and the accounts that got it at the time still have it.

arbitrary_name• 3 years ago

I cannot stand how difficult it is to create, use, and copy/paste tables. It means I'm forced to stick with OneNote.

ilyt2• 3 years ago

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did.

But they were doing seeming fine ? It's not some new VC funded corp that failed after 5 years

DeathArrow9• 3 years ago

and telling you that if you want to own the sync story that you can, but you can pay to have the cohesive experience on every device

What stops you to sync for free using free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts?

belthesar3• 3 years ago

It sounds like that I didn't explain myself super well, because we agree. Using Dropbox or OneDrive to do sync is still owning the sync story yourself. You may not be writing the file syncing software, but you're not using Obsidian's purpose built sync system.

prepend4• 3 years ago

I think it’s an example of trying to charge for things that are low value, and, more importantly, low cost.

Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap.

It was free in the beginning because this is a “classic” software problem where it’s cheap to develop and close to $0 marginal dollars for a user.

When Evernote started charging for dumb features and locking in my notes, I switched to one of many free, open source, or very cheap alternatives.

I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.

The lesson here is to do something valuable or do something cheap. But don’t do something not valuable and expensive.

Sync is nice, but notes can be easily synced everywhere by layering on top of Dropbox or iCloud or whatever. I don’t want custom Evernote sync and I especially don’t want to pay as much as Dropbox for it. Id rather just pay for Dropbox and then toss in a bunch of files.

neilv• 3 years ago

I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company.

For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it didn't?

gtirloni• 3 years ago

Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap.

Are Evernote files just plain "text files"?

seti0Cha3• 3 years ago

I agree that many of the features they were adding were useless (to me), but I disagree that you can encompass what they do with the description of storing and editing files. Their value was in the removing any concern a user might have about where a note is, both in terms of which device, and where on the device. There are a bunch of ways to sync and edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on that, I want to capture bits of information and then be able to find it again without thinking about it. What I was buying was simplicity, reliability, ubiquity, and speed. They screwed up because they didn't seem to realize that was their core value proposition.

TheKarateKid• 3 years ago

I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.

This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these companies struggle because the value proposition simply isn't there for what they're offering.

Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No. But someone has to pay back the billions spent on useless corporate bloat and thousands of employees.

Euphorbium• 3 years ago

Apple notes does exactly the same and free.

stevage• 3 years ago

For me, it's an example of a company building an app that did a thing well, but not a thing people would pay for. And then switching out the app for this monstrous platformy enterprisey catastrophe that I sure as hell never wanted, and being told to pay for it.

Just an endless series of features that I never wanted.

proamdev1232• 3 years ago

Evernote’s files are `.enex` which is a variation of html.

At least, they used to be. I haven’t checked recently, but this was the case for many years. Don’t know if they’ve changed anything recently.

deelly• 3 years ago

to convert free users to paying users for the same features

Not the same features, worse features. They intentionally abandoned Evernote Classic that was like 3 time faster, not clattered, practically without ads, and with more-more features. I will happily pay Evernote some reasonable price if my experience will be better, not worse..

seanhunter2• 3 years ago

I have to say changing to obsidian has been great.

1. there are opensource tools to convert from evernote to obsidian so it Just Works [tm] and you don't lose anything.

2. My docs are now in markdown in a normal filesystem so it's easy for me to back them up, sync them, have everything work on different OSs etc

3. I choose to pay for obsidian sync because I want to fund them but you don't have to

4. Community plugins are awesome. For example I just got done editing my "Linear Algebra Cheat sheet" which is full of Latex equations. It looks beautiful, if I want to jump into vim to edit I can but editing in obsidian works fine also.

pphysch• 3 years ago

I set up Obsidian+Syncthing on my desktop+mobile devices a couple years ago and have had zero technical issues, while Obsidian has significantly improved their product since, IME. It just works AND I own my data.

It's a real gem among mountains of SaaS/VC nonsense.

infinitemh• 3 years ago

I just started using Obsidian and I use the vim keybinds that Obsidian ships with. My only issue so far is I can’t move the cursor back to the title from the body.

ergonaught• 3 years ago

I was a paying customer for many years. Despite their continuous attempts to turn it into something I didn't need and eventually didn't want because they wouldn't leave it alone, they didn't manage to run me off until last year. That coincided with the acquisition but I honestly no longer recall if that was the final straw, as they'd been increasingly aggravating me for a while.

mesoman10• 3 years ago

I'm still a paying customer.

But I don't trust them and haven't since they made it difficult to export all of your notes. And, they damaged tag-based organization by changing to only list notes that are at the bottom of the tag hierarchy - not those in the middle.

And, they want to be the sole custodian my data, and I don't like a company with that attitude.

Having been involved with system design including large servers for 50 years, I don't trust the cloud. Yeah, the huge cloud providers are staffed by really smart people and it is very unlikely you'll lose your data there (although I sure wouldn't trust Google - they're nuts with their product management).

But a small staff Evernote, under pressure to please investors by somehow adding features that will let them compete in spaces already pretty full - no, I don't trust them to adequately use the cloud to keep my data secure.

I do frequent .enex backups of all my notes.

I haven't switched yet, because it's a pain. But I sure do backups frequently.

And if I see a good alternative (maybe in this thread), I'll jump on it.

As long as I don't have to do the sysadmin all the time (I'd forget - busy with other things, or I'd make some dumb mistake); and as long as it isn't a giant pain to install and build. And as long as it has clients for MacOS (including Apple ARM processors), Android and iOS... then I'll look.

Ideas sought.

The last time I did this search (2020), I didn't find one I liked.

acumenical2• 3 years ago

I don't buy it.

To me, the real story is that Evernote sucked for a long time. They never evolved and what worked in 2008 stopped working a while ago. Notion and Obsidian and iCloud ate their lunch, and all apps these days are so well connected that you could even use Slack for reminders and self messages and get most of the note taking functionality that you would ever need.

wpietri2• 3 years ago

I agree freemium plans have hazards like that. But as somebody who never converted, it was because Evernote always felt kinda shaky for me. I was willing to pay for great, reliable software. But them asking for money for adequate but buggy software was a hard sell for me.

johnnyanmac3• 3 years ago

Big issue is competition. you're never going to compete in this space as a premium service when users can take their notes and throw them on MS Notes or Google Keep or the 20 other note taking apps. Or simply use any number of cloud solutions and keep them in any variety of text/picture files.

Evernote when I used it a decade ago was great, but not irreplaceable.

emodendroket10• 3 years ago

If you’re still using Evernote, probably a good time to stop.

I doubt many people do anymore, which is probably the reason it's being dismantled. Sic transit gloria mundi.

yayitswei• 3 years ago

Sad ending for a great product. I've been using Simplenote since 2015 and it's been refreshingly consistent.

it_citizen• 3 years ago

Is there a good free alternative which would sync between mac and iOS that doesn't require iCloud? My company is blocking iCloud.

pps2• 3 years ago

Craft (https://craft.do/) has a free version that supposedly works well now (after they removed the limit on how many blocks you can have). I'm using their pro version thanks to the SetApp (https://setapp.com/) subscription (highly recommended), available everywhere, mac, ios, web.

ElFitz3• 3 years ago

Now I want to set up a Patreon or Go Fund Me to fund an open source web clipper by those who worked on Evernote’s.

I’ve never really found anything that worked that well.

wj• 3 years ago

That was my favorite part of Evernote. However, I was recently cleaning up old notes that I had transferred to Obsidian and few of the pages I had clipped were ever read. It turns out I was just hoarding.

ElFitz3• 3 years ago

That’s where I think coupling a web clipper with audio transcription, CLIP, & an LLM, can provide a lot of value.

Have everything automatically classified, tagged, semantically searchable, and linked.

This way when I, for example, write down a new idea about LLMs, everything related is automatically surfaced, including those Langchain and LlamaIndex tutorials, and the notes I’d left about them.

Same thing when I look things up.

And I think this "autopilot" aspect will drastically simplify the usage of tools like Obsidian & Roam.

It won’t replace careful curation, but I am convinced it can be better than what most have (ie Notes, bookmarks, sticky notes, etc)

Perhaps that’s what the guys over at Quivr[0] are trying to do, but I haven’t gotten the chance to try it out yet.

It’s such an obvious use case.

[0] https://www.quivr.app/

Brajeshwar3• 3 years ago

I like to bring up my personal opinion and realization of owning an open format -- plain-text - content for your life-long textual contents.

I was once an Evernote user since its early days and a premium subscriber for many years. I have used many notetaking apps and bought enough of them – iA Writer, ByWord, Bear, SimpleNote, nvAlt fork of Notational Velocity, etc.

I have moved to a simpler notetaking and writing habit for my notes. I have chosen a simple plain-text life. The idea is to approach contents as data-first with tools on the top. I have grown to like the simple methods I use and the philosophies of managing the files and the directories/folders.

I wrote about it sometime back - https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/

kpw94• 3 years ago

Have you tried Obsidian?

3 days ago one of the obsidian makers posted this: https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792

Key quote:

"These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last."

Seems to align with your philosophy

Brajeshwar3• 3 years ago

I replied to him with with my idea and article https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/1675905574624702465

From the article, “Right now, I use Obsidian to manage my notes. The beauty of this setup is that I can change tools anytime, while my notes remain free of any dependency.”

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

I tried obsidian but didn’t feel it was much better than opening a folder in VSCode, and as I am already used to VSCode, that is easier for me.

bayindirh4• 3 years ago

Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

Notion provides more features, incl. publishing and syncing plus the kitchen sink and its factory, yet it doesn't have offline access.

For sync + publish, I have to pay 1.5x what Dropbox wants for 2TB of storage, or what Trello wants for a year, etc.

It makes no sense, at least for me.

BTW, Evernote's .enex format is just well-defined XML. You can parse and convert it into anything you want. It's a modest superset of Markdown.

jve• 3 years ago

Since when twitter allows posting 2172 character long message? Apparently char limit is now 25k for subscribers...

cturner• 3 years ago

Write-up of a similar system. http://songseed.org/post/20120101.aa.saga.html

jwrallie• 3 years ago

I am having a better experience using plain text over a mosh connection than using apps that sync files over the network.

The logic is that if I have internet connection available to sync, then I can also connect to my computer and use a tmux session with vim to edit my plain text notes. If I use the same tmux session in all devices, then the notes are always in sync.

bottlepalm• 3 years ago

I’ve been using the same OneNote notebook for 20 years. It automatically syncs across all my mobile devices, the web and desktop. It supports all kinds of rich text and images.

It’s way simpler than setting up manual backup and syncing of a tons of text file.

eviks4• 3 years ago

Sticking to plain text is like living in a cave - possible, but unpleasant. Why would you remove all the formatting and integration niceties of modern tech?

Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.

So what? Every relevant device can also read and write a bunch of more useful formats

RDaneel0livaw5• 3 years ago

I absolutely love plain text notes. Maybe you could understand that just because you think something is unpleasant and ancient, the rest of the entire human race might not agree? Shocking I know.

I can't stand any formatting whatsoever on my notes. I love plain text because it stays exactly as that: plain text. I don't want my dashes to be turned into spacers, I don't want my asterisks to be turned into lists, etc...

thecodrr2• 3 years ago

Even though Evernote is a competitor, it's still sad to see such a giant in the note-taking space go down so badly. Of course, I am still skeptical about this news and whether its actually true since no source has been linked.

Aside:

I work (and lead the development) on Notesnook, an end-to-end encrypted, open source alternative to Evernote. Since we are based in Pakistan, our pricing has been really competitive at just $4.49/mo (compared to $17.99/mo of Evernote). And best of all, we have one of the best Evernote Importers around: https://importer.notesnook.com/

If you'd like to learn more about Notesnook: https://notesnook.com/

Feel free to ask me any and all questions!

yaiba3• 3 years ago

Notesnook looks promising! Does it support note history / versioning?

thecodrr2• 3 years ago

Yes! Every edit session is saved separately and can easily be restored.

freefruit2• 3 years ago

Does it have OCR for images?

FreezerburnV2• 3 years ago

As far as I can tell: No, and the roadmap doesn't include anything for adding it. I think it would actually be pretty much perfect for me if it did have OCR.

freefruit2• 3 years ago

Also, do you have a plugin so you can save an email directly as a note from desktop Outlook?

theosp• 3 years ago

I got that one on JustDo.com ; it is more of a tasks/teams management tool. But might fit your usecase.

I_am_tiberius2• 3 years ago

How is it possible to offer unlimited storage?

disqard• 3 years ago

Looks exactly like the follow-up to an "Our Incredible Journey" post.

emmjay_• 3 years ago

A possible way to migrate from Evernote to several different apps: https://www.popsci.com/diy/evernote-alternative-export/

(I have no affiliation with any of these).

tiku• 3 years ago

Had a nice interaction with evernote a few days ago. A hacker had logged in on my Evernote account, received an email about a login.

What stunned me was that I had to confirm by mail, but the hacker from Taiwan didn't have to.

rnoorda• 3 years ago

So many of these comments echo my sentiment around Evernote. I used it for years and was a huge fan, until they reduced functionality and increased prices. I got a new device, couldn't sync my devices, and realized there were many great alternatives. Exported to Joplin and haven't looked back.

elkos• 3 years ago

I'm personally using the Nextcloud Notes app, it covers my own needs pretty well and I have it installed on a couple of Android devices as well.

I wonder what you would suggest is the most valuable feature of proprietary solutions?

f311a2• 3 years ago

Moving to plain-text and markdown a few years ago was my best decision. I encrypt all my notes and store them encrypted on GitHub. I don't want my private data to be handled by unprofessionals.

jayflux• 3 years ago

Joplin felt like the OSS spiritual successor to Evernote for me. It’s in markdown, has a mobile app and you can self-host.

pcchristie• 3 years ago

I moved to Standard Notes a while ago. I like free things for basic things like notes, but was happy to pay for E2E Encryption to support what they were up to. I think I got a 5 year licence for $150 which was not outrageous. I just looked up their current prices - $80 a year which means I'll migrate back to Joplin soon.

LilBytes• 3 years ago

Yeah I'm on a grandfathered plan of $50USD which still seems steep.

Unsure what I'll do next.

J_Shelby_J• 3 years ago

I guess their target market are people that really never want to worry about their notes being leaked, and are willing to pay a premium for that.

tempestn3• 3 years ago

Ah, that would explain it. I've run into three fairly major bugs in about as many weeks. It's like they're not doing regression testing at all, and rather than fixing bugs, they just keep rushing out new "features".

Problem is nothing else fits my workflow as well as Evernote does, but looks like I likely won't have a choice. Guess it's time to give Joplin a try.

dzonga• 3 years ago

one long plain text file is all you need.

easy to back up and replicate if need be.

Animats2• 3 years ago

It is perhaps worth noting that spoon bending is a scam from the 1970s.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending

NovaDudely• 3 years ago

I love the idea of of these guys being bought out by a bunch of people who managed to somehow make a fortune bending spoons (Not Uri Geller!).

Like in 30 Rock how NBC is owned by the Shinehart Wig Company.

TheChaplain• 3 years ago

Wow, they even doubled the price of the personal plan..

I use it occasionally but to that amount it's not worth it. I need to figure out a way to export my data and then I'm out.

coolandsmartrr• 3 years ago

Sounds like I'd better migrate my Evernote to somewhere else.

What's a good alternative that plays well with my existing Evernote data?

mukundesh• 3 years ago

Have been using notes on macOS, works great. I do worry that notes are stored in a proprietary format, would love to have a backup in markdown...

johnwalkr2• 3 years ago

It's my concern too, Apple only makes it easy to export as PDFs. There is a third party tool that can export to markdown[1].

I wanted to point out as well that notes works really well in the browser these days. Good enough to use it on windows, not sure about android though.

[1]http://falcon.star-lord.me/exporter/

antfie• 3 years ago

I suppose I had better hurry up and finish building https://stickerdocs.com then. If you like the EN concept but want something privacy focussed and a honest company to support you on your journey, you might want to sign up.

tluyben2• 3 years ago

Replaced it with Joplin a year ago. Very happy paying user.

irrational• 3 years ago

Thanks. I just exported my notes and deleted my account. Between this and Reddit, tis the season to cancel accounts.

_borj• 3 years ago

The hard thing for me is getting an good exporter from Evernote to some .md kind of file, plus images. I searched a lot and Notion was the only alternative but there's a big hassle between "connect to evernote > export each notebook individually > import to notion > export from notion to .md" and after that 30% of your notes is still missing.

stevefan1999• 3 years ago

In case if you want some Evernote alternatives, here's my shortlist:

1. Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium

2. AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy

3. Affine: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE

4. Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

5. Dendron: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron (requires VSCode)

As a programmer I liked Dendron the most but if you want it to be packed with absolute features, try Trilium Notes (but some considered it to be feature creep and bloated)

Charlie_26• 3 years ago

Do any permit a transfer-in from Evernote?

fprotthetarball• 3 years ago

Joplin does, and it works rather well. I have been planning on migrating my notes since the acquisition, but wanted to see what their next move was.

Joplin seems like the best at handling my mix of text notes, PDF files, and images at the moment. If it doesn't work out, though, at least I have my data in a more open form.

eviks4• 3 years ago

Joplin does

mesoman10• 3 years ago

Standard Notes claims to, with a caveat that there may be a format it can't handle due to Evernote adding features.

A transfer-in from Evernote, either natively or through some third party utility, is a must. I'm not interested in writing something to parse .enex and put it into some other format (although .enex looks pretty easy to parse - it's xml with embedded BASE64 for some things like images).

benoliver9993• 3 years ago

I like and use joplin. Waiting for it to sync sucks (even though it's pretty quick) but I like that you can edit in vim on the desktop and a dedicated app on mobile.

I use it for recipes, where it's easiest to write them on a laptop but better to read them on a phone/tablet.

cborenstein• 3 years ago

I'm biased but I'd add--

- Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/

- Logseq: https://logseq.com/

- Reflect: https://reflect.app/

- Stashpad: https://stashpad.com/

rehevkor5• 3 years ago

I'm wondering what happy mediums might exist between the note-taking world, the wiki world, and the collaborative office document world.

Office-oriented tools like Nextcloud or Collabora seem to be oriented to classic Microsoft Word / Google Docs style documents... not as simple as Markdown or as web-friendly as a wiki page.

The note taking tools everyone's talking about don't seem to support collaborative editing. If they're file-based without a server, then you either have to lock the file for editing, or you have to always remember to sync first to avoid conflicts. Syncthing can't really handle that scenario very well.

Also, wikis usually aren't file-based... they require a database. Plus they don't seem to be as lovingly designed as the note-taking tools... they seem to have a very retro MediaWiki style.

Does anyone know of a self-hosted solution that checks all those boxes? File-based (perhaps aided by database driven indexing) with real collaborative editing, more web-oriented than Word-oriented?

wpietri2• 3 years ago

I've been using Logseq for a few months and am loving it. Its model is pretty different from Evernote, and in ways I think are superior. The heart of is the daily journal, and you can tag each lump (which they call a block) with hashtags. You can also create pages, of course, but I find myself doing that less and less.

coffeeling8• 3 years ago

Dendron is no longer developed, and in any case is intended for a very different use case than Evernote.

Amplenote might be a better drop-in replacement.

sesota• 3 years ago

Amplenote looks really promising.

ComplexSystems3• 3 years ago

Can any of these record voice notes?

RDaneel0livaw5• 3 years ago

I've been using StandardNotes for years and been happy with them. Is there a reason I should look elsewhere at these or other alternatives? It's just interested I am not seeing this product mentioned anywhere here!

sebmellen• 3 years ago

I am also surprised at how rarely Standard Notes is mentioned.

tlavoie• 3 years ago

They do some things really well. I like the speed and effectiveness of the sync across various devices and OSs, like a personal pastebin.

I have a subscription, and was hoping that they'd converge towards something like a wiki, where the notes can link to each other. The suggestion seemed to be rejected out of hand, maybe it's just not their vision. It is mine, though, so I have migrated to Joplin, and expect to let the subscription expire at this point.

acumenical2• 3 years ago

Am I the only one who just keeps a bunch of Sublime Text tabs open? Obsidian looks pretty good for the tagging functionality though

2rsf2• 3 years ago

Which one is the most future proof? I recently tried Organice, even though it has a different feature set, because is is basically future proof even if the hosting company tops functioning

shostack• 3 years ago

Obsidian is a bunch of markdown files.

gaia• 3 years ago

Unfortunately Trilium, the closest option to Evernote (as opposed to Notion), doesn't have an Android client (there is one to send notes but not search/read).

Looks like Joplin is the one checking all the right boxes (added plus of being able to sync via OneDrive, which is free, and with E2E I don't care which cloud it sits on)

majani2• 3 years ago

Google Keep for people who just want a Notepad that syncs

cellularmitosis• 3 years ago

Do any of these replicate evernote's web clipping feature? That was definitely the killer app for me.

gumami• 3 years ago

You might like the browser plug in SingleFile to save and markup pages. I've incorporated it into my obsidian vault workflow.

alsargent• 3 years ago

Thanks. As an Evernote user since 2007, and paying customer for several years, this sucks.

I’m curious: why is Notion not on your short list?

pps2• 3 years ago

How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about

There are great note-taking apps that only a few people work on. Tana, Obsidian, Bear, UpNote come to mind, but there are many more. So it's definitely not a problem. It sucks for the old Evernote staff, but it doesn't have to suck for users, it might even be what Evernote needs, since it's pretty ancient in its feature set compared to the competition.

gareve• 3 years ago

I was there when lifehack blogs will continuously talk about a newly released note taking app(Wunderlist, Evernote, OneNote, etc.)

After trying several apps, including evernote, it felt they had too many features that made them too complex for my simple use case.

After trying several methods, my stable workflow is: - Dropbox markdown file for year long notes. - Google Keep for (shared) checkbox lists & multimedia notes. - Unread emails + snoozing for TODO tasks.

phito• 3 years ago

Markdown in Obsidian is all I need for notes. Everything else is bloat.

charlietango592• 3 years ago

AFAIK, Bending Spoons is a company that successfully launched a couple of mobile apps and they know how to make a living out of it.

According to an engineer who works for them and who I know, it’s a very demanding and stressing environment to work in. Probably they simply plan to throw more work at their existing employees.

The plan was to buy Evernote and make it profitable. It wouldn’t surprise me if they kill the project if it turns out not to be profitable.

bighi3• 3 years ago

I think they BUY mobile apps.

Their modus operandi seems to be:

1) Buy successful mobile app.

2) Increase the prices to insane amounts.

3) Profit off of the people still using the overpriced app.

4) Use the profits to buy another mobile app.

DeathArrow9• 3 years ago

There are ways to import data into other apps such as Logseq or Obsidian, so I'd search for an alternative now.

blacklight• 3 years ago

I know some of the folks at Bending Spoons, and I'm quite confident that they'll manage to get something good out of Evernote - eventually. It's a team of smart folks that so far has managed to get all of their apps right.

I don't think there was an easy/painless way out of this though. Evernote has been agonizing for years, it placed too many wrong bets, its developments had basically stalled for the past 3 years or so. It faced the dilemma of how to appeal its base of power users who wanted tons of powerful features (Feedly/RSS integration, search engine snippets, HTML scraping, IFTTT rules etc.) for free / affordable prices, while developing new features that could also appeal a wider userbase and justify a subscription, all while staying profitable in the process.

It wasn't an easy problem to solve. Me and many others realized it a while ago, and simply moved on to other solutions - from Pocket to save links, to Instapaper to keep an organizing list of scraped content, to Notion for all kind of extra integrations, to open-source solutions like Miniflux, Wallabag or Nextcloud Notes, or even Obsidian.

I wish the best of luck to the new Bending Spoon adventure. I'm sure that something good will come out of it, but it'll probably not be an app that I'll use anymore. Competition in this field today is much fiercer than it was a decade ago when Evernote was the undisputed king.

DeathArrow9• 3 years ago

Boss1: let's create a great note taking app

Employee1: creates a great note taking app

Customers: :) :) :)

Boss2: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?

Bean Counter: let's add some useless crap, our customer base will quadruple

Employee1: ads useless crap

Customers: ? ? ?

Boss3: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?

Bean Counter: let's fire Employee1, hire Employee2 for half the wage and rewrite everything in Electron

Employee2: rewrites everything in Electron

Customers: :( :( :(

izacus• 3 years ago

You missed "Let's add subscription and tell the stupid users it'll actually be used to improve their experience!"

bighi3• 3 years ago

Evernote had subscription since the beginning

yomlica82• 3 years ago

Users hate increased prices, but what if we insinuate that they are stupid when we announce it to soften the blow?

valjaer• 3 years ago

Honestly new features is something I would go away from, not pay for.

Apps these days treat my device as something created so that they could update on it, not so I could use it. I would pay to "freeze the 2009 versions on my devices forever". Software that just works.

lucraft• 3 years ago

I've been an Evernote user since 2008 and a paying one for most of that. The other week I tried to go through some old notes. Half of them wouldn't load. Looking to leave now.

fsckboy• 3 years ago

is it possible that staff had some type of vesting rights in an acquisition that layoffs would terminate? (Yeah, it's not a nice thing to do, but the buyer has the leverage and no loyalty to the past, and they they call the shots in terms of sweetening the deal.) if so, Bending Spoons may plan to keep investing in product development, but they want to do it at market rates, not bonus rates.

arthurofbabylon• 3 years ago

For those looking for a focused alternative to Evernote, check out minimal.app – I built Minimal as the antithesis of Evernote: instead of clutter and feature bloat, Minimal offers focus and simplicity. I love Minimal and use it every day, simply because it is the most focused notes app I could find.

Minimal's most innovative feature is the Note Lifetime, whereby notes "die" when they go unedited for so many days. (The Note Lifetime is customizable, and notes remain available in a deleted notes folder.) The effect is an always-clean collection of notes that truly reflects the present moment. Another effect is more action on the persistent, good ideas and less action/procrastination on the ideas that might be best let go of.

Anyone interested in helping me improve the app, craft the roadmap, or simply get premium features for free can join the beta at minimal.app/#beta.

ComplexSystems3• 3 years ago

Can it record voice notes?

layer8• 3 years ago

I would consider dictation an OS feature nowadays.

scrollinondubs• 3 years ago

I moved to Notesnook about 6mos ago and have been pretty happy with it. The founder is active in Discord and shipping new features about every 2wks. It's E2E encrypted and open source so you can self-host if you want to. I used their Evernote importer to move all my notes and it worked about 95% accurately (only formatting that didn't transfer correctly was the checkboxes): https://importer.notesnook.com/

kimokabi2• 3 years ago

So do you get unlimited notebooks and tags when you self-host?

zkid18• 3 years ago

Subjectively, the app has improved its offline mode and cross-device sync since the company has been acquired.

fredgrott• 3 years ago

I like to add, since I got slightly organized after getting my ADHD under control, you never ever price-silo your workflow as then its locked away to be leveraged against you.

Personally, I use vscode with a combo of zettelkasten and kanban boards which works quite well even for those with ADHD!

ronyfadel• 3 years ago

How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

They will probably use their Italian in-house dev teams instead?

ekianjo• 3 years ago

If you buy into a cloud service this risk should always be top of your list.

nashashmi2• 3 years ago

Notion is great at migrating stuff out of Evernote.

I recently logged in and saw that upgrading to their new interface logged me out of all other devices unless I pay them.

They are starting to nickel and dime instead of innovate.

Evernote is dead.

woodardj• 3 years ago

There's lots of discussion here about the pros and cons of Evernote, and a slew of alternatives, but this HN post is the only result online since February (when there was lots of news about a Bending Spoons/Evernote layoff), what's the source for this July update?

j-bos• 3 years ago

Agreed, no disprespect to OP, but where are the confirming sources or figures?

posix_compliant• 3 years ago

I only have anecdotal information, but my wife worked for Evernote and was let go as part of this acquisition, along with the rest of the marketing team.

concinds• 3 years ago

It was only a matter of time.

Great software in the early 2010s, when it had no good competitors. But with the software quality decline, dubious decisions by the last 2 CEOs, and intense competition, it was bound to die when interest rates rose.

I recommend downloading a copy of your account data immediately.

Notion has an easy Evernote importer. Obsidian import is much more convoluted, but can be done. Or you can probably download your notes as .enex and import them into the old Evernote client to use offline.

Havoc• 3 years ago

I’ve concluded that markdown in git is the way to go. Trusting longterm Knowledge to stay put in some VC funded growth SaaS is insane

frou_dh• 3 years ago

I find having to push, pull, and heaven-forbid even write a commit message for notes to be asinine. Sync should be automatic and instantaneous if one uses multiple devices.

_eMaX_2• 3 years ago

Y not use Obsidian and a plugin to do those git commits for you.

mfld• 3 years ago

Let's assume they shrink from 300 to 30 employees. After some time they adjust internal processes, focus on the original goals and main use cases, weeding out unnecessary features, and having stable applications for Desktop, web & mobile. 30 people should be sufficient to maintain & support & maybe even improve it a bit for a long time given a healthy revenue stream from loyal customers.

Not sure if something like this ever happened in the history of software. :)

kypro• 3 years ago

How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

A company I worked for did the same thing. They got rid of basically all of the staff and just outsourced everything to cut costs. I'd assume that's the plan here.

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

Microsoft being allowed to leverage its enterprise word/ppt/xls trench and bundle OneNote/Teams without anti-trust regulators batting an eye is what kills these companies.

markus_zhang• 3 years ago

I feel like any product that competes with free ones and does not have a technical wall is going to fail eventually.

jonathrg• 3 years ago

How can I download my notebooks on a free account? The internet says to use the desktop app, but I can't log in there without upgrading.

kimokabi2• 3 years ago

Go to https://www.evernote.com/Devices.action and remove devices you don't use. You should be able to have one main device, and desktop app needed for your export.

dkarl• 3 years ago

This was my impetus to finally close my account and delete my data.

I was holding on to it because Notion's import sucks and would only import a few notes at a time, so I had to do a lot of different imports to get all the notes in all the notebooks, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still missed a few. (I have lots of notes — virtually everything I wanted to remember and keep forever, I put in Evernote.)

I'm a bit sad because Notion is a fundamentally different product and sucks on mobile. It has all the features I'm used to from Evernote, and notes with attached images imported well. I had a lot of notes with a scanned document attached and a brief explanation of what the document was, so that was vital for me.

RIP Evernote. It was an amazing tool, and it served me well for over a decade.

coffeeling8• 3 years ago

Depending on what you value in Evernote, Notion may not be the best replacement.

29_29• 3 years ago

Every time in the last 5 years that I drive by Evernote Building on the 101 - I was shocked it was still in business. With Apple Notes chipping away at its core, and stiff competition from Notion - how long could it survive?

phkahler• 3 years ago

All commercial software is rented. It's already been created and the marginal cost is Zero. You are ostensibly paying for bug fixes and new development, which is at least partly true in many cases. SaaS at least admits a rental model.

Free Software is rent-free, but development may be slow.

1letterunixname4• 3 years ago

Wrong. You're conflating on-prem and SaaS commercial software together as "rented", when the former can be delivered as a perpetually working product whereas the latter isn't.

FOSS isn't free to host, accessible to users of all experience levels, doesn't necessarily include support, and isn't guaranteed to have a license that isn't hostile to its intended use.

snowpalmer• 3 years ago

For anyone that used Evernote as a "Document Storage" app instead of just purely notes, I found Notebooks, https://www.notebooksapp.com/, https://www.notebooksapp.com/ to be a good replacement.

It works with files on your harddrive and your existing cloud storage (icloud / dropbox.) macOS/iOS only, but for someone who primarily is storing PDFs this was a much better fit than more alternates that are for taking notes.

727374• 3 years ago

Sorry for the staff who’ve lost their jobs. I did a phone screen with one of their recruiters a couple years back. They told me they couldn’t afford my (slightly above market rate) salary, but went on and on about how the company enjoyed a very “comfortable” work life balance. WLB is great, but I’ve never had a recruiter spend so much time on that and so little on the “exciting” product/role. That was a red flag to me at the time.

smarx0073• 3 years ago

My use of Evernote has been replaced with two apps a few years ago when they abandoned native apps:

1. https://obsidian.md/ for all the notes.

2. https://archivebox.io/ for almost all webpage clippings.

ubermonkey2• 3 years ago

But Obsidian is Electron, right? Not a native app?

smarx0073• 3 years ago

It is indeed Electron, but it has a much better linking story (don't even mention plugins [1]). Evernote being a native app was the last thing the held me as a paid customer with them. Also, the move to Electron was quite bumpy, they simply dropped half the features and it didn't recover until well over a year into the migration.

[1] https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/

coffeeling8• 3 years ago

Yes, but comparatively lightweight for being one. The devs don't use large frameworks like React and write pretty barebones JS. It shows.

mesoman10• 3 years ago

What's the beef with Electron?

ComplexSystems3• 3 years ago

Can Obsidian record voice notes?

midasz• 3 years ago

There's a plugin for that (trademark icon) https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Audio+recorder

yuletide6662• 3 years ago

Any way to import or view things to archivebox on mobile?

smarx0073• 3 years ago

I have an Apple Shortcut to append a shared URL to a request https://domain.xyz/add?url=$sharedUrl

To view things is trickier. But the Readability and Mercury destinations render best.

blitz_skull• 3 years ago

Posting as a lover of the tool, but reflect.app is my new love-affair with note-taking. Evernote has been far too bloated for far too long. Reflect is an amazingly well built product with an awesome team behind it.

civilized• 3 years ago

My Evernote use peaked in 2013-2014, during a whirlwind postdoctoral fellowship. Man, I loved that thing. So simple and responsive. It was a real tool of thought, and I used it for everything. From then on, it got worse and worse every time I "upgraded", and I basically stopped using it since 2016 or so.

Yesterday I "upgraded" at its urging, against my better judgment, and was greeted with a lovely surprise: no local notes anymore. Only cloud sync. The justification for this was basically "less capability is actually good for users", phrased in more or less that way. It seemed like the developers were blinking torture at me.

Evernote was a big blackpill. My bitterest realization that technology doesn't necessarily progress, and many products are just trapped in a cycle of tragedy.

mmchicago• 3 years ago

You took the words out of my mouth. Exactly my experience, except I deleted my account in 2020. Evernote taught me to stop trusting startups with critical services, to manage my own notes, and to always have an exit strategy.

mechhacker• 3 years ago

Evernote lost me when they changed the UI and made it take 5 taps/clicks to do what took 1 before. Was happy paying for it until then.

Now apple notes has replaced it. I tried obsidian as well but like notes better

whalesalad• 3 years ago

Wow, I thought people stopped using Evernote in like 2017

uyfyxr8• 3 years ago

Can someone tell me a better way to export Evernote content?

1letterunixname4• 3 years ago

I used cloudhq to migrate out many years ago. Looks like they're still in business.

1letterunixname4• 3 years ago

I tried Evernote when it came out ~2005, but it never got rid of its rough edges. There were some neat features but they were overshadowed by bugs and glaring gaps in functionality. Tried it again ~2010 to see if it improved, but it was still a no-go. ): It was always an over-hyped app.

I'm currently migrating from Apple to Obsidian.

ubermonkey2• 3 years ago

Evernote was briefly interesting, but they managed non-Windows clients so poorly and kept playing feature-creep calvinball so badly that I gave up on them YEARS AND YEARS AGO.

Basically, TIL that Evernote still exists. Sorta.

sinoue• 3 years ago

Wild that Bending Spoons doesn’t even list Evernote as an app they own. https://bendingspoons.com/

foobarbazetc• 3 years ago

RIP.

andsoitis2• 3 years ago

How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

Bending Spoons has a product and engineering team. They may have concluded that they don’t need the staff from Evernote to take the product to the next level.

pantulis• 3 years ago

Seems unrealistic to me. Evernote's backend platform sure has to be pretty substantial (and legacy!) and managing and operating these types of platforms does not seem Bending Spoons' forte.

kunjank3• 3 years ago

- What is the best way to export Evernote into plain text?

- Is there a good way to export the notes so that it preserves stacks and notebook structures?

brodock• 3 years ago

I've migrated away from Evernote when they converted their MacOS and iOS apps from native to "Electron based". Simple things you expect from a "note taking app" to handle, like, search through text files, or "selecting multiple notes" were severely limited due to the technology limitations.

You could only select 50 items per time in the new "javascript" based desktop version, because that was too much state for react to handle.

The other thing that they broke was the apple pencil support. Using it would result in several seconds of latency.

I was a paying customer at this time, I've canceled my subscription entirely. I checked the app a few times after that to see if they managed to improve anything, the didn't. It only got worst.

So, if you have a native app, you have a moat with it, don't ruin your only opportunity to stand out.

moxplod• 3 years ago

Personally, been using OneNote for over 10 years. Never jumped to any other hyped note-taking app.

atemerev• 3 years ago

I don’t know where to store all my tons of scanned paper documents to be automatically OCRed, searchable, and accessible on all devices :( Do you know any other solutions?

EchoReflection• 3 years ago

I've been "trapped" with evernote for a long time because I put more than a decade's worth of stuff into it, and their exporting tools are shit. Literally I "exported" whole notebooks and what I got was just the titles of notes and no content. Ugh. Guess time to just sit down and spend a few hours doing tedious, tedious tasks for a while. Notion and Obsidian are great though.

manifest3r• 3 years ago

Have you tried Notions Evernote importer? There are also quite a few Evernote to X applications exporters on Github

kunjank3• 3 years ago

Do you have recommendations for exporter that preserves the notestack/notebooks?

getlawgdon• 3 years ago

Ha. Interesting reading through the comments. I recently downgraded everything in Evernote after seeing that Evernote was reporting 3 different service tiers for my account in different places. I kept getting nagged to re-up. I finally did and in the process, with a HIGH degree of intention, selected the "monthly" slider fully planning to cancel my account while salvaging some of the notes.

Lo and behold, unbelievably, Evernote somehow still charges me the annual rate. Absolute transaction dark pattern happening in there somewhere/somehow.

This is after a long sequence of ineffective exchanges with support regarding my tier, and also a long period of being a customer (10 years?) and seeing basically zero feature development in line with long-running community requests.

Net/net: I'm done with Evernote. Just ain't working for me.

pyrophane• 3 years ago

Not sure about the veracity of this, but it is in-line with how people said Bending Spoons operates at the time of the takeover: they buy up apps and then raise prices to try to squeeze more cash out of the existing subscriber base while also cutting costs by firing development staff.

Seems like an almost inevitable end.

Evernote was a great app once upon a time. I'm still not aware of anything that works quite like it. Unfortunately they decided to take too much outside money, which put pressure on them to grow revenue by finding new kinds of customers. They started adding "team" features that no one wanted (work chat?) while neglecting the core features everyone relied on. Prices went up.

Nothing left to do but move on.

agosta• 3 years ago

When I once updated Evernote in 2015 and it got worse, I just reverted and never updated again. I've been using the same version of Evernote for over 8 years for free and it's amazing.

danielseltzer• 3 years ago

Evernote was critically valuable for me but has degraded steadily and sadly for years now.

I began my Obsidian migration a few days ago and it's encouraging.

I found the evernote2md project on Github (https://github.com/wormi4ok/evernote2md) the best way to get from ENEX->md files with good resource references. Joplin wasn't getting it done.

tombert3• 3 years ago

I really hope that this endless wave of layoffs ends soon. I've been let go twice in the last year. Every tech place is going through layoffs and is pausing hiring.

I wrote a browser plugin to automatically fill out a lot of the job application forms, so that I can apply to more jobs in a day, and I get maybe one interview for every three hundred applications. I watch endless tutorials on YouTube about the best way to interview, I spend hours doing problems on Hackerrank or Project Euler, just to be told that they were "impressed by my abilities but they don't think I would be a good fit at this time, but they'll keep my resume on file".

The part that's even worse than rejection for me is idiotic and disingenuous email that I am expected to send to the hiring manager explaining that while it's disappointing that I didn't get the job, but it was such an honor to grovel and waste hours of my life to just be considered for such a prestigious position.

Actually, no, the worst part is the fact that I have to pretend to believe all these companies about their stupid mission statement, and how they're going to save the world. I can't be honest and say "I want a job because I want money in my bank account, and I'm hoping that if I perform labor for you that you will provide me that money", instead I have to make up some reason about how I think StylishlyMispelledCo is actually going to solve all the world's problems and that I want to be a part of the ground floor because I believe in <cause x>, and all the other companies working on <adjacent cause y> simply don't get it. Or I have to pretend that instead of hanging out with my wife or friends, I really want to hang out at a workplace that's more than just a workplace, but also a family.

I'm being unfair to startups, every company is doing this shit now. You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck, you have to launder it through some bullshit sanctimony about saving the world. That's how it was at Apple and Walmart at least.

It's demoralizing, but even worse, it's exhausting. I'm so frustrated with the world right now, and while I know that it certainly will get better eventually, I am also deeply unhappy with my life right now.

I hate the power imbalance that companies hold. I hate that these companies won't acknowledge that power imbalance, or the fact that deep down they're just greedy. I hate that I have to pay for my own healthcare out of pocket (or effectively out of pocket because the COBRA stuff I have is basically worthless). I hate that I got myself into this situation.

WonderBuilder• 3 years ago

I have little to offer but my acknowledgement. The "song and dance" routine of getting and new job (especially in the tech industry at least) is dispiriting, embarrassing, exasperating, and disempowering. Even with an impressive amount of skill and dedication to the interview process, the method is indistinguishable from a particularly unrewarding lottery.

I'm sorry, you're in this situation. Eventually, as you said, it will end...

tombert3• 3 years ago

I appreciate the kind words; I was feeling particularly upset this morning, I'm feeling a bit better now.

I know I'll find a gig soon enough, and I have enough money saved to survive for quite awhile, but I guess just the dozen or so rejection emails I get every morning are getting to me.

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

Actually, no, the worst part is the fact that I have to pretend to believe all these companies about their stupid mission statement, and how they're going to save the world

Maybe its really obvious you feel that way and you should find a company that has a product that resonates with you so you don't have to fake it.

You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck

You can but don't be expected to be paid high end tech salaries for it.

tombert3• 3 years ago

Maybe its really obvious you feel that way and you should find a company that has a product that resonates with you so you don't have to fake it.

Easier said than done. It's not for lack of trying. I apply to lots of companies where I actually think that the project is cool, but they don't respond back to me. At that point, what exactly am I supposed to do? Just completely exhaust all my savings until I find my dream job?

I do really try my best to "get into" whatever the company is doing, but it's exceedingly difficult for me to do that, and it's even harder for me to fake enthusiasm.

You can but don't be expected to be paid high end tech salaries for it.

That's fair, and maybe I should expect it, but it's still exhausting and I don't have to like it.

poppafuze• 3 years ago

tomboy/gnote

cenriqueortiz• 3 years ago

I was a paid user for many, many years. I helped them when they opened the Austin office, and find folks. I liked Evernote. Like 2 years ago I canceled; bugs and the features/functionality didn't justify the cost when apps like Apple Notes (free) just do the trick well-enough. This remind me that I still have content in Evernote that I need to get out (when I tried the 1st time was kind of a pain to do that).

amai• 3 years ago

Which alternative note taking apps offer a web clipper? I just found

- Evernote

- Onenote

- Notion

- Joplin

Are there any other?

fencepost• 3 years ago

THIS APPEARS TO BE UNSOURCED.

There's a TechCrunch article about layoffs of 129 people in February, a Wikipedia edit today (July 6) links to that implying that it's happened now instead of 4+ months ago and also states (unsourced) that the 129 is more than half the remaining staff (the article link was retrieved today but is from Feb). The price increase referenced was announced in April 2023 and took effect in May so also not new.

The Wikipedia article has now been updated to reflect the above.

Edit: I see that OP has noted that it was heard directly from affected employees, with 98 gone and ~30 remaining (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36619945)

jWhick• 3 years ago

feels like notion is gonna be the next evernote

FreezerburnV2• 3 years ago

This REALLY SUCKS. I’ve been using Evernote as a catch-all app for a bit now: scanning documents for paperless, archiving website snapshots, notes for various things (I love being able to make a note tied to a calendar event!), the super good OCR capabilities, task management (even if buggy…), etc. It does a lot for me, and it has great capabilities for bringing information/content into it. There is literally nothing else out there that has the unique set of capabilities I actively use in the same package. (And no, Joplin is not “just as good”) Unbundling to multiple places that don’t have the same capabilities (not to mention not having their supposed upcoming AI search I was really looking forward to) is going to be an absolute downgrade for me and make it harder to manage my life.

If someone knows of something that can fill the void of Evernote so I don’t have to like, use Apple Notes with Reminders (which while you can access them on Windows via the browser, it’s a mediocre experience at best) and like raindrop.io for website archival all at the same time.

And I’m not moving to OneNote which while it might have most of that stuff, I hate using it.

julianz3• 3 years ago

I was a big (paid) Evernote user for a long time, and also don't particularly like Onenote. I switched to Notion (paid) and it's been pretty good - they had a patch a year or two ago where the mobile apps were a bit rough but they have improved a fair bit. I don't make big use of some of the more advanced features but the basics are solid and work well. Sharing a couple of notebooks with family members works fine. Exporting and importing from Evernote also worked quite well, a bit of formatting fixup was needed on really old notes.

(Note - the Notion Reddit forum is full of weird life optimization types who want a dashboard for their entire lives with aspirational quotes or something, and that doesn't match my use case even slightly. You don't have to do any of that stuff.)

Obsidian looks nice but the pricing for the sync feature, converted to my currency, is wildly out of whack. It wants to charge me the same amount per year as a family license for all of Office 365, so that's a non starter.

n8henrie• 3 years ago

Timely thread about Joplin, an open-source alternative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611355

yuletide6662• 3 years ago

My main use case for evernote was for storing recipes for cooking -- the web capture archiving on mobile or desktop was quite nice.

Whats a good alternative for this? Apple notes?

Can obsidian actually do this?

Sad to lose this.

Also if anyone wants some veg cooking recipes I have 270 of them for a limited time

nashashmi2• 3 years ago

I am playing with the old versions of evernote from old version.com and it brings back so many memories and hopes of what the old web could one day become.

I changed the evernote web back to the classic version, and that also made me reminisce about the old days when I used to be more productive.

Those were the days.

KenArrari• 3 years ago

Is there an easy way to just export all my stuff?

__sivakumar• 3 years ago

For Evernote users, it is time to look for alternatives and migrate their existing notes. The best alternative to Evernote is Zoho Notebook. You can find out why on this blog https://www.zoho.com/blog/notebook/why-is-zohonotebook-the-b...

Please ask away any questions that you have.

bks• 3 years ago

Spent the last few days trying to find a hosted (paid) service that does PDF indexing. Check out https://notejoy.com/

s_horner• 3 years ago

I was a user since August 2008 and became a paying user shortly afterwards, it had fantastic OCR which never failed to amaze when I showed it to people. I used to be one of it's biggest fans, always demoing it to friends and colleagues and got a company I worked for to use Evernote for Business back in around 2014 and it was around this time when things started to go wrong.

Notes I synced from a Windows Client disappeared, the Android app regularly had problems syncing and often had to reinstall the app and sync everything again. They rewrote the Web App with less functionality and it was a lot slower. Evernote Business was just confusing for a regular user.

There was a period where they just appeared side tracked with too many shiny projects, Evernote Food, Skitch, rewrites to apps that previously just worked. It eventually got to the point that I just could no longer trust Evernote, notes were just not on my devices and features I used weren't there anymore.

I have been searching for a replacement for years. I am now using Notion, but there are some big missing features for me:

Offline sync in phone apps, OCR, Location, integration with a scanner.

I stopped paying for Evernote around 4 years ago, after being a paid subscriber for over a decade. I gave it a try again about 18 months ago but it was still slow, so gave up and started extracting the data I needed.

It's sad to see a product that I used constantly and recommended so much, disintegrate into an unusable product due to poor company decisions.

Alifatisk• 3 years ago

I am so glad I migrated off all my notes from Evernote, their limitations and popups triggered some red flags I was not willing to risk.

This proved me right, thanks!

jSully24• 3 years ago

I loved Evernote. And then they decided to make fancy and expensive notebooks, pens and paper and stopped working on the product itself, or so it seemed. They really lost focus. And then the price changing.

It was a wonderful product in the early 2010s.

wbharding• 3 years ago

For the poor few still using Evernote, there are many great alternatives now available:

Notion is the obvious one: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-not...

Amplenote was heavily inspired by early Evernote: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-amp...

Reflect is another up and comer: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-ref...

And of course Obsidian has its many evangelists, though the sharing situation with Obsidian leaves something to be desired.

634636346• 3 years ago

I can't believe people made >= $1 billion from a note-taking app that loses data.

tony2016• 3 years ago

I think some users want all the features and everything for free.

Evernote works well for me. It fully syncs all my notes between 2 devices. Those are my home and work computers. That's good enough for me.

If I want to look at a note on a mobile device, I use a browser in desktop mode. However I only had to do this a handful of times in all the years they went down to 2 device syncing.

I just have to deal sometimes with an offer to upgrade. So I close the popup. No big deal.

simne• 3 years ago

Evernote's server side technical stack is nightmare. This is definitely for better, to completely replace it with something modern and adequate.

mindcrash• 3 years ago

They don't. And it's quite simple, and to be expected (because after a acquisition this happens every. single. time).

Bending Spoons only bought the assets, code, architecture and brand. They laid off the entire staff because ALL of Evernotes operations are taken over by Bending Spoons.

The same thing will, for example, also more than likely happen when finally Adobe manages to merge with Figma. Why keep the Figma staff on payroll if you have more than capable staff yourself?

gwern• 3 years ago

Now official: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/evernote-layoffs-moving-...

grantcarthew• 3 years ago

Why is Anytype https://anytype.io/ not on this page somewhere? It should be.

m0rdecai• 3 years ago

I'm still using Evernote. It's become painful. Does anyone have a recommendation for a comparable service? Perhaps one that'll allow me to port everything over easily? ;)

_eMaX_2• 3 years ago

Would that not be a great idea... Create an Obsidian (or Chrome, for that matter) plugin where everyone can add scraping plugins that uses e.g. Chrome instrumentation to scrape out your content based on the SAAS walled garden you're using, and dumps it in a set of .md and .jpg/.mov files.

So I could that way dump out my Tinder chats (I don't use Tinder, but I imagine you can chat there?) just as well as my Youtube videos, my Evernote notes, my Todoist tasks, etc.

A meta tool. Let's raise some millions and push the content into our own walled garden. Just joking.

Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

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