Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
Then this week I was working through a new project on a customer's site taking notes in Evernote as I normally do. I spent a good chunk of time going through the project onsite and making a comprehensive list of everything that would need to be done. I noticed the header on my note was grey but assumed it was a UI change. I had 4G reception on my phone and figured, even if something's not quite right I can sync it up back at the office like I normally do as the note would be on my phone. So I proceeded like normal.
The whole note is gone as if it never existed.
Is this some sort of effort to onboard me to the paid version? Have I inadvertently clicked a "yes I accept that the free version is going to become unreliable" button?
I appreciate I am not a great customer - I have been using a free version for years without even thinking about it. But thats kind of the point, Evernote worked so well I never gave it a second thought.
Now I am not 100% sure on the safety of my notes...
What is other people's experience? Have I just been caught napping because I mindlessly clicked an updated terms of use without reading it (as I do)?
If I go paid am I getting something as good as what the old Evernote was like?
281 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadSeriously, it feels so much better IMHO, with atomic rollback and you can export your data out in a non-proprietary format (MD, HTML, PDF) if it comes to difficult choices someday.
Really liked the product, though. I think they're working on offline support so i'm planning to check it out again when that is added.
Edit: looked into this a bit more and they promised offline support "soon" as far back as 2018 so maybe it'd be a good idea not to be too enthusiastic about this...
I'm interested (especially as i tried evernote previously and found it to be 'not for me'), but where's the pricing page [supposed to be]?
Pricing is here: https://www.notion.so/pricing
Our business plan is to charge for collaboration, so Notion is free with no writing limits for personal users. You can pay $4/mo for deeper version history, bigger file uploads, more guest editors, etc; and more per month to use Notion with a team.
I'll send a note to the marketing design team with your feedback.
It's like a cult
- Notion Nation
- Roam Legion
- Zettelkasten Zealots
- Bear Bros
PS. Add more ;)
- Evernote Evangelists
- Orgmode Promotion Society
- Plaintext Patriots
- Joplin Javelins
- Obsidian Organisation
etc etc etc
Special OPS reporting for duty :-)
I think this was the best of them all :D
- OneNote Outlanders
- MSBuild Masochists
* those who appreciate effortless UX that doesn't ask users to dedicate their lives to learning arcane systems i.e. CLI UIs but allow focusing on life outside computers. Notion is indeed a step forward for the industry for them.
* those who appreciate the responsiveness of CLI and don't mind the learning curve since the investment for them is worth the price. For them, Notion probably doesn't give sufficient control over their workflows and data.
These are justifiable value choices. Calling each other cults only erodes the discussion into name calling. So please don't.
Just like people who used to like evernote, but not any more.
>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html*
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/corporate-market...
Gitlab said out loud what we were all thinking: companies have automation in place to follow big communities such as HN and notify their developer evangelists and marketing teams and have them reply and create "buzz". Aka, shills :-)
Hope that clears the matter with you. Please understand that regular HN contributors do not generally engage being paid shill or voting ring members. Some of us happily choose the dignity here over the chaos in paid social media.
It's a great app and has a lot of things going right for it. They are building a platform for others to also share their customized pages/databases. Tons of templates and resources to learn how to effectively use the tool.
You can try to draw comparisons but I think they and Figma are very innovative products growing in similar ways.
During those years, Evernote has kept getting worse and worse, becomeing slower and more unreliable at doing cores things, while they slap features on it, that I do not want (collaboration, chat and other garbage).
I want to migrate off at some point, but 10 years of scanned documents are tricky to migrate, and frankly I do not know of any good alternatives at this point.
The reasoning is that Apple is a trillion dollar company and they've no interest in screwing me over. I know it's naive but a consolation I guess. If not, what would be an alternative?
I lost a bunch of notes that I didn't realize were stored on an email account that went away.
Now, part of my vetting process for new services is “can I not just get my data out, but also the metadata I care about?”. That’s done with the first few projects/documents/whatever, and then because of being bitten in the past, I know I must do the same export at least twice a year in order to know that the company has not silently restricted it.
Free or one time payment only.
SwiftScan has a one time payment option AFAIK, that's the one I used.
I guess they eliminated the one-time purchase option. Bastards. No way I'd pay £36 for this yearly. Netflix doesn't cost that much more!
In my opinion, that is Evernote's one and only killer feature.
It's a terrific product but I no longer trust it for anything important. I also find the search is increasingly janky which is now a major problem. This is all a shame because it is still best of class to me
No disrespect but surely this was a hail Mary and not immediately expected to actually work out.
Until then, on Evernote's Tos [1] scroll down to "What Else Do I Need to Know?" and read point f) of section "YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE That".
In summary, it says they are not in any way reaponsible for your data loss. Reading in-between the lines, it basically says, they will have outages, disruptions, or buggy updates and your responsibility is to defend yourself against these events.
[1]: https://evernote.com/legal/terms-of-service
I think you already assumed all these. I only elaborated on it because I saw this many times, even (especially?) with the largest providers like Gmail, AWS etc. And this will continue happening.
I understand (and a bit scared for) that most of the people don't even know how unsafe their data is, however, on HN I would expect everyone is (paranoid enough to) back up their data.
I hope you can recover your notes, and regardless of your success in doing so, please spend an afternoon looking up ToS's of the services you use.
(disclaimer: I worked a bit in the backup sw industry, and yes I have multiple full offline copies of my emails and notes for the past 20+y)
On the proactively constructive side (and although my system is not bulletproof either), everything I _create_ first is stored locally and then a copy is stored server side (note, sent email, photo etc). First safety measure is Syncthing (to replicate to other devices), second safety measure is backup (locally and remotely)
Complicated? Yes. Necessary? After reading ToS's, yes.
No it's not, and it's interesting that you recognise yourself that it's unhelpful and lead with it anyway with a disingenuous wording of "eventually someone unhelpfully will ask you".
You're just blaming the victim for the failure of the provider. Yes the risk would have been mitigated had they had a backup, and of course that's a very good thing to do but that doesn't make evernote any less culpable nor does it make your question any more legit or any less unhelpful.
In software/Saas somehow people think it's ok to blame the user for not doing things to work around the services provider providing buggy software or an inferior service. Referring to the TOS doesn't change this.
1. Their app was getting buggy to handle on mac/win. The migration was terrible and they had a custom container format for export which was pretty useless. It became like the Hotel California of software. You could bring your stuff in, but never leave due to the lock-in.
I eventually migrated everything out of Evernote by saving printing emailing and started using plain Git on a local server for document save / version control.
2. There was no app for Linux. They made a lot of efforts on windows mac, and then ios/android but left native Linux support completely out of the picture. Evernote in 2015 had a hard time with Wine for emulation.
https://joplinapp.org/
The sync works with a bunch of different cloud services and I’ve yet to have a problem with it.
Then again there are some very irritating things in the new Evernote 10.x versions of which I am constantly thinking: "are they using this feature themselves or am I the only one?".
For example:
* try to move a note to a different notebook. You would thing that the obvious thing to do would be to click on the current notebook name that is shown above the note and then it drops down a list. But no.... You have to hover over the current notebook name, then a _hidden_ button becomes visible, that you have to click and then you can move the note.
* copy&pasting you tube links always shows a videoclip preview. I never want that, I copy and paste a link because I want to save a link thank you very much.
*search through a stack of notebooks still does not work. You can only search through one notebook at a time or through every note.
I’ve been looking for a good Evernote replacement for YEARS, but rely heavily on their OCR stuff to file well over a decade of important documents that I need to be able to call up fast.
I’ve replaced text notes with Bear for years, but for scanning I’ve still got to use Evernote. And that god damned move note UI.
And Apple Notes will name a new scanned-document note with the first words of the OCR'ed text, which I don't think Evernote ever got around to.
These days they have added all these extra features which I don't need, and which have made the whole app slow and terribly clunky. When I use the iPad app it takes several seconds to load notes or search, and the UI keeps jumping around if it hasn't loaded completely yet. Terrible experience.
The icing on the cake is that they changed the welcome page of the app to no longer show the list of notes - and if you want to edit the page to get that list back, you have to sign up to their premium subscription! And I'm already paying too, just not for the right level of subscription apparently.
I have been meaning to find an alternative for months now, so if anyone has any suggestions please do let me know! The most important features to me are note syncing across iOS/Mac/Windows and the ability to import my notes from Evernote.
https://blog.standardnotes.com/33536/how-not-to-build-a-secu...
I stopped using tools with any kind of lock-in or custom format because I know they will eventually degrade into something unusable.
Currently it is sadly the best set of features within one tool for me (at least the subset I use). I would love to switch to an open source variant to self host. But till then I will probably stay with it.
Still. I don't like the slowness (web and app). I don't like how it feels just off sometimes. And how the Android app just so-so works for me.
If I middle-click on a link to open it in a new tab, I paste-insert my clipboard content _into the link text_ instead (I'm on Linux). That's just horrible.
It's actually the browser's default behavior to do what you're describing! Inside a `contenteditable` element, links no longer behave as links -- they aren't clickable, and hovering over the link doesn't show a preview of the HREF attribute in the browsers I've tested. So in order for links to do link things, we have to fight the browser and re-implement these behaviors.
Here's a codesandbox with no JS to demonstate this: https://codesandbox.io/embed/optimistic-resonance-jbyeef?fon...
I created a task to track this bug internally. I think we can probably solve by calling preventDefault for the middle-click event if it bubbles up from inside a link.
Btw, if links inside a contenteditable aren't supposed to behave as links, why make it clickable in the first place? Because if you make it act like a link, you indeed have to reimplement the whole thing because of expectations.
I'm no interaction designer, but imho a simple edit button would be mucher simpler. It could still be integrated nicely, no need to have wiki-like editing where the entire context is lost.
I still don't understand the UX. Am I assuming correctly that it's core to the concept of Notion to always be editable and not have an edit/view flip switch? Because I never used Notion to write anything, I just read things other people wrote. And so it's arguably weird to interact with a webpage that as it turns out is secretly an editor only masquerading as a webpage. Sly!
My only quibble is the lack of offline functionality.
the big idea is that after a few such iterations startups will focus on solving the core fundamental issues of the target market rather than build out a bunch of infra. IMO this would reduce capital cost for newer startups in the same field, that should impact the incentives but its subtle.
also, who know if all the work is out in open maybe some new startup would get an idea to put things together in a entirely new way. just imagine if BeOS we opensourced when it went under instead of letting it rot in some server.
overall I feel a lot more work is needed in establishing some sort of commons framework.
I very much agree, and there are some compelling projects happening in that space as well:
- https://commonsstack.org/
- https://commonsengine.org/
Getting VC firms on-board is a tough sell, though. Their model intrinsically involves getting a greater return than the up-front investment, usually through centralization, quasi-monopoly, and rent-seeking. The low hit-rate of breakthrough successes makes the perverse incentive all the stronger: VCs need unicorn cash-cows, to offset and subsidize the failures. At best, exit-to-community would be a mechanism to cut losses on investments with a small-but-loyal userbase, but without enough revenue to be truly profitable from the VC's perspective.
If I ever built a note taking app, I'll be using your tag line as a subtitle and a guiding principle :)
"...just a list of notes with some formatting and sync capabilities"
That is the modern business model. First you build something so good it becomes indespensible then you squeeze money out of it until your customers hate you just enough to not stop using you.
I don’t know if I’d call it a business model, but it’s certainly something that many modern businesses do.
Trello did the same thing. They killed their single-user friendly features and moved to enterprise first, gouging serious solo users in the process.
I'm still subscribed to both, but I'm not as happy as before.
They could reasonably retire off just the return on investments.
However, if they start using the $5mil to buy houses and cars and whatnot, they are "cashing out the capital". As they spend more and more, the return on investment drops but everything looks great from the outside: they have lots of cash, a lot of "things", and so-on. However, look ahead a few years and they might be left with $500k invested giving them a return of $25,000/year and it's possible that they would no longer be able to retire off that putting them in to a possible tail spin of needing to spend the remaining capital just to pay the monthly bills.
I propose that this is what companies are doing with their "social capital" (which includes the public's impression of the brand and that brand's work on building up their customers). Creating a brand with integrity and values while working to solve a problem well builds social capital. All they have to do is "maintain the balance" (stay true to the values and mission that got them there) in order to keep getting the "return on investment" (continual influx of new paying customers). However, if they choose to start sacrificing values and quality for the short-term gains they can definitely do that. On a quarterly balance sheet it even looks like they are "rich": "We're spending less on dev time by ignoring bug reports and less on servicing free customers while also converting 10% of those old free customers to paying customers. The bottom line is way up!". But because they've sacrificed the values that attracted those customers in the first place new potential customers will start looking more critically, or will choose a competitor, or will even start their own competing service. It's only a matter of time before the company looks at the balance sheet and wonders why income is down. If they are really looking to ruin the company they might even point fingers like "we used to get $250k/yr, but now we're getting $25k and our competitor is getting $225. we must conclude that the market is saturated and we have to go on the offensive against that competitor.", when what they could do is simply accept that they have to start over to rebuild the social capital so they can have the same level of return again (or maybe even take the lesson and work harder to build more capital and have a bigger return in the future).
Yes, the "first" Evernote had great features, but it was all over the place. No clients had the same set of features, and web side was even worse.
When they ditched everything and rebuilt all clients from the same base, they've lost some of the cool features, but I find it much easier to use and rely on.
Only after that point I bought a subscription, fully went into it, and currently building my knowledge base inside it, and collaborating on some stuff.
Simpler is not always worse. Yes, the old Evernote was a "road warrior's utopia", but the current incarnation works much better on a cross-platform perspective, and I'm a happy camper.
My bigger gripes are that it doesn't support (markdown) formatting without a subscription, and I can't figure out how to put notes into folders.
I only use the free version of Standard Notes, but I am a big fan of the product. Their syncing has been the most solid/problem-free I've seen amongst all of the notes apps I've tried over the years.
Their selling feature (to me) is the privacy focus, because end to end encryption is the default, and a very rare one among other note apps I've taken a look at.
Sync works well, and is one way I use the app, even when I have other things like org-mode in play on some devices. It is typically quite handy to just paste something on my Linux desktop, and copy-paste on my iPhone to send somewhere iOS-specific.
(I assume you mean EULA: https://obsidian.md/eula)
This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada applicable in that Province. Any action or proceeding arising from or relating to this Agreement may only be brought in the courts located in Kitchener, Ontario and each party irrevocably submits to such exclusive jurisdiction and venue.
Obsidian's license terms are weirder than expected. But I'd never hesitate to use a Personal license for random, incidental professional purposes.
But I'm much happier to avoid thinking about the question altogether.
Not an issue for me, but others might be concerned about its (lack of??) mobile support. I do all my work on desktops and sync thru git, so its not been a problem for me.
There are slightly more involved approaches as well:
https://tfthacker.medium.com/dashboard-a-simple-organization...
I use the calendar, and tasks stuff to give me a daily/weekly view in the sidebar for quick nav. and a 'general' note for links to notes I want quick access to.
I just remember seeing comments about it being a bit behind some of the mobile support offered by other systems. I do everything on desktop, so I ignored it. This was a while ago though, sounds like they have a (new?) mobile app?
https://www.dendron.so/
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dendron
After using Notion, Obsidian, Mem and other tools, I have settled down on this app. Solid community too.
What once warranted an app is simply a feature somewhere in another app. MacOS comes with "Notes", which is perfectly sufficient for me.
Now I use MediaWiki through docker (with Sqlite database) on my home server. It's lightening fast for my personal use, and comes with tons of powerful features (categories, subpages, templates, math syntax, etc.). Because MediaWiki is the same system running Wikipedia, I believe it is very likely will run 10, 20, or even more years. It is not the most convenient to use, but I don't use it for quick notes, for which I just use the default note app on my phone.
Not all your notes can be just Markdown format. You will have image files. And then different apps handle image file location differently. Joplin turns attachment filenames to random strings.
Also, Markdown format is insufficient. I will need categories and subcategories, etc. And then different apps handle those differently.
Although in the end I ended up with Microsoft OneNote (with Obsidian for special cases), Microsoft isn't going away and they don't have a habit of killing core products like Google does.
https://getupnote.com/
Cross-platform, and it feels like what Evernote was back in the day: a simple note-taking app with a beautiful UI.
I replaced Evernote with it a few months ago, and it's been a daily driver since. It was first recommended to me on /r/evernote, a subreddit that has basically been echoing the OP's concerns about Evernote for the last two years it looks like.
For a sales pitch, the slack team apparently used workflowy to coordinate dev before they launched.
https://workflowy.com
I'm running it on an unRAID server with nightly backups, but you could just as easily run it from a raspberry pi.
Before next cloud, I was using text files in Dropbox.
My employer just started using notion. It seems fine so far, but I don't see myself switching away from next cloud any time soon.
Sure, Apple Notes may have native window resize, but can you tell if the app is syncing right now? When was the last sync? What happens in case of a versioning clash? Will it decide to work with patchy Internet on that upcoming train ride? Will it sync once you go back online? Will it decide to party with some random Exchange server you used for work once, and how will this affect your notes? Are your notes safe from random changes in formatting when Apple rolls out improvements to the Notes app?
Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone and have used Macs for decades, but I wouldn't trust Apple cloud services with anything even remotely important. I'm even a little sceptical about Mac Finder at this point, which is ten minutes away from becoming a cloud service itself.
Some assembly required of course.
You can read about this era in detail here: https://nira.com/evernote-history/
As we come towards the third quarter of the 2010s, Evernote was being shaped up a bit in terms of non-core products being dropped, on-prem infrastructure being migrated to the cloud and so on but this wasn't without great pains as well.
Not to mention, a non-trivial number of staff appear to have left during that period too which creates a negative feedback loop where the upper tier of potential candidates may be dismissive of an employer like Evernote (if it looks questionable on your CV) which is arguably the type of talent you might need in a period like this where your competitors have true realtime collaborative elements that the market is expecting from you as well as table stakes.
Now after this period, and this is just from my own observations so I don't have any particular stories to link, Ian Small tool over as CEO with a personal focus on continuing to modernise Evernote.
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4I5cq2DfrSpehLO_71NC...
I can't say how that has been received but I have a lot of respect for the "Behind the Scenes" series that occurred, showing Evernote's technical investments such as:
* Sharding their databases
* Standardising feature sets across mobile. Android might have had features for years that aren't on iOS and vice versa
* Standardising their applications hence the move to Electron. In the context of them needing to move faster, it makes sense to focus on one codebase instead of five, regardless of how you might feel about Electron itself.
While I don't know that Evernote can ever catch up, I have to say I have a lot of kudos for the risk that Ian took in showing us what they're struggling with.
That said, I don't use Evernote so I can't exactly say I feel the pain of their customer base but as far as content that might attract new talent, I think transparency like that is pretty much the gold standard next to having a technical blog and so on.
Also, since Simplenote is from Automatic, I am less worried about shown any advertisements or product changing radically.
My entire information management pipeline has been overhauled: I know Notion can be a little culty, but it genuinely has improved my performance so drastically I think it is the best thing to happen to me since the internet itself.
Edit: I just found iA Writer. It works great!
I switched to Obsidian and am very happy. Obsidian Sync and Obsidian Publish are value for money; and Obsidian+Syncthing is a great option for backing up the notes in a local machine.
Syncthing + your text editor of choice (vim in termux on android is actually pretty good, imo) is a reliable bet. Emacs with org-mode could be used in a similar way. I'm sure there are other combinations as well.