It's official: note taking app with 0 advantages over just plain ass notes synced via cloud signs death warrant.
For real, FOSS software that saves to a file folder and does all of this exists. They are just chasing us into their arms.
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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If you're looking for a name drop, Joplin does nicely for my uses.
I also use Joplin!
I've heard Joplin is good. Also Obsidian is apparently amazing with plug-ins. I'm leaning towards Obsidian myself. But between Google and MS, I figured Keep and Evernote would've been impossible to challenge.
+1 for Obsidian, I wrangled long with the fact it is not open source, but since it handles file with markdown formatting and saves them openly accessible, I gave it a try anyway. Really like it but will definitely never be open to pay a subscription for it. One time payment, absolutely!
Another +1 for Obsidian. Will never go back. For anyone running into Notion, it doesn’t work offline (that I last checked.) bit me in the ass one time. Obsidian is all markdown locally available.
And Notion is so slow my god, Crazy how everything feels instant with Obsidian
I self host a lot of shit, but after almost a year of using Obsidian I finally paid for their sync feature for one reason: iCloud sync to iOS is painfully slow.
I was sometimes waiting 30-45 seconds to jot down a note just waiting on the app to open with iCloud sync as my backend. Now, with Obsidian sync, the app is ready-to-go in seconds.
Now if you're only going to be using on desktop, I would definitely consider a git-repository based sync, but if you're gonna use mobile I'd recommend you at least consider Obsidian Sync
I already have Syncthing up and running so its not an issue for me right now and I don't need to share notes.
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And Logseq, too!
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I haven't used Evernote in at least a decade, I didn't even think they were still around.
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Evernote still exists?
Lol, tried them about 10 years ago, wasn't impressed.
They're still around, and think this is a good move? So many other, WAY better notebook apps.
MS OneNote works well on all platforms (except Linux!) for several years now, and blows Evernote away (it's my Achilles heel).
And now apps like Joplin, Obsidian, etc, are closing fast on OneNote (and even better in some ways), and can sync with tools like Syncthing.
Obsidian + ExcaliDraw is mind-blowing. The integration is absurdly good! It can even render entire PDFs for highlighting (a bit slow but usable).
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Having used both OneNote & Obsidian extensively, OneNote is like a children's colouring book in comparison IMO.
Not that it's bad, it serves plenty well for most people.
I think OneNote is potentially a good middle ground between something like Obsidian and something much simpler like Google Keep, but for me it adds complexity without adding enough functionality to justify it.
Not an unfair comparison, though I find Obsidian overly complex/convoluted. But I think that comes with the territory when your design philosophy is very open extensibility and using standard document types rather than a proprietary binary format like ON.
Plus OneNote is 20 years old now, was extended (after MS bought it) to integrate with SharePoint (maybe it was designed that way, I don't remember), so really is a 20th century piece of software. There are add-ons that greatly extend its capability (Onetastic, Gem, etc). So in a business environment the full desktop app with SharePoint is pretty impressive. To it's credit, I have 15+ years and gigabytes of data in it, and have never (knock on wood) lost anything, moving it across perhaps a dozen systems.
All that said... I'm moving to Joplin, lol. Trying to get away from dependence on apps I don't control (and I want a notebook that works on Linux too).
To sync to mobile devices, OneNote requires Onedrive (or setup your own SharePoint server, uggh). At least with Obsidian/Joplin, etc, I get to manage how things sync. And if I'm happy with the features in my current setup, I never have to change anything. Never know when MS will fuck up Onedrive sync, requiring a version of OneNote I can't run, or has issues.
MS OneNote lags 200-300ms on M1 pro CPU...
Ugh, Syncthing. I bet it works well for syncing between Linux boxes or even MacOS, but when I tried using it to sync between Windows and a couple of Android devices, it was incredibly clunky. I found it confusing and obtuse even though I've been a software engineer for over 20 years.
Rant over.
I keep hundreds of gigs in sync between 4 windows computers and about 5 phones, including iOS (on iOS it's Möbius). SyncTrayzor for Windows is really helpful.
It rarely has issues, when it does it notifies you of a sync conflict (it's always a result of me doing something that's bad practice, such as disabling sync for weeks on one device and making a bunch of changes).
Give it a try again. I especially recommend Syncthing-Fork for Android, it moves sync conditions into the individual sync jobs/folders. This enables me to have my DCIM folder sync to home, regardless of network or power conditions, so I never lose pictures, while allowing me to set my media sync folder (music, videos, etc from my home desktop) to only sync while on wifi, and other jobs to only run while connected to power and wifi.
Resilio is another great sync tool, works differently than Syncthing by using the bittorrent protocol. It has Sync-on-demand, which is great for grabbing media from my desktop from anywhere, Syncthing would only permit Syncthing the entire folder, with Resilio you can browse the share from your phone, pick files, and have it sync them right now.
I'd use Resilio more, just for that feature, but it kills memory on a phone because it keeps the sync database in ram when running, while Syncthing relies on files for indexing. So ST is my daily driver, and load up Resilio when I need to grab specific files.
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I’ve never understood why anyone uses Evernote. Just use a folder with Markdown files. Or Obsidian. Or VS Code with plugins. Or EMacs org mode. So many good FOSS options out there (yes, I know VS Code isn’t FOSS but VSCodium is) that don’t lock you in. Hypocritical of me to say as an Apple user, but I hate when companies’ business models are to lock in consumers. Just make a better product that’s worth paying for.
It's simple. The people using Evernote didn't care about being locked in.
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Obsidian is awesome. It won't meet everyone's needs, but I love the lightweight simplicity of it. But it's also extremely extensible with add-ons if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
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I hit the 50 cap, then deleted about 30 unnecessary notes, and STILL couldn't create more notes.
I replaced it with Draft Notes.
I mean, it doesn't 50 active notes so I guess they decided that creation of 50 notes is what's allowed regardless of how many active you have left.
...or it's a bug, but generally I tend not to give businesses the benefit of the doubt.
Evernote used “Subscription model”. It hurt itself in its confusion.
And here I was a sucker for using Simplemote this whole time. I missed out on my opportunity to get charged
The only advantage of Evernote over everything else is it's scanning of the contents of PDFs. I scan all my paper documents and stored them in Evernote for easy searching. Since I moved away from Evernote (to Joplin) that's the only thing I missed. If anyone has a suggestion for replacing this I'd be very happy.
PaperlessNgx makes scanned documents searchable. Its great!
Now this looks promising. Thanks very much. I'll give it a go.
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Best thing about Evernote was its web clipping extensions... anyone use one that's as good or better..?
Old news, they already have implemented it around 2 weeks ago. I moved to LogSeq, it's a bit more complicated than Evernote but it's a really good alternative. Open source too.
Don't forget to delete your account on your way out.
Notesnook.
Standard Notes is a encrypted service alternative to Evernote. It's a mature product with more than six year in the market.
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Since no one has recommended, I would recommend Notesnook. Open Source app with Encryption. They are also planning to open source the Sync (afaik) part too.
Another option is AnyType.
Another option is Notion (not open Source/encrypted).
The article is from November 29 and the change is to take effect on December 4, which is a bit late for this post.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The notetaking app said that this change will be applicable for all new and existing free users starting December 4.
Going forward, new and existing Free users will have a maximum of fifty notes and one notebook per account.
These limits refer to the number of notes and notebooks a user can have in their account at one time: you can always delete unwanted content to remain below the threshold,” the company, owned by Milan-based Bending Spoons, said.
At that time, a spokesperson told TechCrunch that the notetaking app has “been unprofitable for years and the situation was unsustainable in the long term.”
While Ian Smalls, who was appointed Evernote CEO in 2018, managed to get the company to $100 million in recurring revenue, the app has fallen behind newer competitors like Notion.
For users who might want to look for alternatives, Notion, Microsoft OneNote and Zoho Notebook offer generous free tiers.
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Hey everyone. I own a Synology and run evernote on it. Can someone recommend a good note app that isn't Synology Note station that I can run on my Synology? I don't really want my notes on the internet so OneDrive is not an option. Thank you for your recommendations.
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I use SimpleNote, which is really close to the default MacOS note app (my goal was exactly to find something similar for Windows).
Note list on the left, note's content on the right, no bullshit, no clutter. You can pin notes, you can add tags, stuff is cloud-synced.
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