Evernote Vs Craft

[Christian Swindler]

Idecided to spare the time to write this disappointment post. Let me note right here that the disappointments you will read in this post is just a small -but most recent- fraction of my 10 years awesome user experience with EN.

I have been using Evernote for the past 10 years, maybe half of which are premium. Documents, thoughts, tutorials, web archives, book suggestions, recipes, code, everything I care about is on Evernote and I am still using and love Evernote Moleskine notebooks.

Early this year and thanks to COVID (spare) time, I took the time to transition all my data from the cloud to my Synology NAS, firstly because I ended up paying >500$/year (excluding business) to cloud subscriptions but most importantly because I wanted to own my personal data and not pay rent for it. After a streak of subcription cancelling, I cancelled almost all -I am still left with Evernote and iCloud-. I will be cancelling iCloud too when I 've built the Photo workflow I want to. And.. last one standing: Evernote. After giving it a thought and despite the fact that Synology and OneNote both offer a seamless way to migrate notes from Evernote, I said "no". I will be keeping my Evernote subscription, despite the fact that my subscription cost almost doubled in my paid plan years. Why ? Because I got high value from Evernote and it was acceptable to have my data on the cloud but get instantaneous search, famous Evernote OCR etc.

And then... v10 came along. Being a developer myself, I don't get judgemental on product changes. When my clients are going back and forth with features they themselves requested, how easy would it be to offer features that 225M users will love or at least find acceptable ? However, performance/productivity aspects are must-haves and there is no point keeping a productivity app that kills your productivity, and that brought me to: shall I cut the last man standing ?

Alright, that's 2 free hours from me to you @EverNote, a price I am happy to pay considering the productivity gain I had all those years. So, are you going to keep me productive or is this a farewell ?

I saw the writing on the wall and opted not to 'upgrade' to v10, so am continuing to work happily in Evernote Windows 6.25, Android 8.13 and (occasionally) web 10.x - as far as I'm concerned, nothing is happening until those tools are ripped from my cold, dead devices.

I've been stumbling through the use of V10 for the few months and it's usable, but definitely slower than it used to be. I miss the speed with which I could move in v6 and sometimes I go back to Legacy 6.25 in Windows to get certain things done.

That and the fact that mobile for Android appears to be in VERY bad shape, judging from the almost endless stream of very low reviews in the Play Store. It's so bad that I'm actually concerned for the future of Evernote. I've seen no indication from EN that they are even aware of the lambasting they are taking there from their customers, although I can't imagine they've not noticed. But there's no response from EN that I can see anywhere. Half of my time on EN is mobile and so I've turned off all autoupdates and am manually selecting 100+ apps to update, one at a time, in my Samsung Note 10+ just to avoid an update to Evernote.

My patience on that point is getting thinner and thinner, I must admit. Evernote should communicate back to their userbase on their crappy mobile experience. The last meaningful video from management on mobile seems to be from a year ago.

EN should start talking to their users about this or they are going to find themselves in a tight spot, IMO, and having a real tough time recovering from the negativity the mobile app is generating, at least on the Play Store.

Hey @hanseric ! Thanks for sharing. The screenshot taken from the Google Play store is definitely something worths flagging. I had no idea the disappointment is that wide-spread, that's very interesting.

Exactly, I used to follow Phil anxiously to check out what new partnerships he might bring to the service, do you remember the Evernote store ? You could buy an iPad stylus, ScanSnap and a plethora of great partnership products. Now it's dead silence.

I believe your 80% is very optimistic. Regarding the web client, I can't really have say since I never used it ! I think power users will never use web client, except when they need to access EN from another computer.

I use the Android app too and feature wise it is great. However, I find it slow and lagy. Something that I think got worse after the tasks feature was introduced. I like the task feature very much but I get the feeling that the app got slower after that was introduced.

So I inadvertently updated Evernote, not realizing the major changes and SLOWNESS of ver 10. I just couldn't hack it, I don't have the patience for attempting to learn something new to be able to continue doing what I've been doing happily and efficiently for a long time now. Call it old age, or whatever (just an aside, I still prefer Windows 7 over 10 and don't get me started about Windows 11). So I uninstalled Evernote 10, and installed the legacy version (6.25.2.9198) and while it looked like my old Evernote, it was still slow.... I uninstalled that and installed ver 6.25.1.9091 (from file hippo). That's more like it. This is the version I was running previously - fast, responsive and does just what I want it to do.

V10 on Mac uses 80% more resources than legacy here. Until that's drastically reduced I won't be able to make the jump to 10 as I'm using EN to reference things while other CPU/Demanding tasks are happening.

EN Support responded to my message pointing to this post, I was surprised to see that the support representative took the time and had the knowledge to argue many of points raised here. That was surprising because in my experience support agents -at least front line- have no idea what are you talking about and just ask for more information.

2. Just got my 2nd dose vaccination, at the front office they requested a medical serial number. I launched EN as I do since 2011 to find my serial number. It took me 3 minutes to abort waiting and search it in my e-mails. The note where I keep all this relevant info was created in 2013 and never experienced 1 damn issue to get it.

Enough is enough everyone, I am now starting to search for migration options despite the fact that my subscription period is right in the middle of the paid year. I plan to create migration options/review/feedback posts, please contact me if anyone wants to team up, split the workload.

You might want to start in the Forums here - there are already quite a few 'alternatives' posts flying around. The only effective way, I suspect, to fully evaluate another provider will be - once you refine the list to a top few - to try one out.

Careful what questions you ask... the answer to what you actually wrote is already "it's no longer supported" - no more updates, no support apart from us dinosaurs here - though I'd think password issues and the like would still be handled...

As to what I assume you meant - "how long can i still use Legacy" - I have no inside information here, but I'm assuming "indefinitely" applies - Evernote would have to do some pretty extensive reorganisation of their servers to cut off syncing for 'just' the people using Legacy versions, and since a lot of people are using the old and the new side by side, i'm not sure they actually could differentiate.

The fact that I and a few others have had vaguely anxious emails asking why we're still using an older version suggests that take up from existing users hasn't been exactly overwhelming, so unless and until you see wildly enthusiastic reviews (that aren't undercover marketing staffers) I'd suggest you relax. You have plenty of company.

No problem - Backupery is a subscription package that will back up your Windows Legacy Evernote account at a pre-determined interval, with an optional history level. I have a 30GB database and (currently) around 300 notebooks which would be a grind to backup as individual ENEX files so frequently.

Backupery does that for me with no fuss every evening at around 7pm when you can - more or less - guarantee that the laptop is not being used. I keep a running history of 6 days' backups, and archive those away with a weekly system-level backup.

Depends on the content you are storing in Evernote. I keep all my personal archive in Evernote, including medical data, scans, tax info, e.g. To highlight the importance of Evernote, I once won a court just because I had captured a handwritten document in Evernote. Definitely not paranoia.

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