It’s Time to Ditch Evernote in Favor of One of These Alternatives
For many productivity enthusiasts , Evernote became the go-to note-taking app of the 2010s. It was fast and allowed you to create notebooks with notes, images, and even to-do lists. It made it easy to share information and collaborate with anyone, and also had a convenient tool for importing anything from the Internet with one click. And all this was done mostly for free.
But over the past five years, the situation has continued to change for the worse. Evernote started limiting free plans, promoting paid ones that didn’t cost too much. But then they continued to raise the price. Now, in 2023, their basic plan for personal use will cost a whopping $14.99 per month or $129.99 per year, while the professional plan will cost $17.99 per month. That’s more than Microsoft charges for its entire Office ecosystem, including OneNote. To make matters worse, Evernote now limits free members to just 50 notes and one notebook.
People have been jumping ship for years, but this could be the final nail in Evernote’s coffin. But the question is where to go next? There’s no individual copy of Evernote out there, but there are plenty of great tools that offer note-taking, task management, and collaboration all in one, and many of them modernize the Evernote approach.
Microsoft OneNote
If you need an app like Evernote that can handle notes, tasks, and collaboration simultaneously, OneNote may be your best choice. Microsoft has made most of its features available for free, but you’ll need a Premium account if you want to store files locally on Windows or need more than 5GB of storage space. If you pay for Microsoft 365, the premium version is already included.
OneNote offers great tools for taking and organizing notes, and, like Evernote, a great web clipper. Collaboration is based on sharing notebooks, but you can collaborate with users online using the same note, similar to Google Docs. However, one place OneNote is lacking is OCR (optical character recognition). While it’s present in some versions of OneNote, it’s not very intuitive, so you won’t be able to extract text from images as easily. The workflow isn’t as intuitive as Evernote, and searching within PDFs and documents isn’t enabled by default. This is the only thing Evernote does much better than OneNote. To learn more, check out PCMag’s full review of OneNote .
Taskada
If you liked Evernote for collaboration, you’ll get more value from Taskade . Taskade integrates ChatGPT anywhere you can enter text and takes a collaborative approach. The app is project-oriented, but each project is a modular document that can continue to be added to. And when the project is open, everyone who is in it and online can be seen from above. It doesn’t show, like Google Docs, who’s editing what with live cursors, but version history can help you figure it out.
Here you will also find basic task management features. It has a web clipper but no OCR support. To learn more, check out PCMag’s full review of Taskade .
Concept
Notion is a complex tool, but if you can get the hang of it, the payoff is huge. Notion allows you to create multiple document-based workspaces. Notion’s collaboration game is strong, and they have a huge range of templates and customization features. The tables and systems you can create in Notion are sometimes limited only by your imagination. Notion is free to use, and you can collaborate with up to five users without paying a penny.
Obsidian
Obsidian isn’t a full Evernote replacement, but it’s a great note-taking app. It’s built on Markdown and relies on text files that are saved wherever you choose—locally, in the cloud storage of your choice, or on Obsidian’s servers (which costs $96 per year for 10GB storage).
Obsidian lets you create simple text notes and leaves the rest of the functionality to plugins —and there are many of them. They allow you to turn Obsidian into a task management system, calendar app, daily planner , and more. This also means that the learning curve here is huge and it won’t be for everyone. Additionally, there is no collaboration feature, and there is no built-in OCR support (but it can be added using a plugin ). The same goes for web clipper. There is no official tool, but there is a community-created option . This is the best way to think about Obsidian. It’s an ecosystem where you start with simple text tools, but you’ll find community tools for most of the features you might want to add. This provides a level of customization and flexibility unheard of in the note-taking industry. For more, check out PCMag’s fullreview of Obsidian .
Bear
Although Bear is available exclusively for Apple platforms, it is by far the best option when it comes to a simple notes app. Think of it like the Apple Notes app, but with enhanced features. Bear supports Markdown and makes it easy to import and export your notes. Additionally, there is excellent multimedia and document support. You can organize your notes using tags, which are quite powerful. If you mostly want to create and organize simple text notes and want a quick way to find and organize them, Bear is for you. While the free app will only work on one device, you can enable cross-device syncing, themes, document scanning, OCR, PDF search, and more by paying $2.99 per month. Besides collaboration and a web clipper, Bear offers everything that made Evernote such a great note-taking app. And in my humble opinion, Bear is better designed and much faster to use.
Joplin
Has Evernote left a sour taste in your mouth? So much so that you can’t trust another third-party notes service? Joplin can help. It’s a completely free and open source note-taking service that works on all major platforms. You can use the application for free and forever. All the data stays with you, and since Joplin uses Markdown, the data is also easy to import and export.
In terms of features, you get an app that works on all major platforms, a web clipper, a great interface, and tools for importing existing notes. But you won’t find advanced tools like OCR or document scanning.
Joplin supports several synchronization services, and you can use Joplin Cloud if you wish. A $1.99 per month subscription will give you 1GB of storage and collaboration features, but you won’t have to use it to sync data. You can use Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive to sync your notes and continue to use the same experience across all your devices. If you don’t want to trust Dropbox (and we don’t blame you), you can host Joplin on your own servers. For more, check out PCMag’s review .
Simple note
Simplenote’s tagline is “The easiest way to take notes,” which hits the nail on the head. It’s an incredibly simple, free app that works on all popular platforms.
It is owned and maintained by Automattic, the creator of WordPress. It has automatic synchronization, tagging, change history, and collaboration features. You can even write in Markdown. All this is done for free and forever.
If you’re looking for a simple text note-taking system and don’t need advanced features like a web clipper, image recognition, and visual organization tools, you can’t go wrong with Simplenote.
Google Keep
We’ll be the first to say: Google Keep is not a full-fledged Evernote alternative. Keep is incredibly simple and doesn’t even offer a desktop app or import feature to import all your Evernote notes.
However, it is colorful, fun, easy to use and works well on smartphones. Plus, it has a pretty good web clipper and integrates well with other Google apps like Google Tasks, Google Assistant, and more. It’s also quite easy to share and collaborate with Google Keep lists.
It’s free to use if you have a Google account. Keep is a good option if you’re a note-taker, need a place to write and dump information, and don’t mind searching for it (rather than carefully organizing your notes).