Evernote alternative

ndouglas · Jan 21, 2023

BigMcGuire said:
I am a huge note taker. Years ago I decided to go to digital note taking because I can type a lot faster than I can write.

My conclusion after all these years and after spending a lot of time trying most solutions out there? There is no one tool that fits the bill for everything. And I was a power Evernote User back in the day...

OK:

Work - OneNote. I've got thousands of notes in here. The ability to dump images, files, share, write with iPad, recordings, etc - makes this a gem. Office 365 subscription recommended.
Personal - Notability(or GoodNotes) / Apple Notes. I don't have an iPad with an Apple Pencil anymore but I have several college classes of notes on Notability (hundreds and hundreds of pages of handwritten notes). Definitely recommend Notability/GoodNotes for iPad with pencil. Otherwise. Apple Notes.
Personal - Day One for my journal/thoughts/free-thinking.
Personal - Apple Pages. I'm finding that just having a document open for me to write stuff down throughout the day has really worked as a good "notepad" too.

I prefer Apple Notes now for almost everything now days. My requirements are that it is synced to my phone/iPad and accessible via web. It is free and worth learning if you haven't really taken the time. I've got hundreds of Apple Notes (some locked, some many pages long).

Outside of OneNote/Apple Notes -- you're looking at huge learning curves, losses in syncing abilities, and app age.

I'd recommend is: https://www.notebooksapp.com -- great app. Syncing is a little limited especially if you don't use Dropbox... but if you don't need syncing, it's a powerful notebook app without subscription.

https://www.growlybird.com/notes/ - a free OneNote similar app from years ago. Works well. Lacks dark mode but it is free and no subscription. Syncing is limited to Mac OS only.

Beyond this is just bad.

Thanks for this info, I also use Apple Notes heavily. May I ask if you know any notes apps that are more conducive to typing rather than the pencil? I have a Pencil for my ipad but the keyboard is what I need to use 95% of the time with notes. So far I’ve found Simplenote, it’s okay… having used Apple Notes for so many years though, and reading your post and others’ who seem to similarly use Notes the most (or among the most), I suspect I ought to just keep my Notes use going.

BigMcGuire · Jan 21, 2023

ndouglas said:
Thanks for this info, I also use Apple Notes heavily. May I ask if you know any notes apps that are more conducive to typing rather than the pencil? I have a Pencil for my ipad but the keyboard is what I need to use 95% of the time with notes. So far I’ve found Simplenote, it’s okay… having used Apple Notes for so many years though, and reading your post and others’ who seem to similarly use Notes the most (or among the most), I suspect I ought to just keep my Notes use going.

It's been a few years since I've written that.

I use Apple Notes exclusively for my note taking now - personal. I use Diarly for my personal journaling. Lastly, I use Microsoft OneNote for my work notes - (our work uses O365 extensively).

Since I wrote that post the only other note application that came close to making me switch was https://www.notebooksapp.com/ - it's good, it's a one time fee, and it works well with iCloud and Windows. But I ended up going OneNote for my work notes and staying with Apple Notes because of its simplicity and features.

Apple Notes is even more attractive to me now because of the end to end encryption Apple offers.

My thoughts? I do not want to keep moving around using different note applications. I don't want to pay a subscription if I can help it.

I've gone more digital with my note taking as I've aged over the last several years. I almost never use the Apple Pencil anymore. I either type something or scratch it on paper and scan it in. Apple Notes works perfectly for me. It's safe, it's featured, and it handles everything I throw at it - finding stuff is super easy too. It's become my second brain.

I've tried and try other note applications just to make sure I'm not missing something. I love Bear's simplicity, I love Ulysses's features, I like OneNote's power - but Apple Notes just works so well for me across my devices - my Watch, iPhone, and MacBook. Apple Notes it has been primarily. I just wish I had a way to back them up (but I've never lost data) and/or a transfer feature if I ever decide to leave Apple someday. But it doesn't stop me from using it heavily.

The older I get, the more I use my notes and rely on them. My notes usage has 2-3xed over the last few years.

Grass is always greener on the other side. But it's good to know what's over there.

ndouglas · Jan 22, 2023

BigMcGuire said:
It's been a few years since I've written that.

I use Apple Notes exclusively for my note taking now - personal. I use Diarly for my personal journaling. Lastly, I use Microsoft OneNote for my work notes - (our work uses O365 extensively).

Since I wrote that post the only other note application that came close to making me switch was https://www.notebooksapp.com/ - it's good, it's a one time fee, and it works well with iCloud and Windows. But I ended up going OneNote for my work notes and staying with Apple Notes because of its simplicity and features.

Apple Notes is even more attractive to me now because of the end to end encryption Apple offers.

My thoughts? I do not want to keep moving around using different note applications. I don't want to pay a subscription if I can help it.

I've gone more digital with my note taking as I've aged over the last several years. I almost never use the Apple Pencil anymore. I either type something or scratch it on paper and scan it in. Apple Notes works perfectly for me. It's safe, it's featured, and it handles everything I throw at it - finding stuff is super easy too. It's become my second brain.

I've tried and try other note applications just to make sure I'm not missing something. I love Bear's simplicity, I love Ulysses's features, I like OneNote's power - but Apple Notes just works so well for me across my devices - my Watch, iPhone, and MacBook. Apple Notes it has been primarily. I just wish I had a way to back them up (but I've never lost data) and/or a transfer feature if I ever decide to leave Apple someday. But it doesn't stop me from using it heavily.

The older I get, the more I use my notes and rely on them. My notes usage has 2-3xed over the last few years.

Grass is always greener on the other side. But it's good to know what's over there.

Thanks for the update. I can relate to relying on Notes heavily, and more so every year. I just wish they were easier to backup. But in the grand scheme of things, it is perhaps a minor complaint, since they (usually) autosync so well between my laptop, phone and tablet.

MacBH928 · Jan 22, 2023

ndouglas said:
Thanks for this info, I also use Apple Notes heavily. May I ask if you know any notes apps that are more conducive to typing rather than the pencil? I have a Pencil for my ipad but the keyboard is what I need to use 95% of the time with notes. So far I’ve found Simplenote, it’s okay… having used Apple Notes for so many years though, and reading your post and others’ who seem to similarly use Notes the most (or among the most), I suspect I ought to just keep my Notes use going.

i am not sure what you mean but all note apps should have a keyboard input, and the ipad should work with physical keyboards

Tagbert · Jan 22, 2023

MacBH928 said:
i am not sure what you mean but all note apps should have a keyboard input, and the ipad should work with physical keyboards

They do and it does. Apple Notes works just fine with keyboard input on a Mac or on an iPad. The question is a little odd.

ixxx69 · Jan 22, 2023

MacBH928 said:
i am not sure what you mean but all note apps should have a keyboard input, and the ipad should work with physical keyboards

I thought that was an odd question as well at first, and it is if your reference point is an app like Evernote. My guess is that they're considering it in context of free-form sketch notepad apps that are really meant to be used with a stylus (or finger) as almost a literal replacement of a pen and paper. Those apps, even if they can handle text input, that's not really their primary function.

Whereas Apple Notes is a text-first note app, with the ability to add sketches.

ndouglas · Jan 22, 2023

Sorry if I didn’t describe things clearly, I meant Goodnotes mostly since I recently starting using it (trying to use it). But also any non-Apple-Notes app. Here’s a screen shot from Goodnote that might help:

So, I can scribble with a pen but I can’t copy paste (using the ipad magic keyboard) into the note.

I can* create a small Textbox and type in there, but it’s not idea since I want the whole note to allow typed words.

Beyond the small Textbox “objects” to type in, I can’t just start typing in the note.

ndouglas · Jan 22, 2023

ixxx69 said:
I thought that was an odd question as well at first, and it is if your reference point is an app like Evernote. My guess is that they're considering it in context of free-form sketch notepad apps that are really meant to be used with a stylus (or finger) as almost a literal replacement of a pen and paper. Those apps, even if they can handle text input, that's not really their primary function.

Whereas Apple Notes is a text-first note app, with the ability to add sketches.

Yes, this last line —^ sums up my issue more or less, that most is other “notes” apps seem to be the opposite, pencil-first with the _ability_ to add textbox items with text.

ixxx69 · Jan 22, 2023

ndouglas said:
Yes, this last line —^ sums up my issue more or less, that most is other “notes” apps seem to be the opposite, pencil-first with the _ability_ to add textbox items with text.

So to get you on the same page as everyone else (pun fully intended), this thread is dedicated to text-first note apps. With maybe a couple of exceptions, all the apps being discussed here are text-first note apps, like Evernote and Apple Notes.

ndouglas · Jan 22, 2023

Haha got it, thanks! The thread was one of very few that came up when I was searching the forum for Goodnotes info.
It sounds like I ought to give Evernote a try next.

Tagbert · Jan 22, 2023

ndouglas said:
Haha got it, thanks! The thread was one of very few that came up when I was searching the forum for Goodnotes info.
It sounds like I ought to give Evernote a try next.

If you skim through this long thread, you’ll see lots of different (mostly text) notes apps. I think the original question was about someone who wanted to move from Evernote to something else.

doc james · Jan 23, 2023

Subtly different use case but my wife and I have used Evernote in the past to plan household projects together (but separately: we're too busy 😢) - little in the way of notetaking but heavy on the webclipping and links to web pages through shared notebooks. Mood boards with detail. A sort of private Pinterest to be honest. Now Evernote is cr*pping out in unreliable ways (I shouldn't have let it update I think).

I had a look at Pinry (self hosted Pinterest) but couldn't get it working well (and ties you to Chrome). I'm thinking about moving us to Joplin but not sure it's quite as easy to use (my wife is not learning markdown so don't even go there).

Anyone familiar with this scenario?

Tagbert · Jan 23, 2023

doc james said:
Subtly different use case but my wife and I have used Evernote in the past to plan household projects together (but separately: we're too busy 😢) - little in the way of notetaking but heavy on the webclipping and links to web pages through shared notebooks. Mood boards with detail. A sort of private Pinterest to be honest. Now Evernote is cr*pping out in unreliable ways (I shouldn't have let it update I think).

I had a look at Pinry (self hosted Pinterest) but couldn't get it working well (and ties you to Chrome). I'm thinking about moving us to Joplin but not sure it's quite as easy to use (my wife is not learning markdown so don't even go there).

Anyone familiar with this scenario?

Could you and your wife use a share page in Apple Notes for this?

MacBH928 · Jan 23, 2023

doc james said:
Subtly different use case but my wife and I have used Evernote in the past to plan household projects together (but separately: we're too busy 😢) - little in the way of notetaking but heavy on the webclipping and links to web pages through shared notebooks. Mood boards with detail. A sort of private Pinterest to be honest. Now Evernote is cr*pping out in unreliable ways (I shouldn't have let it update I think).

I had a look at Pinry (self hosted Pinterest) but couldn't get it working well (and ties you to Chrome). I'm thinking about moving us to Joplin but not sure it's quite as easy to use (my wife is not learning markdown so don't even go there).

Anyone familiar with this scenario?

I wouldn't recommend using Joplin as its mostly just text. There is a plethora of available note apps for some reason.

Some that might work better in your own use case is DevonThink, OneNote, and Notion. There are others if you search the internet.

doc james · Jan 24, 2023

Tagbert said:
Could you and your wife use a share page in Apple Notes for this?

Possibly. I'll have to look at the share sheet in Safari to see how that could be used as a "web clipper" or maybe write a short cut to put everything into one note. Interesting.

doc james · Jan 24, 2023

MacBH928 said:
I wouldn't recommend using Joplin as its mostly just text. There is a plethora of available note apps for some reason.

Some that might work better in your own use case is DevonThink, OneNote, and Notion. There are others if you search the internet.

Thanks, that's really helpful. I'm very happy with Drafts as my text only notetaking app so won't waste time looking into that further. I felt exhausted looking at Notion but I'll perhaps have a further rummage.

sracer · Jan 24, 2023

doc james said:
Subtly different use case but my wife and I have used Evernote in the past to plan household projects together (but separately: we're too busy 😢) - little in the way of notetaking but heavy on the webclipping and links to web pages through shared notebooks. Mood boards with detail. A sort of private Pinterest to be honest. Now Evernote is cr*pping out in unreliable ways (I shouldn't have let it update I think).

I had a look at Pinry (self hosted Pinterest) but couldn't get it working well (and ties you to Chrome). I'm thinking about moving us to Joplin but not sure it's quite as easy to use (my wife is not learning markdown so don't even go there).

Anyone familiar with this scenario?

For WYSIWYG note taking that can mix text and images, webclipping, I recommend taking a look at UpNote. It supports importing from Evernote so if you want to bring over your Evernote files, that option is available.

I'm a fan of UpNote because it is cross-platform, can be very visual, offers a free version tier, and single price perpetual license. (I'm not a fan of subscriptions)

rhett7660 · Jan 24, 2023

Tagbert said:
Could you and your wife use a share page in Apple Notes for this?

Was thinking the same thing... We actually have several checklists that are shared between me and the wife. It so far, knock on wood, has worked flawlessly!

MacBH928 · Feb 14, 2023

So after plenty of search an app that I totally shunned appears to be the app I am looking for. It is Standard Notes.

The reason I shunned it is because they have a subscription plan and I do not do subscriptions. At least monthly ones. I surprisingly found there is a free option that won't let you format your text but I can live with out it.

PROs:
-Open Source
-Professionally done
-Seems sustainable
-Rich Text (not option for me)
-No Markdown (I do not prefer it)

Cons:

So far I do not believe you can store in your own cloud.

Although I would like to support open source and trust worthy developers/projects , Standard Notes asking price is laughable at the least. Their Subscription is $15 monthly ($90 yearly) to store text like the original Macintosh could do in 1984.

Sometimes a high paying small number of users is all you need but everyone in the business world knows, pricing is the most difficult thing to do.

-----Close Second----

Joplin is completely free and you can store wherever you want but its much worse in the "polished" department, feels buggy, and worse of all it does not have WYSIWYG editor and I hate enabling an "edit" mode. At least that is the case for the iphone app.

Although I am not sure how rich text formatting is transferable between apps (for future proof and migrations) , Joplin away from my eyes and beneath it all stores formatting in markdown (on desktop app/has wysiwyg editor) which would be great for maintaining formatting for exporting.

-----Viable Option-----

Apple Notes does the job well but I do not trust Apple with privacy and I hate for one company to gobble up everything (centralization, monopoly) . Keeping options alive is in the benefit of society.

BigMcGuire · Feb 14, 2023

You don’t trust apple with privacy but you’re ok with Standard Notes using their own servers and trusting them?

jmckenzie · Feb 14, 2023

BigMcGuire said:
You don’t trust apple with privacy but you’re ok with Standard Notes using their own servers and trusting them?

Since they publish their code, if you were a programmer, you could check to confirm that their security promises are real. I'm not able to check, but it does seem like people who would know believe them.

BigMcGuire · Feb 14, 2023

jmckenzie said:
Since they publish their code, if you were a programmer, you could check to confirm that their security promises are real. I'm not able to check, but it does seem like people who would know believe them.

But what proof do we have that they're running their servers correctly? They have a LOT less to lose from server intrusions than Apple.

BigMcGuire · Feb 14, 2023

Don't get me wrong, Standard Note looks nice - but you have to trust them that they're doing everything right on the back end ..... pretty much the SAME as Apple. Seems a little eyebrow raising to me to trust a small no-name company with this over something like Apple.

And I can program - I have for many years. Despite this I've never actually opened open source source code to verify stuff (and I've used a fair number of Open Sourcecode applications).

Just me.

I'd trust the company that has a lot more to lose. Or, none (local only).

jmckenzie · Feb 14, 2023

BigMcGuire said:
But what proof do we have that they're running their servers correctly? They have a LOT less to lose from server intrusions than Apple.

Well, if the data is end to end encrypted, what's the risk of someone infiltrating their server? I guess they could just delete all the data or something, but I don't think they could look at it.

I don't entirely disagree with your larger point, in that I do actually think Apple is trustworthy, and I use Notes and other apps that use iCloud for storage. Haven't even bothered to turn on end to end encryption, but I should do so...

The main reason I use Standard Notes is because I needed a separate notes app that was _not_ iCloud dependent, and which supported Linux as well.

MacBH928 · Feb 14, 2023

BigMcGuire said:
You don’t trust apple with privacy but you’re ok with Standard Notes using their own servers and trusting them?

Standard Notes uses open source software and is end to end encrypted. I think the CSAM scanning Apple just adopted e2e encryption to their icloud but I am not sure. Here are some reasons why I do not trust Apple: