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For many productivity enthusiasts, Evernote became the most popular note-taking app of 2010. It was speedy and allowed you to create notebooks with notes, images, and even to-dos. It made it straightforward to share and collaborate with anyone, and it also had a handy tool to import anything from the internet with one click. And it did all this mostly for free.
However, over the past five years, the situation has continued to change for the worse. Evernote started limiting its free plans to promote its paid ones, which had no cost too A lot. But then they kept raising the price. Now, in 2023, their basic plan for personal apply will cost a whopping $14.99 per month, or $129.99 per year, and the professional plan will cost $17.99 per month. That’s more than Microsoft charges for the entire Office ecosystem, including OneNote. To make matters worse, Evernote now limits free members to just 50 notes and one notebook.
People have been abandoning ship for years, but this may be the final nail in Evernote’s coffin. But the question is: where to go from here? There isn’t an individual copy of Evernote in the world, 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
Source: Microsoft
If you need an app like Evernote that lets you share notes, tasks, and collaborate, One note may be the best solution. Microsoft has made most of its features free, but if you want to store files locally on Windows or need more than 5 GB of storage space, you’ll need a Premium account. If you pay for Microsoft 365, the premium version is already included.
OneNote offers great tools for creating and organizing notes, and like Evernote, it’s also a great tool for clipping web pages. Collaboration is based on sharing notebooks, but you can collaborate with users online on the same note, just like in Google Docs. One thing that OneNote lacks is OCR (optical character recognition). While it’s available in some versions of OneNote, it’s not very intuitive, so extracting text from images won’t be as straightforward. The workflow isn’t as intuitive as Evernote, and searches in PDFs and documents aren’t enabled by default. This is the one thing Evernote does significantly better than OneNote. Look at the whole thing OneNote review on PCMag learn more.
Tasks
Source: Khamosh Pathak
If you love Evernote for collaboration, you’ll get better results with Taskade. Taskade integrates ChatGPT wherever you can type text and takes a collaborative approach. The application focuses on projects, but each project is a modular document to which you can add additional elements. And when the project is open, you can see from above everyone who participates in it and is online. It doesn’t do the Google Docs function of showing who’s editing what with dynamic cursors, but the version history will support figure it out.
You’ll also find basic task management features here. It has a web clipper but no OCR support. Check the whole thing PCMag Assignment Review for more.
Concept
Source: Concept
The concept is a elaborate tool, but if you can get into the swing of things, the payoff is huge. Notion allows you to create multiple workspaces based on documents. Notion’s co-op game is powerful and has a huge range of templates and customization features. The tables and systems you can create in Notion are sometimes only restricted by your imagination. Notion is free to apply and you can collaborate with up to five users without paying a penny.
Obsidian
Source: Obsidian
Obsidian is not a true replacement for Evernote, but it is a great note-taking app. It’s Markdown-based and relies on text files that are saved to a location of your choosing – locally, on your chosen cloud storage service, or on Obsidian servers (which costs $96 per year for 10 GB of storage).
Obsidian allows you to create notes in plain text while leaving the rest of the functionality intact plugins– and there are many of them. They let you turn Obsidian into a task management system, calendar app, journal, and whatnot. This also means that the learning curve here is huge and it won’t work for everyone. Additionally, there is no collaboration feature or native OCR support (but it can be added using a plugin). The same goes for the web clipper. While there is no official tool, it does exist community-created option. That’s the best way to think about Obsidian. It’s an ecosystem where you start with uncomplicated text-based tools, but you’ll find social 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 space. To learn more, check out the whole thing Obsidian review this PCMag.
Bear
Source: Niedźwiedź’s Notes
Although Bear is only available for Apple platforms, it is certainly the best option when it comes to a uncomplicated note-taking app. Think of it like Apple Notes, but elevated. Bear supports Markdown and makes it straightforward to import and export notes. Moreover, it provides excellent multimedia and document support. You can organize your notes using tags, which is quite powerful. If you mainly want to create and organize notes in plain text and want a quick way to find and organize them, Bear will be a good fit for you. While the free app only works on one device, you can enable cross-device sync, themes, document scanning, OCR, PDF search, and more for $2.99 per month. In addition to collaboration and a web cropper, 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 apply.
Joplin
Source: Joplin
Did Evernote leave a sour taste in your mouth? To the point that you can’t trust another third-party note-taking service? Joplin can support. It is a completely free and open source note taking service that works on all major platforms. You can apply the app for free, forever. All your data stays with you, and since Joplin uses Markdown, importing and exporting data is also straightforward.
In terms of features, you get an app that works on all major platforms, a web clipper, a great interface, and tools to import existing notes. However, you will not find advanced tools such as OCR or document scanning.
Joplin supports multiple sync services and you can apply Joplin Cloud if you want. The $1.99/month subscription gets you 1GB of storage and collaboration features, but you don’t have to apply it to sync your data. You can apply Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive to sync your notes and still have the same experience on 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. Check PCMag review Know more.
A uncomplicated note
Source: Simplenote
Simplenote’s tagline is “The easiest way to take notes,” which hits the nail on the head. It’s an incredibly uncomplicated, free app that works on any popular platform.
It is owned and maintained by Automattic, the creators of WordPress. It has automatic sync, tags, version history and collaboration features. You can even write in Markdown. All this is available for free and forever.
If you’re looking for a uncomplicated, text-based note-taking system and don’t need extra features like a web cutter, image OCR, and visual organization tools, you can’t go wrong with Simplenote.
Google Keep
Source: OpturaDesign/Shutterstock
We’ll be the first to say it: Google Keep is not a full-fledged alternative to Evernote. Keep is incredibly basic and doesn’t even offer desktop apps or a feature to import all your Evernote notes.
That said, it’s colorful, fun, straightforward to apply, 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. Sharing and collaborating on Google Keep lists is also quite straightforward.
It’s free to apply if you have a Google account. Keep is a good option if you don’t take notes, need a place to write down and store information, and don’t mind searching through it (rather than meticulously organizing your notes).
