I loved the idea of Evernote. A specialized, well-designed app for taking naps that persisted in the cloud and had great search-ability. I also liked that I own that content, a lot of my notes are drafts of creative writing or personal reflection, and so I don’t want to store that in my corporate’s OneNote for privacy and continuity reasons.
Lately though, Evernote hasn’t lived up to it’s hype. Meanwhile, Apples Notes has become just competent enough that it makes sense to switch.
My problems with Evernote
Performance
Evernote is abysmally slow on a Mac. Opening the application or creating a new note can take 15 seconds or more. If you’re trying to capture a thought or phrase just uttered, that’s just too damned slow.
Sharing
Evernote is blocked by my company’s firewall. This makes sharing notes a PITA. I guess many corporations would prefer for you to use the bundled OneNote.
Architecture
Evernote is monolithic: I prefer apps that build small; use-case specific apps mean greater simplicity, ease-of-use, less bloat, etc. I don’t need Work Chat, don’t need Tasks, etc.
Interoperability
Evernote friction with Microsoft & other vendors: e.g. Ordered lists moving between Micorsoft Word and Evernote often get trashed. Moving tabular data between Excel or JIRA is a real pain.
Buggy
Things just don’t work. Fields that don’t sort in the notes grid. Full-text search that misses terms. Giant memory leaks, etc. etc.
Privacy
Evernote made some big policy changes and they signal that privacy isn’t paramount for them, as it is with Apple. These changes were made opt-out rather than opt-in. Evernote also leaves encryption turned off by default.
Expense
At ~ $75/year for Evernote Personal, this was a pretty significant expense that only offered marginal value above the free alternatives I have like Microsoft To Do (formerly Wunderlist) and Apple Notes.
Missed things
No bulk tagging