I am looking for a replacement for Evernote. Does anyone have any experience or knowledge about this app?
Is there any special reason you’re looking for an Evernote replacement? That might help with responses.
I’m not exactly looking to replace Evernote just yet. But I was peeved last month that notes I was taking at a live, on-site conference using Evernote on an iPad Air 2 got truncated (= lost) because the app started trying to sync the current note every 30 seconds while I was still trying to type.
It’s a fault with Evernote’s rewritten-from-scratch framework where they did away with manual syncing or any control over when syncing happens.
For that reason, I would want to know if an app like Joplin can offer me a better experience, AND if it can seamlessly transfer my 10,000+ existing notes.
I am playing with it because I can sync the database to my Synology via WebDAV. I like that it’s open-source and you can self-host it. It’s also pretty feature-rich. But it’s harder to use than Apple Notes because Markdown is practically mandatory, and the syncing is a bit janky.
Thanks for the knowledge. I have recently discovered sub-optimal syncing and saving in recently updated Evernote on newish MacBook Pro w/Monterey. Problems on both Mac app and Evernote in a Chrome browser tab. I have gotten Joplin going w/Chrome extension and app. Interested in other possible alternatives, my hopeful future is less of Evernote. Willing to explore syncing to local hardware or iCloud, etc.?
Jun 09 2022 03:39:39 PM
I haven’t used evernote, so I can’t compare directly to its feature set. A good notes option, though not cheap, is Alphons Schmid’s Notebooks. $14 for iOS, $40 for Mac (a native mac app). It’s been around for years and is well supported. There is reasonable help on the web site. It can import evernote and apple notes (you have to extract the apple notes from an ios backup). It can sync via webdav (servers are built in to the apps), dropbox and icloud drive, or with a $3 in-app purchase, to an external drive/sd card and other options. All data is stored in standard formats, so if you do a drawing, it’s a .png etc. Two flavors of markup, a bookmarklet to send a webarchive from a browser to notebooks, equation editing with MathJax or KaTex, two files can open side by side, a watch app. Lots more features, many I haven’t even played with. For syncing, my Mac version of Notebooks connects to its files on my file server, and I sync the phone and ipads with the mac.
I hadn’t known about Joplin. At first glance it’s similar to Notebooks. It’s an electron app, so the interface has those peculiarities. It probably won’t get a second glance from me just because I already have Notebooks, but if I was shopping it would be worth some time.
In a different class, I use Goodnotes ($8, free for 3 notebooks) quite a lot with the apple pencil on my ipad mini. It reads my writing much better than I can myself. I also have the Mac version of Goodnotes, but it’s Catalyst, not native. It’s kind of ok, but I’ve never met a catalyst app I like. In practice, Goodnotes gets used for projects, and Notebooks for more ad hoc things.
If you want to audio record a lecture or meeting that syncs to the notes you take, Notability can do that, but they’ve gone to a subscription ($12/year) and also grab some identifiable data about you; since I don’t need that feature, Goodnotes takes its place easily.
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I have been using Jopin for some time. I’m not, by any measurement, a power user. Mostly I just use it as an ‘interesting’ items database. Jopin functions just fine with one exception - the browser plug-in -I’m using Brave - disappears from time to time.
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I replaced it with Notes and a DropBox folder of pdf files. Never really got comfortable with Evernote myself.