Don’t understand how they made it this long.
Venture capital spurred by effectively negative interest rates.
I switched to Joplin a few years ago from Evernote and haven’t looked back. Take control of your own notes - Joplin is open source and has clients for every platform, and imports notebooks from Evernote.
Or Obsidian? Take actual control over them including rendering if you want to customize that.
Maybe it’s a different use case 🤔
Obsidian is closed source, so once the company dies, no one can modify the app. Joplin on the other hand is open source.
What I really like about Obsidian is that it stores your notes as plain text/markdown files on your computer. So you always have access to them, even without Obsidian itself. Markdown is also a fairly common format, so it shouldn’t be too hard to move them somewhere else later.
But your concerns are still valid and I generally also prefer free open source software.
The app may be closed-source, but the data is all markdown, which should be easy to move to other apps.
At some point I realized that the solution to this little problem is Emacs org-mode. It’s just sitting there waiting for people to use it.
Haven’t tried Obsidian, but have heard good things about it. I have about 12,000 notes and continue to be impressed with Joplin’s ability to handle that with no issues.
Obsidians really good with lots of notes and linking them together as well as adding metadata to them.
It really depends on your use case. The plug-in ecosystem is also quite rich.
Different use cases, indeed. All I need is plaintext, images, and in-line pdf rendering. No audio, no video, no LaTeX, not even italics or bold.
Now, to be completely fair, while Joplin is great for simple notes, it’s data entry modes are weird AF. I assume, in a programmers mind, the operation is normal for an IDE as it can’t/won’t render links/objects in line with editing. You either get a markup-only window that’s editable, a rendered window that is read only, or lose half your screen to a split-view version. These options are selected via two, separate, unlabeled, non-status-indicating toggle buttons which cycle through 2 and 3 versions if the view.
Aside from that, it seems nice.
It also has a web clipper, which imo is a very handy feature.
Years ago I was a paid Evernote user. The app kept displaying ads on startup trying to get me to pay even more for the “higher tier”. Right then and there I knew the company was dead.
Not only that, but they kept adding features and telling me about it. I was paying for their existing features, and yet half the time I would go to add a note and by the time I clicked through their “we did something you probably don’t care about” popups, I’d forget what I wanted to note.
There is a recent thread discussing Evernote alternatives at https://beehaw.org/post/986939
Personally I exported my notes from Evernote, imported them to Joplin, and setup Syncthing to handle synchronization of note content between my devices. Not exactly a trivial setup but not difficult either. Also fully open source and much more secure.
I mean… haven’t they been surviving purely on inertia for a while already?
They had my inertia. I moved from free to $25/yr. Then watched as it crept up to $60/yr with basically zero improvements. I bailed at $120/yr for a terrible transition to a new db style that could only be updated in real time as you opened each note (taking 3-45 seconds per note to update) and a promised AI component for which I have no use.
Inertia was carrying me as well. First it was $35 for premium, then $70 for several years, and then last month they announced it was going up to $130 and that’s when I bailed.
At $70 it wasn’t too bad and I stayed the last year or so also because they actually published a native Linux app that worked on par with the Windows and macOS app. I won’t say it worked great because since they moved it all to Electron or whatever it’s been slow/clunky all around. But at least it was available and consistent.
And that is why I self-host as much as I can
What’s a good self hosted thinking like Evernote?
For note taking, you might even get by without self-hosting, looking at software like Obsidian which works perfectly fine with just SyncThing to sync between devices, or just literally any other file syncing solution, self-hosted or otherwise.
Obsidian is great. I’ll also throw https://logseq.com/ into the discussion. I just switched from obsidian to it because it better suits my workflow for taking notes.
Trilium is great as well
I didn’t even know Evernote was still a think. I thought it had died years ago
I hadn’t heard about Evernote in years. Honestly thought they’d gone under years ago.
Holy shit someone tell danny brown to save his raps
I finally bailed on it this year.
I have this suspicion that it might survive even this though, it’s been through so much over the years
Man, I saw something about the other day and it doesn’t make me feel good about still having some work notes in Evernote. I’m going to have to find an alternative, but I need collaboration and low cost (cuz my company is cheap AF). And I know those two things don’t usually go together.
Obsidian
Notion FTW
Another example of why federated services are good idea. Also, all such services must be willing to hand over all your data. Which implies open standards and open sourced implementations.
You can already export your data from Evernote.
significant boost in operational efficiency that will come as a consequence of centralizing operations in Europe.
On one hand, this is understandable. My employer recently went through similar learnings and dealt with this equally.
But if the whole know-how of the code and platform needs to be shifted over, this is an awful lot of risk and problems. Maybe they already did the transition. Who knows.
I don’t think they intend to shutdown the service, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the service gets more and more unstable, progresses slower than before and thereby slowly dies off with the competitors speeding ahead.
If you prefer markdown and don’t need a massive set of features, I highly recommend notable.
