We tried Evernote for business in our office for around 6 months. The sharing and communication feature-set was really bad. In a shared notebook we ended up with 'conflicted copies' of lots of important notes that really needed to be an authority on things. The 'Work Chat' feature is spectacularly bad and unusable - to the point of comedy. Most of us flipped way to using Google Apps and Keep Notes, which just really nails collaboration and keeps everything nice and simple.<p>In my opinion Google doesn't get enough credit for it's Apps offering. I see lots of articles on here and elsewhere that deride it as a 'search company' that 'can't build product' - but I really think they're quietly building an excellent product suite.
Fab is already a "dead unicorn" in most people's eyes. During their Series D in 2013, they had a post-val of 1.17B, only to be acquired earlier this year for 15M.<p>I think the biggest problem these current VC-backed unicorns will face is when "venture tourism" comes to an end sometime in the future and all this available cash becomes harder and harder to raise as mutual/hedge funds back slowly away from the private markets:<p><a href="http://blog.pitchbook.com/if-winter-is-coming-how-well-are-unicorns-prepared/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.pitchbook.com/if-winter-is-coming-how-well-are-u...</a><p>I hear a lot of chatter about how IPO is the new down round in tech, and it seems to make sense to me. I don't foresee the high quantity of venture-backed companies worth over 1BN being able to keep up with such valuations ESPECIALLY if they try and hit the public market anytime soon. I also don't see how they're going to be able to maintain increases in valuations thus making it pretty safe to assume an impending "down round" period for those unable to find sustainable revenue. And lastly, there isn't a huge M&A market for companies with a price tag north of 1BN.
As a paying customer, I see Evernote as awesome and terrible at the same time. I've enjoyed using Alternote on OSX as an Evernote client to get what I really want out of Evernote...a place to store, umm, notes. No chats. No web clippings and highlights. It's just notes I write, and associated attached media like document scans or images, in a clean interface. One of my favorite Evernote features is automatic OCR of images within notes. They do an excellent job at it.<p>I only use Evernote for my personal note-taking, and as much as I shake my fist at the massive clutter that has always existed in their first party apps, I can't live without it. (Notebooks AND Tags AND Search AND a map? Why?) It has never once occurred to me to use it as a collaboration tool. It boggles my mind why they would think this is something their customers want from them.<p>I've been using Evernote for so long the thought of having to move dozens of notebooks and hundreds of notes to another platform does not sound appealing!
Evernote lost some of my data, which is like a money market fund breaking the buck. You just can't allow that to happen. If you do you'll get carried out. Twitter could lose a few of my tweets and it wouldn't matter, you lose my valuable notes? GTFO<p>I should add that I was a paying customer.<p>I was already struggling with the crappy UI and looking for an alternative when the data loss happened. For a while I tried different apps, then Microsoft released OneNote for iOS. OneNote works great for me but now I'm snake-bitten and worried about Microsoft losing my data.
What on earth is this trying to say?<p><i>Evernote, located in Redwood City, CA, and directly on the 101, is a bit north of the tech companies that dot Silicon Valley and far south of those that have headquarters in San Francisco. In other words, Evernote isn't exactly on its own in terms of tech-oriented neighbors that it competes with for talent.</i>
I ported all my writings from Evernote to Google Docs the day when I read that their CEO said that he was building a "corporation for the next 100 years" a couple of years ago. There's nothing wrong with such desire, but I thought that the lack of realism/humility of this CEO would run this company into the ground.
If the original author reads this; I found the combination of webkit anti-aliasing with a thin body weight to be instantly eye-strain-inducing, and the deliberate hiding of scroll bars even on non-mobile viewports made for a persistent sense of unease.
So what's the alternative to Evernote?<p>The article lists Google Docs, which doesn't really seem equivalent, and OneNote. I'm using OneNote right now to organize planning for a media/writing project, and the experience leaves a lot to be desired. The writing interface in particular is clunky, in the web client and on Android -- on my phone, I have to pop open a menu and then a drawer just to switch bold text on or off. And the Office365/OneDrive setup just isn't well integrated overall -- navigating OneDrive is confusing, and you can't, for example, insert a picture stored in OneDrive into a note.<p>Google Keep doesn't fit my needs, as it's missing support for any sort of real organization. It seems more geared toward quick digital post-its and todo lists.<p>Is Dropbox's Notes product any good? That seems to be in closed beta still...
Evernote: <i>"Bring your life's work together in one digital workspace. Evernote is the place to collect inspirational ideas, write meaningful words, and move your important ..."</i><p>And they're going down. Not good.<p>How to export your data from Evernote.[1]<p>[1] <a href="http://jasonfrasca.com/deconstructing-everyday-blog/evernote-how-to-backup-notes-import/" rel="nofollow">http://jasonfrasca.com/deconstructing-everyday-blog/evernote...</a>
I find Evernote quite useful for specific domains, namely interviews. When preparing to give interviews, I gather all the info online using clipper. I can then categorise information based on the interviewee. After publishing interviews, I probably won’t access that information again until relevant information appears when researching about my next interviewee, e.g. a statement or an allusion to the previous person.<p>The latest significant development I saw from Evernote is its tie-up with the Nikkei newspaper, which was still a meager addition of the “Clip” button to the online version. (It’s well-known that Phil is a fan of Japan; Evernote even tied up with the Nagatanien bottled tea.)<p>Perhaps, Evernote can expand its offerings into paperback books, in which annotations are not yet effectively digitised. I’d also appreciate if they could release a suite for members of the press, who need to research, organise, and release information.
I was a heavy evernote user a few years ago and then migrated to OneNote. I think one of the challenges that is causing evernote users to drain off is as its organization model for notes is broken unless you are highly disciplined in using tags.<p>As your usage grows the product becomes worse for you for non-search navigation and discovery.<p>MS OneNote on the other hand feels like an upgrade from evernote in terms of its ability to provide a simple hierarchy for organising and navigating between notes and notebooks.<p>A key thing for any productivity tool is to balance between it being easy to adopt for new users and continue to improve its utility as usage grows over time. Very few companies have managed to do this effectively.
I was afraid of this, I've spent years optimizing my workflow to store stuff in Evernote, because I love it's search feature. (IFTTT recipes to save everything from twitter/reddit/etc into it). I'm extremely ADD, and even have audio recordings from years ago that I'm hesitant to jettison. anyone know the quickest way to push everything (audio+pdf's) to an alternative?<p>Also, do One Note/ any other alternative do search within PDF?
I was a heavy user of Evernote until I tried using it across multiple platforms. I'm not sure if things have changed since then but a while back my notes on my laptop and iOS and Android would all render differently, I couldn't control or edit as easily on any of my mobile phones and the syncing was never consistent. I constantly found myself reopening the app and forcing a sync to make sure I could access a note on another device.<p>While I do like OneNote better in some ways its organization style is very old fashioned (at least with Evernote it was easier to stuff tons of things into it, tag it properly and get it back easily). Once you get past 10 or so notes in a single section (depending on screen size) you have to scroll in OneNote and it just makes things a pain.<p>Google docs is awesome for documents but for notes? No thanks, it's too much of a pain in the ass to navigate. At least with Evernote or OneNote I can quickly access a note within the same interface.<p>Honestly I feel like there is room for a killer note taking app here that can go cross platform. But it would quire so much effort to build something even to parity that I don't know when or if that would happen.
The only thing I use, and pay, Evernote for is digitising printed receipts and similar documents, managing which otherwise I find troublesome. The document photo taking features which make taking pictures of receipts easier is pretty nice, as well as the ability to search for text through saved images.
I like Evernote. I like how its available across devices. The Web UI is really nice, though the Desktop Native app needs a facelift. I use it to write "private blogs" on my tablet. I used to use Svtble for this as I love the simplicity and the UI but they dont seem to have a native android app, so Evernote is how I do things now and would be sad to see them go.<p>Does anyone know of any better apps for my usecase (writing loads of text on tablet and have them easily available across devices. Preferably native Desktop app as well)?<p>Ps: I love OneNote but... it does't feel like its meant for dumping loads of text into it and the Android app has horrible reviews so i haven't risked downloading it yet
I used to use Evernote back in 2012. I found the ui confusing and not very useful for my needs. I then adopted Workflowy for simple to do lists, organizing info, and that works great for my style; have not gone back to Evernote ever since.
With the risk of sounding bitter, I am truly not, I always wondered why does it take close to 300M and 400 employees according to Crunchbase to build a note taking app, even at scale.
We make a better more collaborative app that centers on really simple notes as the core thing. You can jot some Knotes but you can also share them natively like slack and put lots of content from other services into them. Knotable.com<p>Feedback welcome. Still beta<p>But the Chrome extension is 1.0 and doing really well!<p>Knotable.com/chrome/note
I use Evernote purely as a tool to store bookmarks. I could probably use anything else but Evernote generally suits my needs for that. Rarely, if ever, use it for taking notes or anything that isn't a bookmark. Best export my bookmarks if the story is correct.
Doesn't it seem nasty to claim that a large established company may go out of business? Just the claim can hurt their business.<p>Evernote is fairly useful. I pay the minimum amount above the free tier. I enjoy the product but I only use it perhaps 10 minutes a day, on average.
i'm using evernote with the web-browser extension Clearly, this way its useful to me..(as for example, if i want to clip an article for later reading etc..)