Eight years on, I'm shopping for an Evernote replacement
Friday, July 25, 2025
I’ve been a user of Evernote since April 24, 2008 and spent much of that time as a Pro user. I am definitely a power user. The free version, now called Basic, doesn’t allow use on more than two devices and severely limits the use of email forwarding to get notes into your account. Upgrade to plus and you can do those two things but still can’t search within files, present your notes or annotate PDFs. The only viable plan is Premium at $8/month and I wouldn’t mind paying it if I still had the same faith in the company I had for the first four years or so. The free and middle-tier plans are really aimed at users who will sooner make due with Notes.app on Apple devices, Google Keep, OneNote or just plain old email.
And couple the plan changes with the recent threat of a ridiculous privacy policy update and predictable near-immediate walkback and it’s just not the same company anymore. The new policy would have opted everyone into employee-readable notes to facilitate machine learning improvements to the product. Any company that chooses opt-out for privacy eroding policies instead of opt-in is just not very trustworthy.
I’m testing alternatives now, with a special focus on Simplenote, which supports only text. Attachments are great but I’m not sure I need them in my notetaking solution anymore. Google Drive and Dropbox are so embedded in my workflows for various projects that integrated file storage isn’t as big a requirement as it once was.