Why I Gave Up Evernote

I used to prefer Evernote (why) over other productivity apps. I thought I’d never do it, but I gave up on Evernote. Here are the reasons why; in random order.

Mobile Sync 

Cross-device Evernote sync messes up my shortcuts within the app. After carefully organizing the shortcuts on my Mac, I turn on my (normally idle) iPad; which reverts the shortcuts back to the last time I had my iPad on. I couldn’t find any way to disable that.

Another quirk is regarding mobile notes I create over Siri. It sometimes takes a few days before they appear on my desktop app; so I can’t rely on that at all.

When I send an URL to Evernote on my iPhone, it takes really a long time for Evernote to capture the URL. I can’t do anything else meanwhile. It probably attempts to render & clip the webpage; while all I want to do is to bookmark the URL in Evernote. I couldn’t find any way to disable clipping and just saving the URL.

When those points come together, I can say that my mobile to desktop sync experience doesn’t meet my expectations, to tell the least.

Visual

Despite persistent user requests, Evernote Mac still doesn’t have a dark mode. After activating the dark mode of Mac Os Mojave, Evernote was the only bright & shiny window left, which was undesirable to tell the least.

When using Mojave in dark mode, the list view messes up with random black lines; and I was unable to get this bug through to the development team (read further).

In my opinion; Evernote is slow to follow the visual trends on Mac anyway. It doesn’t feel like a native modern Mac App to me; it sometimes feels like a program running in a virtual box or something.

Editor

Evernote editor is not very good if you use a lot of indentation in your notes. You can indent a line, but as soon as you hit enter, the new line starts at column zero. This might be insignificant for many users; but as a programmer working with indentations all the time, I find that frustrating.

Support

I was using the paid version of Evernote, and expected to have a decent support. However; getting a bug or significant request to the actual development team is really painful and time consuming.

First, they assign you a random community member which assumes that you are a random dummy end-user and forces you to walk through uninstallation, deletion of cache and whatnot – which never helped in my cases. Then, you need to provide screenshots and videos; which is fair. But most of the time, the random member told me that this matter is or is not in the development plan; and you can’t get through that.

You can try posting on the forums, but I got no response from Evernote devs from there either. It is so time consuming and frustrating that I totally gave up submitting bugs and suggesting new ideas.

Features

I have noticed that I don’t use most of the paid features at all. The ones that I use are available for free on other platforms. So, it didn’t make sense to keep my subscription active.

I have simplified my productivity workflow; and I don’t need the (otherwise wonderful) tagging / searching / linking / etc. capabilities any longer. The ones I need are available on other platforms as well; such as Apple-scripting, sharing, cross-device availability, etc.

(I am planning to write about my new simplified productivity workflow as well; follow me for updates.)

My Choice

Looking for an alternative; I have tried different Evernote alternatives. Check my Time Management FAQ to see the latest productivity application that I’m using.

Evernote is still a very good and powerful product though, if you like it and don’t have any frustrations, keep it.

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