When it comes to taking notes and using them to get work done, having an app that syncs across all your devices and has a browser version, too, is indispensable. Evernote has long been a leader among note-taking apps, though the company has taken its fair share of criticism over the years for hiking prices, gutting the free version, and not addressing major concerns that power users raise. Nevertheless, in terms of functionality, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a service that does everything Evernote does, which is why it remains an Editors’ Choice. That said, it’s not the best fit for everyone. The high price is a turnoff for many, and the free version is inadequate for most. If you need the best, most capable note-taking app and you can afford to pay for Evernote Premium or Business, it’s worthwhile.
The only app that comes close to Evernote’s prowess is Microsoft OneNote, which is also an Editors’ Choice for note-taking apps. OneNote’s free version is much more generous than Evernote’s. If you already have a Microsoft account, and especially if you already pay for OneDrive storage, using OneNote makes sense. There are differences between the two services that are worth exploring if you’re trying to decide which one to use.
What’s New in Evernote?
In September 2020, Evernote released a thoroughly updated version of its app for iPhone and iPad, with similar new versions of its other apps for macOS, Windows, and Android on the way. The new app fixes a lot of problems under the hood, making the app more stable and the search tool faster. The team also addressed problems of very large notebooks, which the app previously didn’t handle well and led to other problems for users.
A completely redesigned editor makes a big difference. It’s finally easy to clear the formatting of notes, adjust the font size and color, although tools for adjusting line spacing still aren’t available in the Apple mobile apps. Some work also went into making the transition between the Apple mobile apps and the Evernote web app smoother.
How Much Does Evernote Cost?
Evernote offers three tiers of service: Basic (free), Premium ($7.99 per month or $69.99 per year), and Business ($14.99 per person per month, with a minimum of two people). Students are eligible for a 50 percent discount on Premium plans. Evernote previously offered other plan types, such as Plus, and while they’re no longer available, some users may find their account types have been grandfathered forward.
The Basic option has become quite limited in recent years to the point that it’s not especially useful for many people. You can only sync between two devices, and you can’t save notes offline to mobile devices. You get 60MB of new storage each month, which isn’t much, and each uploaded file is limited to 25MB. Unused storage doesn’t roll over. The free account doesn’t come with tech support either. I don’t recommend the free Basic account except as a way to get a sense of the app’s interface. If you need a free note-taking app, Microsoft OneNote is a better pick.
Premium accounts include a lot more features and perks. Storage increases to 10GB per month, and the max file size is 200MB. You can sync with unlimited devices, and mobile devices can store offline notes. You can annotate PDFs that you upload and you get a version history of your notes. When you search for text, Evernote looks in your typed notes, images, as well as the text in attached PDFs and Office files. You can get customer support via email or live chat. There’s also a presentation mode that lets you turn notes into slideshows with no additional effort on your part. You also get the ability to scan and digitize business cards. Premium really is the way to go, but as I said, it’s expensive.
The Business account adds team collaboration features and administrator functions. Read more about it in our separate review of Evernote for Business.
How Do Evernote’s Prices Compare?
Evernote’s prices are high among note-taking apps. But price isn’t the same as value. As mentioned, Evernote’s free option pales in comparison to other free options, namely OneNote. Another good, free option is Zoho Notebook. Then there are a few apps that are free but don’t give you many features, such as Apple Notes and Google Keep.
All the apps mentioned so far provide both apps to make notes and the storage to keep them. Other note-taking apps are just apps and you have to bring your own storage or use a built-in third-party provider, such as iCloud. Bear is one example. It looks like a pared-down version of Evernote and it’s pricing ($1.49 per month or $14.99 annually) is much lower than Evernote’s in part because you’re responsible for providing your own storage.
If you’re already paying for storage from another service, whether it’s Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, or something else, then it might be in your interest to find a note-taking app that’s compatible with it.
The Evernote Way
Evernote is one of those applications that you either get or struggle to understand. It’s so flexible and open that when you first start using it, you can easily get blank-page syndrome. On the company’s blog, you can find tips and use cases for Evernote, which can help you understand not just how to use it, but why. Additionally, from the time you first pick up Evernote to the moment you get the hang of it, the app feels completely different. It gets better the more you use it because it’s difficult to see how valuable it is until you’ve filled it with notes.
In brief, Evernote is a place record, save, organize, and search all your thoughts, notes, voice memos, images, files—whatever you upload. Everything is stored in the cloud so that you can get to it from your computer, smartphone, or tablet. It comes with an excellent search tool that lets you find anything you’ve uploaded to your account. Evernote offers a wealth of tools for sorting and finding your notes in other ways, such as tags, geolocation tags, notebooks, and stacks of notebooks.
When comparing Evernote to some of its biggest competitors, there are fundamental differences. For example, Google Keep and Apple Notes are much closer in form and function to digital reminders or sticky notes. They’re really good for jotting down an idea quickly and leaving that note in view to help you remember it or for adding an alarm-type reminder to it. Evernote is more like a digital filing cabinet where storage and the ability to search for information is as central to the experience as making a note is.
OneNote and Evernote have key differences, too, although they have much more in common than Evernote and Google Keep or Evernote and Apple Notes. OneNote has a pasteboard or scrapbook feel to its pages, whereas Evernote pages are essentially word processing documents. OneNote and Evernote also have slightly different schemas for how you can organize notes; which one is “better” is a matter of personal preference.
App Design
Evernote has apps for every major platform: Windows, macOS, web, Android, iPhone, and iPad. The web app works in any browser, and it’s an important feature. With a web app, you can access your notes no matter where you are or what device you have on hand (as long as you have some kind of web-browsing device on hand). Not every note-taking app has one.
All the apps have an orderly look to them. They resemble other productivity apps with a three-paneled design. Evernote uses rich formatting, which is much improved in the new iOS release and hopefully will be the same in the other apps when their latest versions roll out. Menus let you change the typeface, point size, alignment, and so forth. Some people find formatting distracting, and if it’s not your jam, then look for an app that supports Markdown language. Very simply put, Markdown is a way to type text to apply basic formatting to it. If you’ve ever typed double asterisks on either side of a word in a messaging app to make it bold, that’s Markdown. Bear for Mac and iOS supports Markdown, and so does an app called Laverna.
Everyone’s Evernote account ends up with a unique look based on their note viewing preferences (i.e., the layout options they choose in the app) and what kinds of notes they keep. For example, some Evernote users store a lot of images, in which case it’s helpful to use a layout that shows previews of those images. Some accounts are text-heavy. Some use other graphical elements, like tables. Overall, the fact that you can adjust the layout and view based on the type of notes you have or your personal preferences makes a big difference.
Features in Evernote
Evernote has several advanced features that most other note-taking apps don’t have. The ability to search for text and find it in images, whether those images are snapshots of a page of typed text or contain handwritten text, is perhaps the most remarkable example. Microsoft OneNote can also do it, but few other note-taking apps can.
When you take pictures of whiteboards, presentations, business cards, advertisements, recipes, or anything else you want to save, you can trust that Evernote will make all the text in the image searchable. It’s an incredible feature, although it’s not 100 percent foolproof. From time to time it misses something due to a glare on the image or some other problem.
Search is a big deal. Because Evernote’s search works as well as it does, you don’t have to put as much effort into organizing your notes thoroughly. You can always search for text, whether it’s typed or in an image. For Premium and Business accounts, Evernote also searches the text inside attached PDF and office files. To narrow down a search, you can look in only select notebooks or stacks of notebooks or exclude notes that don’t have a particular tag on them.
Premium and Business users also get a unique feature called Context. When enabled, Context analyses the content of your note, both text and metadata, and then suggests related notes and news articles. In practice, Context suggestions can be a distraction, but it all depends on how you work and what you do with Evernote. Plus, you can always disable them. Or you can customize suggestions so that they only come from certain sources.
Another advanced feature, Work Chat, puts an instant messaging window right into your Evernote workspace. It’s available to all Evernote members, including free Basic members. You can invite anyone to chat with you while you’re in Evernote, though they must sign up for an account to use the tool. I love the concept of being able to collaborate quickly and easily from the same window in which I’m working, although with the rise in popularity of team chat apps, many people already have a preferred method for getting in touch with colleagues and collaborators that’s equally as convenient.
A personal favorite feature is the web clipper. It’s a browser extension that lets you save a web page as an Evernote note. For example, if you see a news article that you want to read later or a recipe online that you want to save, you can clip it to turn it into a note and tell Evernote to save it to the notebook of your choice. The web clipper has options to skip over advertisements on the page, clip only a selected portion of a page, and so forth. A few Evernote competitors have a web clipper, too, including OneNote, Simplenote, and Google Keep.
A feature called Conflicting Changes offers a much-needed service but has never worked as well as I would like it to. When Evernote detects something amiss in a note as a result of a syncing issue, it lets you know by saving copies of the note to a folder it creates called Conflicting Changes. Conflicts occur if you edit a note offline without first syncing changes from a previous edit on a different device. User error can cause conflicts, but slow syncing or a device crash can be to blame as well.
We’ve always wanted Evernote to show the conflicts in such a way that they make sense and can act on them, such as highlighting what’s different between two versions. As it stands, you just get raw chunks of text or whatever the format of your notes, and a time and date stamp of the save. There’s no easy way to reconcile the two files without reading them word for word. It could be nothing more than an extra space or a punctuation mark on one version but not another. You’d never know that, though, because the differences are not visible.
Compatibility With Other Apps
Evernote plays well with other apps, a huge advantage when integrating it into your personal or business life.
For example, every paying Evernote member gets a unique Evernote email address that they can use to forward messages into their Evernote account, turning emails into notes. The app can connect to Slack, too, so that you can type a command into Slack and have the post automatically show up as a note in Evernote. It works with other workplace collaboration tools, as well as personal apps, such as Instapaper and Pocket.
If there’s an app or online service you want to connect to Evernote and don’t see supported, you can always look to see if connectivity is possible through IFTTT or Zapier, because they both support Evernote as well. IFTTT (it stands for “if this, then that”) and Zapier are online tools that help people connect apps that don’t necessarily connect to one other natively.
Evernote vs. OneNote
Evernote and OneNote are two close competitors in the note-taking arena, but they have different styles, functionality, and appeal. Here are a few of the major differences.
On price, OneNote has a more generous free version with no major restrictions, while Evernote’s free version merely gives you a taste of the app.
On storage, Evernote gives you an allotment of storage each month, and unused storage does not roll over. OneNote uses OneDrive for storage by default or SharePoint. Free users get 5GB and can pay for more. The one issue with using OneDrive is that you can use it to store other files from other apps, meaning the amount of space you have isn’t reserved exclusively for your notes.
On style and the method of organization, Evernote seems more business-oriented while OneNote has the potential to be more casual and artistic, depending on how you use it. OneNote’s purple color scheme certainly adds to this impression. OneNote uses a pasteboard style for notes whereas Evernote notes are linear and based on the same concept that governs text files. The pasteboard vs. text file shows up in where you can place tags, too. In OneNote, you can put a tag anywhere on a page next to anything. In Evernote, tags go at the note level only.
On web clippers, Evernote does a better job identifying and removing advertisements when asked, whereas OneNote easily gets tripped up by ads. Evernote also makes a guess at which notebook you want to use, such as adding a web page with a recipe to a notebook for recipes. OneNote shuffles clipped web pages into a default notebook.
An Ever-Changing Value Proposition
Evernote remains one of the best note-taking and syncing services there is in terms of features and functionality. It’s still an eminently worthy Editors’ Choice for its Premium and Business plans. It’s much less of an attractive app for casual users who want to use it for free, however.
If you’re already into Evernote, it’s very difficult to quit and very easy to stick with it for all its great features, plus the new Apple mobile apps and forthcoming revamped apps for all the other platforms. If you aren’t committed to Evernote yet—and especially if you want a free app—OneNote is well worth a try.
