Don’t understand how they made it this long.
Venture capital spurred by effectively negative interest rates.
Free money.
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.
I’m a l former emacs user of ~10 years and I could never get used to org mode, so it’s definitely not for “normal” people.
Additionally, in modern times being emacs bound means no decent mobile client, no web interface, and mandatory roll-your-own sync and backup.
There’s a few friends I know who swear by org mode up and down, but it’s a considerable effort for most 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
It’s not quite as full featured as Evernote, but I like Joplin. It can sync using Nextcloud, OneDrive, WebDAV, and other services. It’s end to end encrypted and works well on Android!
Been using Joplin for ages now. used to use Evernote and was trying to find something to replace it. Joplin fitted that need, and being able to store all the stuff on my dropbox in encrypted format made it great for use on all my devices. Combination of Joplin and Bitwarden is pretty much my secure solution to everything. lol
What platform? Windows? Unix? Linux?
Linux and Windows but will also need to support Android
Know anything that I can move all my pdf’s to that has preview and search like evernote?
Once Apple overhauled Notes a few years ago AND offered a way to import from Evernote, I never looked back. For anyone in Apple’s ecosystem Notes is one of the best (and completely free or cheap on any iCloud+ plan).
One thing that Evernote got right is that it made it easy to export your content. I really appreciate that about the service. Leaving Apple Notes is not as easy.
How do you import from Evernote?
From what I remember, you do a full Evernote export and then in Notes on the Mac you do “File --> Import” and you point it to the exported file. I only did it once and many years ago so the process may be different now.
They made it 1/10th of a century. So far, so good, right?
I’m pretty sure Evernote has been around since early 2000s so it’s at least 2/10ths, lol.
I gave my resume to Bending Spoons and they didn’t hire me, so fuck them And fuck them for the layoffs, they have people working from home so relocating seems like an excuse
I didn’t even know Evernote was still a think. I thought it had died years ago
Holy shit someone tell danny brown to save his raps
Surprised they still had all that programmers for something that’s still stuck in the year 2014
I hadn’t heard about Evernote in years. Honestly thought they’d gone under years ago.
Everyone here are so cool with fancy open source alterantives. I’ve been basic and been using Notion for all my med school notes and beyond and while it’s been mostly great the few episodes of outages have been so frustrating. Wish there were some easy to use solutions with all the text formatting options Notion has.
Obsidian
As much as I love obsidian, I’ve been moving on to Emacs org-mode! I like that Obsidian notes are just text files but with org-mode I get that and it’s Emacs which is open-source, thirty years old and literally never going to die. I can export org-mode files to PDFs or even turn them into HTML pages.
I made the mistake of having bunch of columns, annotated images with captions, and tables everywhere that obsidian’s addons couldn’t really replicate the experience. For prep work around writing research papers, it’s probably easier to use than notion for sure.
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
