Help this snowflake find an Evernote replacement.

December 28, 2016 7:25 PM

I've used Evernote for years, but due to recent privacy developments would like to switch. I'm having trouble finding something that fits the bill:

My special snowflake needs are:

• Works cross-platform (specifically my personal Mac laptop and desktop Windows work pc. Android phone version nice to have, but optional).
• Can use tags and boolean logic for search.
• Has a web clipper.
• Stores images, etc. in addition to text.

I've been trying to switch to Microsoft OneNote, but I miss Evernote's robust tagging system -- the rigid notebook/file tab/page directory system just doesn't work for me. Google Keep's web-clipper feels super clunky, lacking the nice automatic "clip just the article and not the sidebar crud" features of Evernote or OneNote.

posted by HeroZero to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Best answer: Don't know if you received this, but I recently got an email from Evernote saying that they had got so many outraged customers over whatever their proposed privacy changes were that they apologised and decided not to do it. (At least that was my vague interpretation of it.) So it looks like it's not going ahead. Hope this helps.
posted by Jubey at 7:44 PM on December 28, 2016

Best answer: And I quote,
Evernote recently announced a change to its privacy policy and received a lot of customer feedback expressing concerns. We’ve heard that feedback and we apologize for the poor communication.
We have decided not to move forward with those changes that would have taken effect on January 23, 2017. Instead, in the coming months we will be revising our existing Privacy Policy. The main thing to know is this: your notes remain private, just as they’ve always been.
Evernote employees have not read, and do not read, your note content. We only access notes under strictly limited circumstances: where we have your permission, or to comply with our legal obligations.
Your privacy, and your trust in Evernote are the most important things to us. They are at the heart of our company, and we will continue to focus on that now and in the future.
posted by Jubey at 7:46 PM on December 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Backtracking aside, I'd love to see answers to the original question.
posted by jzb at 3:34 AM on December 29, 2016

This is going to sound perilously old school-- have you tried the newest versions of 'Word?' [O365]

I take a lot of notes for my gig; I've swapped between OneNote, Keep, and EverNote. (And Paper, and whatever 8 x 10 I can grab) It eventually came down to 'F-ck it, I'll just use word.'

It's got all of your features you've identified-- and-- quite a bit more. The newer mobile app versions are pretty incredible, actually, from an Android perspective. As in, I used them, and I said 'Wow, this is a strikingly good bit of software.'

Bonus Idea-- If you are just jotting down quick stuff or to-dos or general hierarchical list type stuff, wunderlist was basically the equivalent of the discovery of fire, as far as improving the quality of my organizational life.

Speak to a physician before considering taking any software internally.

---
Last minute edit: I heard Dropbox Paper is cool; No personal experience with it. But if you've already got the Dropbox...

why not?
posted by mrdaneri at 4:34 AM on December 29, 2016

More of a data point than an actual suggestion, but: I, too, am finally ditching EN now. However, my actual note-notes have mostly been in plain text and accessed via Notational Velocity for a long time.

All that was left in EN was basically web clips, and I've moved that to OneNote. I wasn't a heavy tag user, so maybe this isn't the best approach for you, but EN has felt wonky to me for a long time -- whereas ON has gotten better and better, even on the Mac.
posted by uberchet at 10:26 AM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I ditched EN some time ago because they have no Linux client and the web client was basically unusable for my needs, and switched to Nimbus, which is not a whole different but I like it better anyway.
posted by snakeling at 3:58 AM on December 30, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks all. Sheer inertia is steering me back to Evernote. I tried to workaround OneNote's tagging deficiencies with hashtags, but the search function was super slow.

To clarify how I use Evernote: I'm a playwright. My main use of Evernote is web-clipping articles that have interesting content related to plays I'm working on. So a single article might be tagged #feminism, #WonderWoman, #film, etc., and related to multiple things I'm writing.

Thanks for the tips!
posted by HeroZero at 7:32 AM on December 31, 2016