Switching From Evernote To Notion
A few months back I decided to make a serious attempt at switching from Evernote to Notion.
Since tweeting about it created some engagement, I thought I should follow up with a longer post on my experience with Notion vs Evernote. So here we are!
This is by no means an extensive review of Notion — it’s simply a summary of some of the things I like about it, plus some of the issues I experienced coming from Evernote.
Why switch from Evernote to Notion?
I’ve been a long-term die-hard fan of Evernote since I signed up 10 years ago. It pretty much revolutionized the way I do “personal information management”, like it has for millions of people around the world.
Evernote has sincerely been one of the most life-changing products I’ve ever used. It was the first app I listed when I listed out 6 apps that will improve your life a few years back. As mentioned there, Evernote has helped me:
- Keep a journal when traveling
- Remember and develop ideas
- Research and learn new things
- Build vocabulary in foreign languages
… to mention just a few things.
So why did I feel like it was time to switch from Evernote to something else? Simply put, the pace of product development has not kept up with the world around it. In fact, in some ways I feel like the product has become worse over the years. The iPhone app now feels sluggish for me and it literally took years for the iOS app to get a somewhat modern look and feel. Not to mention, you would expect new and clever features being shipped from a world leader in personal information management. Alas, loyal Evernote users have received very little to get excited about in the last few years.
As a consumer, I would much rather support a product that continues to innovate and impress customers rather than one that has become complacent.
So, after asking around a bit, Notion seemed to be the best bet in terms of what I was looking for.
How did I make the switch from Evernote to Notion?
Notion conveniently offers functionality to import your notes from Evernote when you set up your account. This makes it easy to bootstrap your new Notion account.
I should say the import feature is not perfect. In my case, a few of the notes had their formatting broken — basic things like newlines disappeared, making notes just one long string for text. Not ideal, but not a dealbreaker in my case.
Also, if you have encrypted Evernote notes, these will be imported in their encrypted form without any way to decrypt them. I’ll get back to this later in this article.
I imported thousands of notes, and I’ve naturally not reviewed all of them after importing, so there might be other issues with the import feature that I’m not aware of.
What do I like about Notion?
Besides the fundamental reason I changed to Notion — they continuously improve their product and ship new features — there are quite a lot of things to like about Notion for an Evernote user.
Structure
You could use Notion with pretty much plain text and no particular structure. But if you’re like me and like to keep things organized in your way, there’s so much you can do with Notion! I really like how they’ve managed to allow for flexible structures both within notes and between notes.
I’ll give you one simple example from my daily life. I like to keep a “learning journal” as a part of my quarterly personal objectives and key results (OKRs). Here’s what it looks like in Notion:
Every entry in that calendar is a separate note within Notion, but it’s organized such that it’s easy for me to: 1) remember when I learned this (a form of situated learning), and 2) keep track of progress in learning new things (for my OKRs).
This would have been quite cumbersome to set up in Evernote, but with Notion it’s extremely easy.
Emojis 😍
Something as basic things as associating emojis with notes makes it feel like it’s “your” notebook, and it’s easy to get around visually. There’s a reason emojis are popular in modern communication — they’re quite efficient meaning bearers. This is also true for your notes, so embrace them.
Markdown
Your notes are written in Markdown so you can export them for use in other products that support Markdown (e.g. Github). This makes you feel like you’re not fully locked-in, in case you want to switch to a different product later.
Powerful filters and views
Related to the point above about structure, you can create views and filters in Notion so as to organize your notes in useful ways.
I’ve spoken to people who have set up Kanban boards and quite advanced databases inside of Notion, so it’s really up to you to take advantage of the power of Notion’s filters and views.
Web clipper
The Chrome extension to copy content from websites comes straight out of the Evernote playbook. It feels quicker than the Evernote equivalent though, probably because the processing of the website content happens at a later stage.
General user experience
Overall, Notion feels simple and snappy on both iOS and iPhone. I also find the design clean and modern. As with Evernote, there might be a bit of a hurdle to get over in the sense you need to find your way to use it to manage your personal information. But for an Evernote user, it’ll be easy to get started.
What could be improved about Notion?
As with all products, there are things to improve. Here I’ll focus on what I missed coming from Evernote.
Search
Firstly, the search is not great. This has been one of Evernote’s strengths — you can find any note in seconds just by searching for it. In Notion’s case, the search feels a bit slower, and (anecdotally) it doesn’t return as accurate results — at least not in my case.
OCR
This is related to search as well, but Evernote’s optical character recognition (OCR) really is a killer feature. Take a snapshot of some handwritten notes on a whiteboard or piece of paper, save it in Evernote, and it’ll be indexed by their search engine.
I would love to see this in Notion as well, and allegedly it’s on their roadmap:
Images
When taking a photo inside a Notion note you have to wait until it uploads before exiting the note. If you don’t, the note will be saved without the photo — which is annoying! I don’t recall having this issue with Evernote.
Web clipper
Yes, the web clipper appears in this section as well! Although I like how quick and easy it is to use the Chrome extension, sometimes the web clipper does a poor job of grabbing content from websites. For example, it might try to convert something into a table when it would be better to grab it as plain text.
Encryption
Notion doesn’t support encrypted notes, so you probably shouldn’t use it to store secrets. If your account gets compromised, you’re basically screwed. The additional security layer in Evernote where you could encrypt individual notes with a passphrase is something I miss. Because of no encryption, there are certain things I don’t store in Notion at all.
Conclusion: I Switched from Evernote to Notion
Evernote might still be the front runner in some respects, but I’m willing to bet on the horse right behind it accelerating with higher pace.
As grateful as I am to Evernote for 10 years of service, it’s time to move on.
In case you’d like to try out Notion as well, you can use this referral link and get $10 in credits to get started. Thanks for reading!
