Notion for Wavering Evernote Users

The story of a die-hard Evernote user‘s journey to Notion

I installed Evernote on my birthday a long time ago in 2009 — it was the best gift any note-taking fan could give themselves back then. Soon after, I became a paid subscriber and have been ever since.

Over the years, I’ve created several thousands of notes used across multiple devices including mobile for everything from work, to creative projects, business, and my personal life.

In the years since then, I also tried a range of popular note-taking competitors such as OneNote, Dropbox Paper, and Google Keep. I even built my own wikis and personal knowledge management systems with the likes of Dokuwiki and WordPress.

But nothing could sway me from Evernote.

My Early Experience With Notion

Notion began to appear on my watchlist in 2018 after various articles recognised it as an app to keep a watch on, and later in 2020 when news broke of the company becoming a unicorn startup valued at $2 billion.

As a fan of productivity apps, I checked it out at the time but, except for a couple interesting twists on functionality, I found it didn’t have much to tempt me from the green trunk of the Evernote elephant.

It’s difficult to shift away from something that has become both fundamental and second nature to you for a large portion of your adult life.

The Cracks Begin to Show In Evernote

However, as the years had progressed, I’d begun to encounter more and more challenges with Evernote:

• Limited hierarchy: The three level structure of stacks, notebooks, and notes became increasingly limiting, causing a sprawl in the breadth of my notes instead of depth — my navigation sidebar in Evernote scrolls for days
• Slow performance: The Windows app has become slow over time and, as of last year, frequently freezes for a couple seconds across PC and notebook (most likely because of the number of notes I have in there)
• File upload limits: While I never consider my note-taking app as my major file storage area, the very fact that Evernote limits this (60MB per month on the free plan, 10 GB per month for paid) meant I often caught myself debating whether to add a particular file and, in so doing, subconsciously discouraging myself from even bothering to upload loads of files
• Update overload: Updates to the Evernote desktop app became more and more conspicuous causing a barrier often to using the app with its prompts and needs to restart (a similar challenge I encountered with Firefox that eventually made me look for another browser with a more transparent update process)

The Path Back to Notion

I’d put up with these Evernote challenges for years, trying to convince myself they were mere ‘eccentricities’ so that I wouldn’t be tempted by competing note-taking apps.

I was like Ulysses devoutly strapped to the mast of Evernote, clinging to it as the only thing that had helped me take notes productively to date. I continued to be an Evernote evangelist encouraging all those around me to hold fast to Evernote too.

Actual footage of Vaughan sticking to Evernote

Then in 2022, I started work on a project with a good friend and, in amongst the vast smorgasbord of apps that she likes to dabble with, she was using Notion but only casually.

I begrudgingly had to accept I’d have to get to grips with it for the duration of the project — although I declared I would not be happy about it!

But experiencing something is the best teacher and, in so doing, opened my eyes to what Notion had since become.

10 Reasons Evernote Users Should Consider Notion

Out of the box, Notion has the following benefits over Evernote:

1. Blocks: Everything in Notion — from headings to text to lists to pages — is a Block and can easily be repositioned anywhere on a page or dragged to another page
2. Unlimited page hierarchy: For better or worse, Notion allows you to create sub-pages until infinity like note-taking nesting dolls, enabling you to worry less about at what level a note should go while you create it
3. Toggles: I have several lengthy pages of notes so that everything is within easy reach, which means masses amounts of scrolling in Evernote whereas with Notion, I place that content into toggled headings and collapse them in one click
4. Turning: Any Block can be turned into another type of Block — need to make a line of text into a bullet list or a toggled heading or even a new page? couple clicks and you’re done!
5. Commenting: The ability to have threaded conversations on the Block level with people you’re sharing a note with is a game-changer for collaboration
6. Easy hyperlinking: Pasting a link over selected text is a beautiful way of quick hyperlinking, or you @ mention the name of a page to link to it inline (and automatically keep the name of that link updated with any changes you may make to the page title)
7. Auto Table of Contents: For those of us who write structured content, there can be no greater joy than being able to type /toc anywhere on a Notion page and instantly have the page headings automagically summarised into clickable links
8. Automatic backlinks: An increasingly popular feature to turn note-taking into knowledge management is the ability not only to link to other pages but to easily see what other pages link to the current page you’re viewing
9. Fully-featured free version: With the free version, you can use every aspect of Notion across unlimited devices with an unlimited number of file uploads under 5MB per file (unlimited file size on the paid Pro plan) — in fact, Notion’s free version is better featured and more complete than the free version of any other major app I’ve ever seen
10. Workspaces, Reminders, Power Search, and much more: The list of features for Notion goes on and on, but then I’d have more than 10 points for what should be a snappy summary section

Yet, despite this growing list of Notion advantages, I still bravely resisted changing from Evernote — I would not go gently into that good night!

The Number One Reason Why I Changed to Notion

Databases.

I’ll say that again:

DATABASES

When I saw the tremendous leap ahead that Notion had made with its concept of databases, I knew there was no way my Evernote structure could compete. No amount of describing this functionality can do it justice until you actually use it for yourself.

Notion databases might not seem like that big a deal on paper — seemingly no more than glorified tables perhaps or like mini-Excel spreadsheets — but that belies their immense power within a note-taking app.

Databases as the Evernote Killer

Databases enable you to move beyond the nested page structure and into more of a spider-web structure where pages are all on the same level but easy to sort and filter on-the-fly before drilling down into a specific page.

They are vital for the note-taker who has subjects that have lots of “items” within them, be they chapters of a book, a wishlist of products, or a summary of your friends. With Notion, I no longer have to store these as a complex hierarchy of mega-filled pages like I did with Evernote.

How I Started Using Databases in Notion

I group each major content area into a database and associate various unique information about each. For example, I have databases for:

• Projects and Tasks: For various clients as well as business, creative, and even life projects
• Worklogs: To track the time I spend on all those client-related tasks as well as calculate the billables for these based on the rates for different types of tasks
• Entertainment Library: Tracking books, movies, series, games — what have I seen, what’s lined up next, what’s on the wishlist, what do I own etc
• Shopping List: What groceries I need to buy including tracking the cheapest price I’ve paid for those items before
• Applications: All my notes to myself about the apps I use
• Clippings of text and images I’ve found on the Internet
• Songs I’m composing
• Stories I’m writing
• Daily journal entries…

…and with that, I was no longer able to resist the Siren song of Notion.

Databases were everywhere

What I Miss From Evernote

Is Notion better than Evernote for everything? Absolutely not.

Evernote beats out Notion in the following areas:

1. Offline availability: Notion is designed to be used with an Internet connection, although it does cache recently accessed pages but there’s no guarantee that page will be available when you need it offline and it doesn’t cache database entries — Evernote is rock-solid with its offline functionality (albeit a feature not available in the free version of Evernote)
2. Email-to-Evernote: Evernote provides you with a personal email address to email content to your Evernote that will then automatically be added as a new note
3. Encryption: You can optionally password protect any text in your notes for added security of sensitive information
4. Deep search: Search text found within PDFs and even pictures (again only as part of the paid version)
5. Unlimited version history: While you can view a summary of all the updates made to a page in Notion, there is only 30 days version history available even in its paid Pro version (Enterprise does have a full version history) — Evernote’s paid plan reveals the full version history

Like it was for me during the peak of Evernote, these are ‘eccentricities’ of Notion that are not deal-breakers.

But some of these will be deal-breakers for users with different priorities, the biggest complaint I see most often is the inability to store notes on your local device.

So Will I Be Using Both Evernote and Notion?

The short answer is no.
The long answer is yes.
Of course it is.

For where I’m at right now in my journey with Notion, I’m fully committing to it — we’re exclusive! Switching back and forth between Evernote during this focus time with Notion causes confusion and risks me having to debate where to keep a note when I create it (the number one barrier to productivity). I’ve been exploring the very limits of Notion just as I did for Evernote.

But I’m not migrating all my existing content that’s already in Evernote into Notion. Rather, I use Notion for content that’s of most relevance to me right now, and if I need some information I already have in Evernote, only then do I bring it into Notion.

A few productivity influencers suggest using Evernote as the place for all your clippings: the dumping ground, the unsorted Inbox. Then after you’ve sorted what you want to keep in there, you send the filtered notes from Evernote to Notion.

I’d also use Evernote for any information I know I’d need to be able to access on mobile if I don’t have data, and if I ever have visual content I know I might need to search text for (such as research PDFs or photos of whiteboards).

But for now, this Ulysses is enjoying a productive life with his Siren.

In Summary

Anyone who knows me knows I’m loyal to a fault and I don’t change easily, so switching away from Evernote amounted to an existential knowledge management crisis.

I went through a cycle you might very well experience too: self-debate while testing some random Notion features, then feeling like I was cheating on Evernote, so trying to go back to Evernote to give it one last chance, before embracing Notion for storing new notes, causing me to completely turn my back on Evernote, then becoming overly obsessed with using Notion for everything, until eventually reaching a level of synthesis of realising the value of each.

Evernote has become my Archive I refer to ad-hoc whereas Notion is my Hub — the daily productivity tool.