Five promising Evernote alternatives
A s Evernote recently changed its pricing plans, restricting free access to only two devices, the interest in alternative note taking applications had seen a sudden surge. As people have started to look for a better, or at least more affordable solution, the many shortcomings of the most popular note taking application had come to light, from privacy concerns, to the question of who really owns your data. When a company can suddenly restrict access to your own files, it might occur to you that keeping your data on other people’s servers (or using the buzzword term, “The Cloud”), might not always be the idea, unless you have assurances that you may do with it as you please.
The following five applications have the potential to challenge and probably eventually break Evernote’s monopoly over your note taking habits, offering different answers to the same problem. Not all of them will solve it completely, but each offers a viable alternative to the one note-taking app to rule them all, which suddenly does not let you access your notes like you used to, unless you buy it back from them. (Click the app names for links.)
Simplenote
Simplenote is a perfect name for an app, in which simplicity is meant literally: There is no fluff, no extras, no bells and whistles, only a blank canvas, and your notes. To make it more than a plain text editor, Simplenote offers MarkDown support, convenient tagging, and a powerful search function, and a quite innovative “history slider”, which lets you revert to previous versions easily. Another major advantage of Simplenote over many other apps is the ability to export notes as simple text files, which will preserve tags, metadata, and even deleted items in the thrash can.
Where Simplenote falls short is offline file support. To be able to use it, you need to register an account, and your notes will be stored God-knows-where (meaning, in “The Cloud”), by a company, you might know even less about that you do (or thought you did), about Evernote. Other than that, heavy-weight Evernote users might find Simplenote just too simple. None of the advanced options are available here, nor even the simplest ways to organise notes (besides tagging). There are no notebooks, or stack, not even folders, only notes in a list, which can limit Simplenote’s usability for the professional user, but might be appealing for someone who is looking to quickly jot down their thoughts without needing to worry about a cluttered UI.
OneNote
Microsoft is a serious player, when it comes to note-taking. OneNote, Microsoft’s note taking solution is a professional tool, allowing you to take notes in visual way, not unlike drawing on a white-board. Indeed, there is very little that OneNote cannot do, from taking simple notes, through ToDo list to well-designed, professionally crafted documents (have a look under Templates). OneNote, is part of the Microsoft Office suite, and similarly to other Office components, you would be hard-pressed to find anything that comes even close in terms of features and functionality.
Paradoxically, that same feature-overload can be one of the major turn-offs, when considering OneNote as an Evernote alternative. If you are looking for a simple, rapid note-taking solution, that aids your productivity, OneNote can seem too big and clunky, often not very intuitive to use, where common features can be easily lost among the plethora of functionality. Another problem point is OneNote requires a Microsoft account, so it can store your note in the cloud (on Microsoft’s OneDrive), which is convenient for synchronising, but does not address the problem with privacy. That, and the lack of a native Linux client (for which the web version does compensate somewhat), might make OneNote one of the less-likely candidates for the privacy-savvy user.
Google Keep
Another tech giant’s own take and answer to the note taking question, Google Keep might be regarded as the polar opposite of OneNote. The interface is meant to be simple and clutter free, the note taking process streamlined and rapid. In reality, the interface quickly gets cluttered. When you have more than a few notes, default staggered grid view will make it near impossible to find anything without using the search function. This can of course be countered by switching to a list-like view, only this means sacrificing a lot of screen real-estate on larger screens.
Google Keep offers some convenient options, like interactive checklists, quick and simple image attachments, custom background colors, simple labels. The latter two can prove to be a real asset when organising notes, as there is no other way to organise them at all. There are no notebooks or folders, all your notes are poured into the same ever-growing bucket. This might be in line with how Google Keep forces simplicity to the extreme: Even the basest text formatting options are missing, which is not necessarily productive, and makes the usefulness of adding “collaborators” rather questionable. Why work on a document together that cannot, by any standard, be regarded as a document?
Then there is the usual question of privacy: Google Keep(s) your data in the cloud. It’s fine, Google usually knows more about us, than we ourselves do (which is scary), letting them know a few more of our secrets will surely not make a huge impact? (Hint: Yes, it will.)
On the positive side, Google Keep makes it really easy to add different types of notes, pin items to top, or even set reminders. The interface will be familiar on all platforms, which might be good, or bad. The UI and UX have been designed with mobile interfaces in mind. It might not work the best on the desktop, but makes it easier to find your way around on different devices. On the whole, Google Keep is good for someone looking for simplicity, yet might be a little too cluttered for the same reason, which makes it the single most ambivalent app on this list.
TiddlyWiki
TiddlyWiki is a “non-linear personal web notebook”, which looks (and works) just as strange as this sounds. When you first try to get familiar with TiddlyWiki, it looks like you’ll need an MSc in Computer Science to be able to use it, but when you get to know it a little better, it should be clear that you’d be better off with a PHD…
Entirely web based, TiddlyWiki will run in your browser. There are extensions available for all major web browsers, with native apps for Android and iOS, with some more exotic options available for Android, and a possibility to self host it on your own machines or servers, although this needs a little technical knowledge and fiddling. With TiddlyWiki, you can organise your notes into so-called “tiddlers”, which are the units of note taking, might or might not representing individual notes. The options available here are so extensive (including horizontal, or even vertical tabs, scripting, HTML and CSS formatting, various short-codes, and loads of customisation options) that it would take an essay, or even a dissertation, to even try to describe them all.
Best of all, TiddlyWiki fully supports offline files, which means, you are in perfect control of your notes and data. TiddlyWiki’s extensive feature set makes it a versatile tool for professionals. You can create rich documents, be it online documentation, a technical book’s outline, a whole interactive book, or even whole websites. Think about it as a raw version of gitbook. On steroids.
TiddlyWiki is definitely not a simple note taking app for quickly jotting down everyday notes, or organising the quickly occuring ideas. Of course it can be used for that, but it would take a certain personality… Yet for professionals, it offers features that would be difficult to find anywhere else, and for serious work, it might be very well worth learning it’s feature and tool set.
TagSpaces
TagSpaces is an open source, personal data manager and file organiser. More than just a note taking app, TagSpaces is capable of handling many file formats natively, some can be previewed, others edited, but it also excels as a note organiser.
On of TagSpaces’ noteable features is off-line access to a flat file system, where your notes are simple text, MarkDown, or HTML files in a plain folder structure that can live anywhere on your hard drive; the other is its superb tagging capabilities. Tagging happens in a unique fashion: The tags become part of the filename, so besides being perfectly portable, as they always stick with the file, they are also easily searchable.
TagSpaces supports every major platform, desktop or mobile OS, and even has web browser extensions, its interface looking the same across all supported systems. This might or might not be a good thing, depending if you prefer uniformity, or seamless integration. Used as a notes organiser, TagSpaces might be the closest to Evernote in terms of UX. You have convenient browsing through notes, folders, and connected locations, which is even better than Evernote’s offering, not restricting you to Stacks and Notebooks (as folders can reach any level of depth). Its rich text editor allows you to visually edit HTML files, offering a convenient formatting toolbar, to easily mark up and beautify your notes.
Where TagSpaces really excels, is the fully off-line, no accounts, no logins, and the flat file, no databases approach, which makes your notes portable, reuseable, and basically just your own, meaning, as secure as you are willing to keep them.
Where TagSpaces falls short, might be the same where it excels, depending on where you are coming from. It means you need to add an extra step of synchronising your notes across devices, but as the notes’ location can be literally anywhere, this should not really be a problem with a cloud storage service like Dropbox or even Google Drive (just to make Google Keep envious).
The innovative way of tagging files by changing the filename, might not be acceptable or viable for everyone. Professional documents, or collaborative projects could prevent you from using this feature entirely. Tagspaces solves this in its paid-for Pro version, where tags and metadata are optionally stored in sidecar files.
This does of course look like reintroducing the original problem, that being Evernote’s pricing policy, yet TagSpaces does not charge you for basic functionality, such as accessing your notes off-line (which Evernote does), but for features most appreciated by those who might use it in a production environment. Also, the yearly subscription payment is only there to get access to new software versions. When your subscription expires, your current version will not stop functioning, only you will not receive any more updates. Either way, you are not forced to pay for your data, and even not forced to pay at all, as most of TagSpaces’ features are available in the free version.
The cliché conclusion
It’s about time we ditched the hype and take control of our data. There is life after Evernote. There are many available alternatives, that offer different approaches, all catering for different needs. Whether you are after the super-simple, or the super-customisable, the tech giant’s cloud service or the totally independent, fully privacy-conscious off-line solution, there are choices that allow you to avoid being extorted, and continue being just as productive, as you have always been.
