No More Free Evernote? Here Are 5 Best Free Apps You Need
Evernote Is Limiting Free Users.
In case you weren’t aware, Evernote recently delivered a Mike Tyson uppercut square in the jawbones of all of their free users by limiting them to one notebook and 50 notes unless they pay.
I already have 39 notebooks and more than 400 notes, so you know, screw me, right?
I can’t use the app until I upgrade, which is way too aggressive in my opinion.
Note-taking apps are common as dirt, so why don’t we see what else is out there that we can use for free?
And may this be the last thing I ever write in Evernote. Amen.
5: NoteJoy
Although this list is in order, and number one is the one that I’m now personally using, I’m putting this one first on the list because I believe it’s the most similar to Evernote.
The sidebar feels familiar with note previews, notebooks, and a search bar and all that.
The upgrade button may also feel unpleasantly familiar, but not to worry — there’s no note limit here.
However, there is a limit of five notebooks. I wish that didn’t exist, but what can you do?
They have to make money somehow, I guess.
Overall, I like it.
4: Microsoft OneNote
I know, I know, I’m sorry, but I have to throw it in there.
It’s just a really solid note-taking tool. It just is.
It’s basically like if your Word documents were neatly packaged up into notes and notebooks.
You can tag them and search for them, and there are some cool hidden gems when it comes to formatting and whatever.
It’s just generally a powerful and 100% free tool.
I’ve used it in the past, though usually only when it’s work-related — and not YouTube work, I mean like my actual job. What, you thought I made a living on YouTube?
I’d have to upload more than once a year for that to happen.
3: Simplenote
If Evernote felt like overkill, Simplenote may be all you need.
There’s not even a premium tier from what I can tell; it’s free through and through. There’s no notebooks and organization at all, but you can tag notes and search for them as needed.
There’s no note limit or anything.
Styling is done in Markdown, and you can publish notes to be seen by anyone if you wish.
It’s really just a stripped-back version of what the free version of Evernote was.
Not quite enough meat to it for me, but it might be exactly what you’re looking for, so I thought I would put it on this list.
Overall, again, I like it.
It wouldn’t be on this list if I didn’t like it.
2: Notebook LM
This one is kind of fascinating to me. Notebook LM is centered around uploading sources to your notebooks and then asking questions about them.
It’s got a chatbot, like a ChatGPT-style chatbot, but you can’t just ask it anything — you have to ask it questions about what you uploaded.
It’s not quite similar enough to what I’m used to on Evernote to be my replacement, but I think it’s very cool and could potentially be very useful, so I’m putting it here for now.
Before I reveal number one, I wanted to do an honorable mentions speed round.
Ready? Let’s do it.
- Google Keep: Feels like the predecessor to Notebook LM. Both are by Google. Sort of like digital sticky notes, kind of. It’s very, very simple but handy a lot of the time. It appears in your Gmail sidebar, which I like.
- GitBook: The most amazing documentation tool I’ve ever used. It’s not really a note-taking tool, but you could use it like that if you wanted to. Fantastic formatting options, very cool tool.
- Obsidian: Obsidian offers very simple and easy Markdown notes with some neat little bells and whistles. It didn’t make the list because you have to pay to sync across devices. That was one of my bare minimums that I needed. Prices are reasonable, but we do ball on a budget here.
- Bear: Bear is an excellent choice if you are an Apple-only user, but it didn’t make the list because you have to be an Apple user. I’m not an Apple user.
All right, all right, enough jibber-jabbering, enough wind-jamming, enough gum-flapping.
1: Zoho Notebook
Zoho Notebook’s free tier seems to be very similar in power to Evernote’s old free tier.
A lot of the same stuff: there are notebooks and note cards instead of notes, but whatever.
They have a good enough amount of formatting options that can be synced across platforms like my phone and all that for free.
Boom shakalaka, that is all I need.
Conclusions:
There’s other stuff too, like you can co-work together with people in the note cards, there’s version history on your notes so you can go back to old versions of your notes, you can tag things, you can scan documents, you can even migrate from Evernote, and so on.
Limitations on the free tier are that you only get 2 GB of free storage space on your account.
You’re missing out on a lot of fancier bells and whistles, but the gist here is that it’s free and it’s gosh darn good enough for me.
The cherry on top is that the pro version is literally $2 a month. Not bad.
Looking forward for your thoughts in the comments below.
