I used Evernote free version for over a decade. I finally went to the paid version when I needed it on more than the supported free devices at the time. Later, the number of devices I needed it on went down and I dropped free. Shortly after that, they lowered the number of devices for free and I was forced to go back to premium. Then the price doubled. Then Bending Spoons acquired it and it doubled again. I started looking for an alternative after the first doubling, but wasn’t finding anything that worked for me. I looked even harder after the second doubling, and Obsidian was as close as I could get, but not quite what I want, and the premium version ain’t cheap. But still cheaper than BS (appropriate acronym for them given what they have done to Evernote) and I have had looking into an Obsidian migration in my Evernote To Do list (a feature that was part of the app even before there was a cloud edition). I recently read a good discussion of UpNote on Medium (Don’t Use Obsidian) that prompted me to try it again (I’m 90% positive I looked at it after the BS price hike) . It is very much like Evernote was when it first moved to the cloud.
So far, here are my comparisons:
- Tags are case sensitive in UpNote.
- Still will miss nesting them as in Evernote.
- No reminders in UpNote, but that was a feature I rarely used in Evernote.
- UpNote only pins notes, not tags.
- But, Evernote is erratic about that feature, sometimes with sub tags and sometimes not
- I do like how I can make notes narrow again in UpNote.
- Evernote reduces the paragraphs spacing in lists, where UpNote provides fine-grained paragraph spacing but doesn’t differentiate with lists.
And here is what I intend to try:
- Try exporting Evernote into this and then back to Evernote in case UpNote goes under.
If the above works well, I will probably switch. Unfortunately, I have to subscribe to do that. I can see where a monthly subscription to try and then a switch to lifetime might be worth it.
© Scott S. Nelson
Since no one ever comments here, I feel free to do my addendums in the comments for now (until I break this up into a series?).
While the cheaper side of me really wanted to use a monthly subscription to try out the Evernote to UpNote migration and only commit to the lifetime after trying it out, the time management side of me won out because
(https://getupnote.com/support.html).
The migration is fairly easy, (though not so much if you want to experiment like I did).
I first imported with the option to turn tags into notebooks. The resulting layout was a flattened hierarchy, which means I have to recreate (and finally reorganize) my tag hierarchy.
I was curious if using tags instead of folders would be more suitable, so I deleted all of the notes to re-import again. This is when I discovered there is no mass delete for notebooks, only their contents. Well, I would use them again anyway, so I wasn’t too annoyed.
After re-importing with the tag-to-tag option, I realized that since I couldn’t bulk delete notebooks, this would leave me with the too-tedious-to-consider process of moving notes to notebooks individually (in Evernote, across 3 notebooks, I currently have ~3k notes).
I thought I would be clever and try re-importing the same notes with the tags-to-notebooks option with the hope that it would recognize that everything was a duplicate and just put them in notebooks. Alas, I just wound up with duplicates of every note, half with tags and half in notebooks.
So, I deleted all the notes again and imported as notebooks. I do like the ability to create my own notebook covers (on Windows 3.1, I had icons on folders because that’s the kind of childish nerd I am). And I really like the ease of finding notebooks to link to notes. It reminds me of how easy Evernote was to use when it was a note organizing app and not an investment vehicle.
Continuing my transition description, I have only migrated my personal notebook from Evernote, leaving my work notebook for later. The work notebook has more notes (~1400 vs ~850), which partly informed the choice. Another difference is I use my phone more often for personal notes than work notes, so this gives me more opportunities to note how it works across devices. My initial observations is that search is much faster in UpNote, which can be attributed to the smaller amount of content. But the key thing for me is how Evernote change the home screen from what used to be notes with links to other features to a list of the other features where I have to first select notes (the only function I use!) and only then can I start using the app for its primary purpose. In UpNote it opens directly to the notes, and that changes in notebooks and tags do not change the sorted order of last updated (as some recent changes in Evernote do).
If the visual representation of your current tag hierarchies in Evernote are numerous, complex, and important to you, migration is going to be disappointing. Even if you select for the imported tags to be converted to notebooks and to import into a notebook, the result is that all of the notes are imported in a flat list in the selected notebook and all of the tags become notebooks at the root level without their prior hierarchy.
If I were in a rush to move, this would be a deal breaker for me. Fortunately, I have a little over 3 months for this migration, and the re-creation of my hierarchies and cross tags (notebooks in UpNote) is interesting, even fun at times…so far. A couple thousand notes to go, so we’ll see…
One features from Evernote that UpNote could benefit from is drag-n-drop for the notebooks. Yes, they are tags in Evernote, but since UpNote doesn’t have a tag hierarchy, UpNote Notebooks are feature parity to Evernote Tags. I do like being able to customize the notebook covers in UpNote (used to do that to folders on a Windows 3.1 desktop), but drag-n-drop is a much more practical feature, especially for those of use migrating. The click, select, select, click process is fine if one doesn’t organize much but gets really tedious with 100’s of folders to re-organize after migrating.
It took 3 weeks to finish re-organizing my personal notebook and a notebook from a former job in UpNote after importing them from Evernote. I used UpNote for all personal notes during that time as well.
To summarize my thoughts and experiences so far:
I really will miss the reminders and being able to email notes to myself for follow up through my in-box, and I expect that UpNote will eventually add these features. And I am not looking forward to a month of re-sorting a decade of content when I bring my work notebook in. In fact, if Evernote has stuck to the $49.99 per year, I would have dealt with the mobile UX going down hill to keep the features and save the work. But Evernote went from supporting users to supporting investors, and Bending Spoons just wants users to bend over and pay even more for AI features that are available one window away for free, so I will not be renewing my subscription next year, ending almost 20 years of customer loyalty.
I still need to turn these comments into the Part of this post. Meanwhile, ran across an interesting read today that leads to the need for a note app, though for the use case given One Note would be sufficient: https://fev.al/posts/work-journal/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
Forgot to mention: The idea of importing back into Evernote isn’t support by either app. Reminds me of portal platforms back in the early 00’s when they were all proprietary to lock customers in, then later in that decade they all started using “open” standards, which resulted having proprietary formats that would fit in those standards. In this case, both will export to HTML or Markdown but the outputs drop all of the organization.
Crossing my fingers that UpNote gets the long ride Evernote has had.
I reviewed the FAQ page about security. For a non-technical person it can be very confusing. For a technical person it is still confusing. I truly don’t think this is intentional.
To summarize:
There are two key questions whose answers are relevant…
UpNote stores data on the Firebase server (which is a service provided by Google). The Firebase platform is certified to major privacy and security standards and fully supports the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Firebase encrypts your data in transit using HTTPS and encrypts your data at rest. You can learn more at https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy. We also take great care to ensure that your data is secure and only you can access it.
and
End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) is an advanced security method for encrypting and decrypting data and is designed to protect highly confidential information. Due to the complexity of implementation, UpNote currently has no plans to support E2EE. If you wish to store sensitive information such as passwords or credit card numbers, it is recommended that you use a password manager application specifically designed to encrypt sensitive information.
The gist of which is that the data is not encrypted on your devices. This is a bit of nit-picky difference but worthwhile to note that the weak link in the chain is how you manage security on your device.
In Evernote, tags exist as a flat hierarchy, with the nesting only being at a visual level. For example, if I have a tag Misc and then move it to be under Foo, I cannot create a tag under Bar named Misc. While UpNote also manages tag in a flat hierarchy, Notebooks are truly nested, so I can have a notebook named Misch under Foo and a different notebook under Bar also named Misc. I can then cross reference between notebooks using a tag such as #reference. This is much more how these things work in my head. Your mentalization may vary.
I love the Collapsible Section feature in UpNote. I often used Evernote for presentation notes. The first annoyance in Evernote was when they added wide margins, making it impossible to have both my notes and a presentation on my desktop at the same time. I would use a tablet or my phone to make up for this problem until I eventually got a 35″ monitor (not for that purpose, but a nice bonus point for the monitor upgrade).
Not only can I size the UpNote window to any width I want, I use the Collapsible Sections to make it easier to scroll through the content based on each slide. The keyboard shortcuts are nice touch, too.
Finally parting shot: In preparation for closing my account I went to delete all of my notes. It would be useful if it gave some error message that the default notebook couldn’t be deleted. I eventually figured it out, created a new notebook and set it as default. Still, 1000 notes wouldn’t delete when deleting the notebook. Finally I had to delete at the note level, which is limited to 100 at a time. Hey, Bending Spoons, it is all the friction to standard note management tasks that drove me away from 21 years of use. Making the final steps as difficult as possible helps to reinforce my decision.
Oh, and then when I actually cancelled the subscription I first had to confirm again (acceptable), then scroll through a huge list of features that I was losing (annoying but predictable), then give a reason from a list, but only ONE reason (ridiculous) and then was finally offered a discount of 40%, which if they had offered that in response to any of my complaints over the last two years I may have accepted, but having just spent two months migrating to UpNote, wasn’t going to happen.