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