I'd really love a good Evernote alternative, but the one feature that tends not to exist is full page bookmarking / web clipping. I want to be able to clip a full page easily into the program, which will also save a copy of whatever article I happen to be reading. I really wouldn't mind (and would even love) to roll my own notes system with vim/etc. But without full page clipping, it would be a problem.
Another good thing about Evernote is the easy ability to mix in images, documents, and text.
The reasons I want to leave Evernote, btw, is:
1. I worry about their future and would rather a more open solution.
2. Their software, at least on Mac, really, really sucks. It's slow, and has tons of incredibly ridiculos bugs that have been open for a long time. E.g. when typing in a tag, if there's a dash, it will cause a problem with the autocompletion. For someone who uses the tags a lot and has a whole system based on them, having dashes cause a problem is a big deal, and the fact that it hasn't been fixed in ~ a year makes me really question their priorities.
I really liked Evernote 3 on Mac. It had a simple interface but those really powerful html/rich text pasting abilities. One of the things that sold me on it was that I could just dump anything into evernote and process it later. With the syncing features I could even do this across multiple devices and platforms. Perfect.
As evernote advanced though, it only got worse. New features and interface changes seemed to be being stuffed in without much of a strong focus on making the core useful features good and resilient. I gave up after I lost some notes for the third time during a sync.
Most of these alternate note taking solutions I find fail miserably with rich text and web content, instead preferring markdown (which I hate for notes). Either that or they are too complicated (e.g. devonthink). And to top it off, they rarely have any good implementations of syncing or cross-platform apps.
I couldn't agree more. I am using a different note taking app beside Evernote because I just can't stand the interface and usability of their Mac and iOS apps. But their OCR feature is by far the best on the market so I have to keep using it. As far as I can tell, Evernote is in a league of its own when it comes to OCR. They make it really easy to read physical books with that feature. (I like to keep notes of the books I'm reading and I hate to sully actual pages.)
I really want them to succeed, but I also recognize they will never make an app that I consider to be perfect or even good. They'd have to get rid of like 50 features, which is a hard thing to do by itself but also not in their MO.
Their software pretty universally sucks - if it was just Mac it would be possible (although not reasonable) to argue that MacOS was an afterthought but IME it's terrible on Windows and iOS too and they just don't seem to care.
I've had weird syncing bugs where the content of one note appears in place of another's, or the note's content has had all the formatting ripped out so everything is on one line, which mostly fix themselves if you clear the app's cache.
They keep saying they've fixed it in release notes but the issue keeps happening, and if you raise a support ticket (I've got Evernote Premium with supposedly prioritised support) you'll get useless responses that suggest they haven't properly read your ticket, days after you opened the ticket in the first place.
It's terrible, and I'd really like to stop giving them money, but I've struggled to find an alternative (tried OneNote and stopped for a reason I can't recall right now, plus the now-dead Vesper and Simplenote) despite a long line of comments below suggesting that emacs org-mode or papyrus and carrier pigeon is a viable alternative.
The only thing I've found even remotely similar in capability to Evernote is NimbusNote which is a clone with a similar but not the same web clipper. I've been unhappy with Evernote for quite some time and eventually left it but I can't say I'm definitely not missing some features and most of them tie to the web clipper, which is their best feature and sets them worlds above other software.
There isn't even a app on Linux and Evernotes web interface is the worst I've ever used. I _overwrite_ important notes with bs on a regular basis because the Ajax took two minutes to load and writes to something offscreen.
But the Webclipper works most of the time. Laverna does not even have a Browser Plugin.
Another good thing about Evernote is the easy ability to mix in images, documents, and text.
The reasons I want to leave Evernote, btw, is:
1. I worry about their future and would rather a more open solution.
2. Their software, at least on Mac, really, really sucks. It's slow, and has tons of incredibly ridiculos bugs that have been open for a long time. E.g. when typing in a tag, if there's a dash, it will cause a problem with the autocompletion. For someone who uses the tags a lot and has a whole system based on them, having dashes cause a problem is a big deal, and the fact that it hasn't been fixed in ~ a year makes me really question their priorities.