This piece seems to be inspiring a lot of discussion at the moment:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/04/evernote-lost-its-cto-cfo-cpo-and-hr-head-in-the-last-month-as-it-eyes-another-fundraise/

Except for one project, I've pretty much abandoned Evernote, but I still follow its fortunes with interest. I wonder if it really is in serious trouble?

I can't say to what extent EN is in trouble, but none of this can be construed to be signs of success. I imagine their main challenge is that they're supporting very large numbers of users on the free plan and not converting enough to paid plans.

I was on the premier plan for several years (back to around 2009, if I remember right) but dumped it last year (a) because of the rising cost and (b) I had some concerns about their apparently slightly ambivalent view of security and privacy.

Hmm... I have tons of information stored in EN for several years. What would you suggest as a replacement, either free or paid?

I have not tested this because I do not use EN. RightNote can integrate with EN with the added benefit of organizing the EN information in a tree.

Jon

Right! Many thanks for reminding me of RighNote.

Has EverNote ever not been in trouble? ;0)

Freemium is a difficult strategy to get right. Give people too little for free and they won't use it. Give people too much for free and they won't upgrade.

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

I've said this before, but I think Evernote should do away with the free version and charge a moderate $15 a year or something like that. If someone isn't willing to pay that small amount, then why give them anything for free?

Andy Brice wrote:

Has EverNote ever not been in trouble? ;0)

Freemium is a difficult strategy to get right. Give people too little
for free and they won't use it. Give people too much for free and they
won't upgrade.

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

Hah! So true. It is among those companies that seem to be a bad press magnet.

Andy Brice wrote:

Has EverNote ever not been in trouble? ;0)

Steve's point about dumping the free level makes sense, or maybe limiting it to 200 notes, or something, for unlimited trial purposes. I didn't quite understand why the revenue number mentioned in the TechCrunch article was so low in comparison to the installed-units number.

Been using Evernote since 2005. Seen its demise predicted often enough -- have shared the feeling many times. So far we're 13 years later and they're still up and running.

TheVerge actually jumped on the bad new bandwagon by pointing out they're running a subscription special :D

The thing that has me most "worried" about Evernote is their desire to "do something" or "be something" in the business space. I don't think anyone is waiting for that. Their current users aren't, and the business users they hope for aren't going to be on Evernote, for the most part.

Evernote is a very odd company. They remind me of Apple's attitude of "this is what I make, this is what you use, if you don't like it, move on". For some reason they want to invest resources in doing things like adding margins to notes, something nobody has asked for, but are persistently reluctant to implement features people ask for.

I came across Nimbus Note last year. Looks and feels like the old Evernote. But once you import your whole Evernote database, search is very very very slow. Apparently outdoing Evernote isn't so easy.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I've said this before, but I think Evernote should do away with the free
version and charge a moderate $15 a year or something like that.

Most successful apps in that specific info management space, as I'm sure you're aware, offer free tiers over free trials because they find they get more paid upgrades that way, and that not doing so would send customers (including ones that would become pay customers) to competitors. Apps that don't tend either to be smaller products that hit a ceiling of users (which may or may not be enough), or survive in a niche. Charging $15/year when Microsoft, Zoho, Cinta, and Apple still have a free tier would only their collapse sales.

Same for many other online products, like online storage. Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud - would you likewise tell one of them to buck the freemium trend and simply charge a smaller amount with no free tier?

Wojciech wrote:

Hmm... I have tons of information stored in EN for several years. What
would you suggest as a replacement, either free or paid?

Are you Windows or Mac?

I'm Mac and went to Devonthink. DT has a specific Evernote import so I pulled all my notes out of EN straight into DT. I believe Eaglefiler has a similar feature.

Neither are any use if you live in Windows, I'm afraid, and I left Windows so long ago that I don't have any sense of what's out there.

Indeed. And the big base of free users--even if most are unlikely to ever upgrade--is also an incentive for professionals to choose a product over another.

Dropbox is a prime example of this; were it to be used within our company alone we could turn to other solutions. But all our clients and partners use it, so not having it is not an option.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
Same for many other online products, like online storage. Box, Dropbox,
Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud - would you likewise tell one of them to
buck the freemium trend and simply charge a smaller amount with no free
tier?

There's a lively discussion right now on the Evernote user forum:

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/115984-evernote-death-spiral/

I dislike Evernote for many reasons

- Lack of extended note hierarchy
- No custom sorting of notes/notebooks outside of cumbersome naming conventions
- Lack of markdown support
- Lack of basic style options (please give me headings)
- Android app won't auto populate the title with the first line of the note like the Win Desktop version does (may seem like a little thing but it's super over the long run)

I actually despise these things and would leave EN if I could. There are two big reasons I don't.

1. Search & Tagging
They do these things very well. Evernote is the best place to dump stuff with little organization necessary. You can either not organize at all & rely on search, or with an extra second you can quickly tag things.

Sadly the bulk of my work benefits greatly from hierarchical organization, so Evernote tends to only act as a gateway rather than an endpoint for the majority of my information. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Information Capture

Evernote is simply the best all-around cross platform "inbox" for the frictionless capture of information. My work is creative in nature, and I have many responsibilities. If I don't capture inspiration or todo's when they hit me, then I suffer greatly in the long run.

Evernote mitigates this suffering by offering the slickest capture on Windows and Android (my main platforms).

The other top contenders to replace EN is OneNote and Google Keep. But I can't justify the switch because

1. OneNote is slower on capture, awkward storage of "quick capture" notes, and doesn't offer page tagging for rapidly organizing notes as I take them.

2. Google Keep has no desktop app and cannot open a window per note on desktop. I don't need more browser tabs.

Evernote is in a weird position of doing a few extremely critical tasks very well, while being otherwise mediocre. Their lack of product improvement over the years is mildly infuriating.

If they just improved their dang product in the ways their users have screamed about for years, they wouldn't be in any trouble at all.

Now I'm sitting over here praying that Notion.so offers some slick quick-capture ability so I can leave EN for forever...

NickG wrote:

Are you Windows or Mac?

Windows, unfortunately...

I had some confidence in Evernote and started to use it extensively for storing just about everything. What attracted me to it was that it was available from all of my devices (7), and DevonThink Office seemed so difficult to use reliably on more than one machine. I'm afraid that I'm going to have to search for a new way of doing things for all of the pdf and other files I could so easily clip from the 'net to Evernote.

Jeffery Smith wrote:

I had some confidence in Evernote and started to use it extensively for
storing just about everything. What attracted me to it was that it was
available from all of my devices (7), and DevonThink Office seemed so
difficult to use reliably on more than one machine. I'm afraid that I'm
going to have to search for a new way of doing things for all of the pdf
and other files I could so easily clip from the 'net to Evernote.

"DevonThink Office seemed so difficult to use reliably on more than one machine." Jeffery, you don't say when this was, what the machines were or what the problems were that you encountered. If you were referring to syncing DevonThink on a Mac with DevonThink To Go version 1 on an iOS device, just to say that in my view the current DTTG 2 represents a significant improvement over version 1. Of course syncing a bundle of files reliably is never going to be particularly easy with any "consumer" software, but in my opinion (and I think that of others, to judge from DT's forums) DTTG 2 is much better at it than DTTG 1.

Now I'm sitting over here praying that Notion.so offers some slick
quick-capture ability so I can leave EN for forever...

Same. I echo all of your previous points, very well said. Though for me OneNote has been my 'ubiquitous dump' forever. Though I agree that EN is a better dump for random snippets loosely organized whereas OneNote wants to be a classic hierarchy. Both have great search.

I am excited about notion and am slowly trusting it more to be the place for structured info and projects. I'd love to see Android shortcuts to individual pages.

I think it was April when Microsoft finally announced the final changeover to 'Universal' OneNote and sending the desktop app go into maint mode (which it's been in for years anyway). The awesome full desktop app is what got me into OneNote in 2008 and what has kept me there. If MS is abandoning it then I suppose I shouldn't feel any hesitation to drop it too. Though they did tease in that same announcement that they were working hard on filling some more feature gaps which included a real tagging platform... But they also said that'd happen this summer. I refuse to get my hopes up about that being anything but a colossal let-down...the majority of their 'improvements' lately have been like pen colors and emojis and other useless crap.

Yeah, without a proper desktop version of OneNote my information would be stuck in there. No power addons to export, no local storage.

Jeffery Smith wrote:

I had some confidence in Evernote and started to use it extensively for
storing just about everything. What attracted me to it was that it was
available from all of my devices (7), and DevonThink Office seemed so
difficult to use reliably on more than one machine. I'm afraid that I'm
going to have to search for a new way of doing things for all of the pdf
and other files I could so easily clip from the 'net to Evernote.

As @Hugh has said, DT sync is very good. I sync 2 Macs and iPhone and and iPad with no problems.

However - it does need more thought to set up than EN, because the database is on one of your devices, whereas in EN, the core data is on their server. In EN, you just log in from your device and let their system worry about sync. With DT, you *must* decide where the database will reside and set up access credentials and any encryption. It's not especially challenging, but it *is* a necessary process.

Zoho's Take Notes recently came up on a "best of" list. Still free, not a bad feature list, web client on PC, has an android app (iOS too, I think). Has anyone given it a test drive?

If you're talking about Zoho Notebook (https://www.zoho.com/notebook/ I tried it on Mac and iOS (still have it installed, should probably uninstall) and I really *wanted* to like it, but I don't.

It's largely a competitor to Google Keep, with the greater ability to put noted into notebooks, with your choice of attractive covers.

It's kind of a UI mess. I tested it last year by creating a few notebooks. I called one notebook To-Dos and inside it I put 5 checklists. When looking at the main Notebooks app page there's no indication of the contents of each notebook - whether there's text, photos, lists, etc - or how many lists there are. It's annoyingly opaque.

https://d.pr/i/Yq5fsL

Once I open the To-Do notebook I see little Post-it style squares showing part of the checklists, but the text is messed up. Here's one mini-square inside the To-Do notebook:

https://d.pr/i/5A0a16

What's with those garbage characters?

And here's that list opened with a double-click:

https://d.pr/i/y4FTtn

Like I said, I'd like to like it, but it's got issues, and when launching the app it's too unclear as to what's in the notebooks, and there are still, months later, text formatting issued.

Zoho Notebook is a mess, I agree. It looks like a port of a iOS app (designed for children) to Mac. The instructions for importing notebooks from Evernote are iPad-oriented and wrong. Even after figuring out what the instructions for a Mac should be, the import fails with anything other than plain text notes. Most of the user comments on the Mac App Store mirror @satis's evaluation. Nice idea. Badly implemented.

Yes, Zoho Notebook. Interesting. Great reviews on Google Play. But not all apps work well on all the platforms.Thanks.

Another article about Evernote's problems:

Evernote just slashed 54 jobs, or 15 percent of its workforce

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/18/evernote-just-slashed-54-jobs-or-15-percent-of-its-workforce/