Finding An Evernote Replacement

When I decided to leave Evernote, I knew I needed to find something to replace it. The problem is, there is nothing on the market that does exactly what Evernote does: a repository for reference information with tagging, notebooks and the ability to link to task managers. I looked and tried software, and hunted some more. Today’s article is about what I settled on as my Evernote replacement.

First Looks

Most of my information in Evernote was reference material. It included craft patterns, articles I had saved for reference, all of my recipes, and ideas I want to try at some point. It also contained all of my blog article ideas and material on engagement, mailing lists and marketing.

So the first thing I wanted to do was look for something that could handle my reference material.

Here were my list of features from Evernote that needed to be replicated:

• Multiple notebooks or at least good tagging (necessary). I have a lot of different subjects in Evernote, and I needed a way to separate it. I don’t need my recipes mixed in with my knitting patterns. And I certainly don’t need my Halloween ideas mixed in with information on how to grow an email list.
• Reasonable cost (necessary). I was paying $30 for using Evernote. While I don’t mind paying for software that works, I am not going to pay more than $100 a year to use anything. Although I long for the days when you could pay a one-time fee and license that version of the software forever. Much easier on the pocketbook than these subscription models.
• Active development (necessary). I was leery of anything that had stalled in updates, much like Evernote was over the past few years.
• Ownership of information (necessary). Cloud storage means “someone else’s computer”. I didn’t want to end up in a situation where my Evernote replacement could be turned off an I lose everything. Even a computer backup of the information is better than nothing.
• A way to link to Remember The Milk (necessary). Evernote was the system of record for my in-process and upcoming projects. I had to be able to get information to my day-to-day task manager.
• A way to import (necessary). Obviously, I was not going to copy and paste a thousand notes from Evernote into the new system.
• Offline access (nice to have). I use Evernote for my recipes. That means I need access to them when I am not online or connected to wifi.
• Multiple platforms (nice to have). I want to be able to get to my information wherever I am. That means from my computer, at work, and my mobile devices. I don’t much care if I have to access a website on all three.
• Ease of extraction (nice to have). Going along with ownership, I want to be able to print, transfer and share information without having to jump through a bazillion hoops.
• Web save (nice to have). I enjoyed the web clipper in Evernote, because it made it easy to save information to the program. I wanted that ease of saving.
• Mail to save (nice to have). Rarely there were things that I wanted to send directly from email over to Evernote.

What I Considered

So I turned to my trusty helper Google and looked at the following:

Joplin

Joplin is an open source program that runs on PC. All of your data is stored locally, and it has a decent import program for Evernote. My experiments showed that the data imported cleanly, but it did struggle with formatting, a downside for recipes.

It met the requirements for multiple notebooks, reasonable cost (free), and an active developer community. And with it being open source, I knew I could get into the source code and find a way to get my information out if worse came to worse.

On the other hand, it didn’t have a web or mobile access. Nor did it have email access.

OneNote

OneNote, by Microsoft, was an obvious contender for the replacement. It has multiple notebooks, comes free with Office and Windows 10, allows tags, and is under active development. It also supports the Microsoft scripting, so I can get the data out easily. OneNote stores files locally, so it works offline (at least on computer) and syncs to the cloud. There are mobile and web versions of OneNote.

However, the utility that was supposed to make the port didn’t work. At all. I suspect the recent changes at Evernote have not been correspondingly made in the tool, and Microsoft has no plans to update it.

Notion

Notion is a simple wiki-like program that is advertised as an Evernote replacement. I already use it as my blog writing platform. It can run locally, but needs to the web service to do so. There are mobile apps, and I am familiar with it.

However, the data is not local, and I don’t know how much I trust the sync after recent problems with the online service wiped out my local Notion for hours (I did get it back, but still…). There were issues with the native Evernote import.

To Find A Replacement, Do A Needs Assessment

None of these applications offered a way for me to link the information to Remember The Milk. Given that this is where the work happens, I found I couldn’t function without it.

I had realized some time ago that I was mixing different types of information. Evernote held my reference material, someday/maybe list, and my active projects.

So maybe instead of looking for a one-stop replacement, I needed to look at meeting my needs.

My Assessed Needs

I sat down and did what I do professionally: a needs assessment. Here are the two things I needed to match what was in Evernote:

• A project list with statuses. Someday/maybes are just projects that haven’t started yet. A project list with statuses would meet this need.
• Reference material storage. My reference material needed to be stored ina way that I could find it quickly. It also had to capture both text and pictures.

But What About Porting the Info?

Ah, yes, the sticking point…porting the information. I realized that I might have to bite the bullet and do the port manually. The biggest chunk of my data was recipes, and I figured I could leave those in Evernote until I found time. The rest I would take the opportunity to clean out the data and purge those things that were so old they weren’t of use.

My Final Solution

After doing the needs assessment, I settled on two software packages to meet my needs.

• Trello. I used to use Trello to track the progress of items for the blog. It was exactly what I needed for keeping track of someday/maybes as well as active projects. I could mail items to it, and I knew it hooked into automation programs like IFTTT and Zapier, expanding how I could get information into it.
• OneNote. OneNote became my program of choice to hold the reference material because it stores locally, I can get to it via programming, and it has a web clipper. The port, though, was going to be painful.

Ah, the porting of information. I’ll address what I had to do…and how I had to circumvent…to get my information from Evernote over to Trello and OneNote.