Escaping Evernote


UPDATE: Years on (2022) a lot has changed, but I am still using pinboard and Google keep.

I used to have a lot of notes stored in Evernote, over 4000 to be precise, and more than 2GB of content. However, despite all this, I never really enjoyed using the platform. It’s important to note that this had nothing to do with Evernote’s recent pricing changes, which I was not even aware of at the time. While Evernote is a functional note-taking and organization tool, I can’t think of a single instance where I felt it worked particularly well. The search function was poor, the client was prone to bugs, and the syncing was sometimes slow, not to mention the lack of a native Linux client.

My primary use case for Evernote was archiving webpages. Out of my 4000 notes, only a few hundred were created by me. The majority of the content I had stored in Evernote was made up of webpages that I didn’t want to lose access to. I often came across technical blog posts that were filled with valuable information, and I didn’t want to risk losing access to them by bookmarking them. Using Evernote’s clipping feature allowed me to save a full-text searchable copy of the webpage and protect myself from the risk of it disappearing from the internet. It was like building a personal library, and it also served as a note-taking tool for the few notes I created manually.

However, I eventually found a better solution for archiving webpages using pinboard and, more specifically, the pinboard archive account for $25 a year. While it wasn’t able to capture everything I had saved with Evernote’s clipping feature, I only lost about 150 out of 4000 notes. As for my other notes, I am now using Google Keep. While I miss some of the features that Evernote offered, overall I am much happier with my current note-taking and organization system.