I’m looking for potential alternatives to Evernote, my current choice for taking notes.
The note-taking application needs the following:
- Desktop application (Windows7) with local storage of notes
- Cloud sync (can be self-hosted if needs be)
- Browser accessible notes
- Android App
Why am I investigating alternatives? I’ve been finding myself less satisfied with Evernote’s performance over the last while: I frequently find Evernote is maxing out one of my CPU cores; the changes from 3.0x to 3.5x were poor in a lot of ways and introduced the need for extra actions to achieve the same tasks; the destruction of most usefulness of the screen capture tool; and the android app is extremely dissatisfying (for example I often find that searches yield no results unless I’m searching for a specific tag, and that Android app taken notes either don’t sync or take an incredibly long time to do so).
Also, to be honest Evernote has a host of functions that I just don’t need. My note taking tends to be plain text, with very very occasional embedding of images. I don’t need handwriting recognition, I don’t really need full web page embeds, I just need a fast, eminently searchable set of text notes.
In addition, whilst I’m all for a decent rate of application updates, Evernote 3.5 has them with such a frequency that I often find when I need to make a note I’ve got Evernote bugging me to update. Not only this but I just noticed that Evernote was using up 471.8Mb by storing every single update.exe, as demonstrated by the image below.
Evernote storing all app updates
As you can see each update necessitates a complete application download (would they not save a fortune on bandwidth by implementing a patch system rather than a complete application download?), and these application updates have slowly increased from 35Mb to 40Mb.
So if you’re an Evernote user and you’re wondering why your main drive is running short on space, just navigate to (on Windows 7 at least) C:\Users\~username\AppData\Local\Evernote\Evernote\Updates and empty it out.
If you’d like to do some more investigation into disk usage check out this handy application, Foldersize, which visualises disk usage for you.
Frederick Frost stated on May 12th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
The only ever note alternative I am aware of is called springpad. I believe this is currently only web only. I still prefer ever note.
Noemi Szoke stated on May 12th, 2010 at 6:28 pm
Hi,
Try Shelfster, it’s still in beta but if you sign up your email on the web address http://shelfster.com you will receive an invite.
Cheers,
Noemi
Alex Leonard stated on May 12th, 2010 at 9:23 pm
@Frederick Thanks for the suggestion. Web only is definitely a no-go for the time being. The fact that I’m currently living in Cambodia means I can’t be guaranteed a net connection at all times and I definitely want local store of all notes which then syncs to web – also just for purposes of speed.
@Noemi Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll sign up for a beta invite now. Do you guys have an Android app in the pipeline?
Alex Leonard stated on May 12th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Oh, @Noemi – is the desktop ‘client’ just a tool for clipping/cropping and sending to the web account? Or does it actually allow browsing/storage of notes locally/offline.
Alex Leonard stated on May 12th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
@Jeff Thanks for the comment. I’ve signed up to have a look and will keep an eye on the blog to hear news of an Android App. Desktop app is definitely high in my requirements list though. Do you have a publicly viewable roadmap? Cheers for dropping by!
Jeff Janer stated on May 13th, 2010 at 6:30 am
Hi – I’m a co-founder of Springpad (http://springpadit.com) and wanted to let you know that while we don’t currently have a desktop app (it’s on our roadmap), we are launching an Android app within the next couple of weeks. It will have offline access to all your “stuff” as does our iPhone app. We also sync in the cloud between web and all mobile app versions.
If you do check it out, we welcome input and feedback.
Tweets that mention Can someone recommend an Evernote alternative? – Alex Leonard’s Blog -- Topsy.com stated on May 13th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
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Noemi Szoke stated on May 13th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Hi,
We are in development with the mobile version, which you will be able to use on your Android. Our concept is to have the desktop tool as a collector, but we welcome any feedback you can provide. We are still in beta so we are open to all suggestions.
Cheers,
Noemi
Neil Hinrichsen stated on May 19th, 2010 at 11:03 pm
I’m dismayed to hear that Evernote 3.5 maxes out one’s CPU as well. I’m still on EN 3.1 because 3.5 still doesn’t have a “Find” feature in the Tabs pane which I need (this is slated to come out first week of June).
Evernote 3.1 maxes out my one CPU core every time I do ANYTHING in Evernote – add a note, add a tag, make a tiny change to a note. It’s so bad I have the Task Manager icon permanently in my system tray so I can see when I can carry on, because every action in Evernote brings it to a standstill for anywhere up to thirty seconds. This is an utter nightmare since I’ve been using it for years before it got so bad, and my whole life and work is in Evernote (some 14,000 notes), so I’m using it all day long, and switching to something else is not really a possibility.
The CEO of Evernote personally promised me that upgrading to Evernote 3.5 would solve this, so it’s worrying to hear that you’re still getting this (and you’re not alone: http://twitter.com/dimepr/status/12234804509).
Alex Leonard stated on May 23rd, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Could also be difficult to use with Android. I’m sure something will crop up soon enough. I’d love to have something self-installable, and potentially I could utilise TomBoy if I was to write a specific app for it. I think you can sync TomBoy to your own server using LDAP. Not sure whether it has any web interface option though…
MK stated on May 23rd, 2010 at 9:22 pm
How about writing them in text files, and do text search using “search in folder” function in most text editor like Notepad++. And sync them all in Dropbox
But eh, web-accessibility is going to be a bit hard for that. Unless you want to download the text files from Dropbox >_>
Alex Leonard stated on May 29th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
@MK Hmm, weird that our comment timings were completely off there. Must edit that so the comment is in the right place.
Evernote has just released a much needed update to their Android app which has solved the issues I was having with search and appears to have much improved note upload (although I haven’t tested on EDGE network yet).
They also have mentioned that they’re working on offline storage for Android. If they can streamline their desktop app a bit so I don’t get so many CPU max-outs, I may not need to look for an alternative (but will be keeping an eye on shelfster and springpadit to see what their desktop applications are like if and when they come out).