My Evernote Premium subscription just ran out, so it has come time for me to reconsider whether or not to continue using the service. Evernote hasn’t made any mis-steps recently, and I’ve actually found it quite useful at work.
Evernote Plus costs $30 USD per year, and would give me the offline access to my notes that I require. It has 1 GB of upload capacity per month, which is quite a lot for my needs. What it doesn’t do, however, is have the PDF annotation features, which can be handy in a pinch.
If I want everything that Evernote has to offer, I’m looking at Evernote Premium, which is about $60 USD per year. It’s double the price of Plus, but it does let me search all the attachments inside of Evernote, and provides a whopping 10 GB of uploads per month.
These really aren’t crazy prices as far as I’m concerned, but given the increasing number of subscription services I’m using, I thought I’d at least examine whether or not I could live without Evernote. $10 for Lightroom, $10 for Dropbox Pro, $10 for Apple Music, and $5 for 200 GB of iCloud Storage is quickly adding up. So I’ve decided to think a little bit about what makes Evernote so valuable to me.
The greatest things about Evernote are:
- offline access
- great cross-platform presence
- attachment support
- fantastic search
- flexible tagging system
These features are present in some competitors, but I do think Evernote does strike a pretty good balance.
OneNote comes closest to Evernote in terms of cross-platform and attachment support, but it doesn’t do as good a job with fast syncing. Last time I tried OneNote in August 2015, I felt I had to babysit the syncing algorithm. I had to keep OneNote on every once in a while, or it just wouldn’t sync my latest notes to my iPad. What OneNote really has going for it is fantastic free-form notetaking. I can add drawings besides text, and throw atachments in-line with text boxes, or off to the side as a reference file. OneNote has also recently made it much easier to import notes from Evernote, which sounds a lot easier than what I did last time.
I think I’ll give OneNote another shot this year, but the second service I’ll try will be Apple’s own Notes app. It isn’t truly cross-platform because there’s no native client on Windows, and I do use Notes at work. However, there is a passable web app that could work well as a pinned tab on my work computer. The great thing about Notes is that you can copy and paste attachments from one note to another, and the built-in share extension really is a great way to append information to a running note. Notes is supposed to sync in the background, but in my experience it does about as well as Evernote in terms of reliability. Sometimes I’ll load it up and it’s completely up to date, whereas other times it will start a sync right when I load up. So it doesn’t feel like there’s a major advantage in that regard.
However, with WWDC coming up and an iOS 10 beta on the horizon, I think it would be prudent to try Notes out in early or mid June, just so I can see what kind of improvements Apple has cooked up for their own notetaking app. Evernote has been serving me well, but it’s good to see that there are some viable competitors out there in 2016. I’ll be holding off my Evernote renewal until I give these OneNote and Notes another shot.
[By the way, if you have any other suggestions aside from the two services above, do give us a shout in the comments!]
© Thomas for iPad Insight, 2016. |
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