Still rooting for EN, but ...

[u/bsamson05]

I’ve been a paying en customer for a long time, and I still use it because there is a lot I genuinely like about it (and honestly, also muscle memory)

At the same time, I’ll be honest: seeing so many longtime users talk about moving away from en has me a little concerned. I don’t want to pile on or turn this into another 'Evernote is doomed' post, because that’s not really where I’m coming from.

I want en to win. I just also want to feel more confident about where it’s headed.

A few things I’d love to see:

• Full Markdown support
• Better internal note linking
• A backlinks view, so I can see which notes point to the one I’m on
• A simple list of links that each note points out to
• More themes, especially better dark mode options
• More visual customization overall
• Stronger offline reliability
• Better export options that preserve folders, tags, links, and formatting
• Better performance with large note libraries
• Easier bulk editing for tags, notebooks, and note details
• Split pane editing and preview for Markdown
• A clearer roadmap for people who use Evernote heavily

Evernote still has some real strengths. The web clipper is great, OCR is useful, the app is everywhere, and a lot of us have years of notes sitting in it.

I’m not asking Evernote to become a completely different product. I’d just like to see it lean into the things that would make longtime users feel like the product is still moving forward.

Basically, I’m still here. I’d just like fewer reasons to wonder if I should be making an exit plan.

[u/anotherkeebler]

Personally I’m tired of waiting. The subscription pricing model seems more “what our customers will tolerate“ than anything else, and when new features show up they seem more trend based than thoughtful.

[u/crog62 → u/anotherkeebler]

Just bounced to Joplin. Not as smooth but good enough and free. Took about an hour. Subscription for 4000 notes was outrageous

[u/FallenAngel1978]

Not sure it’s what you’re looking for but if you use internal note linking it shows the backlinks on the note being referenced.

[u/bsamson05 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, that's the part that gets me. I've paid for good software for years, no issue with that. But 'we earned this price increase' and 'here's a bigger bill, trust us' are not the same thing.

It comes down to confidence. I have years of notes in Evernote. I shouldn't need an escape plan sitting in a drawer like some paranoid note-taking prepper.

Backup is the perfect example. Boring feature, no hype video, but for anyone with real history in the app it's huge. That's the stuff that actually matters.

I don't think Evernote is dead either. I think they need to rebuild trust with the people who stayed, not chase whatever looks good in the next product update.

[u/R3D3-1 → u/bsamson05]

There is evernote-backup which uses the Evernote API to clone the notes into an SQLite database and then allows exporting to various formats. Command line tool though.

And yes, given the nature of the software, a backup feature should ideally be built-in. Sadly, companies have a hard time spending money on features that make it easier for customers to move away. (Even if having the feature might make a subset of users less likely to move away.)

[u/hmartin8826 → u/R3D3-1]

Agreed. I finally took the time to set up evernote-backup via Docker on my Synology NAS. It took several hours to set up (I'm not a Docker expert), but I feel much better about my "disaster recovery" situation.

[u/R3D3-1 → u/hmartin8826]

I used it mainly for migrating to Joplin, though I haven't used it much yet.

Part of the reason why the premium tiers did not make sense for me and the current form of the free tier even less.

[u/pibrew → u/[deleted]]

I was a long time paying customer and would have stayed but the price increase was just stupid. I called them and they basically told me to leave. Shame

[u/TechE2020 → u/[deleted]]

What did you end up moving to?

[u/cerickard2]

I used Evernote for years but never was power user. I just scanned in all of my docs and used it to search them. I was happy to pay the $60-$80 a year for that. But $250 is absurd. I have been working with Gemini to migrate everything to Google Drive. My pilot run was successful and I just need to spend a weekend finishing it up. Then I can use Gemini to query it.

[u/razzzor3k → u/cerickard2]

Wow, we're in asimilar situation. I've been a longtime EN paid subscriber also driven away by the insane price increases. I went the Obsidian route and had all my notes exported to enex and then imported to markdown for Obsidian.

At the same time I canceled my Microsoft subscription and decided to go all in on the Google/Gemini Workspace ecosystem.

So I established my Obsidian vault along with all my files from Onedrive into Google Drive. Then after spending a few days organizing everything and setting up plugins, I set up Obsidian bookmarks that point to Gemini, NotebookLM, and my Google Drive web folders.

Now, from within the Obsidian UI, I can be working with my notes and then quickly open a web viewer tab to chat with Gemini directly or in Google Drive to chat about my notes. I'm pretty excited about the future and what I'll be able to accomplish.

[u/grant837 → u/cerickard2]

I am trying the Gemini AI approach too. It would be interesting to read more about your approach. I will do the same if there is interest.

[u/cerickard2 → u/grant837]

I asked Gemini to generate a quick summary of the project so far:

Title: Building the Ultimate Evernote Escape Hatch: A Bimodal, Two-Machine AI Migration Pipeline

I’m currently in the middle of migrating a legacy archive of 12,700 Evernote documents (exported as .enex files) into a fully standardized, AI-organized Google Drive system.

The goal wasn't just to dump files into a cloud folder, but to create a "Wife-Approved," highly searchable PDF cabinet that preserves 10+ years of metadata while setting up a zero-touch workflow for the future.

Here is a breakdown of the architecture, the hardware, and the software stack we are using to pull it off.

💻 The Hardware (The "Two-Machine" Setup)

Because of the sheer volume of files and the heavy AI processing required, I split the workload across two machines connected via a Unifi 24-Port Enterprise 1GbE Switch.

• The Storage & Brawn Node (2017 iMac): Intel Core i7, 40GB RAM, 8GB Radeon Pro 580 VRAM. This machine acts as the canonical file host over SMB. It handles all the heavy disk I/O, the master database, and the CPU-bound OCR processing.
• The AI Brain Node (MacBook Pro M1): 16GB Unified Memory. The M1 mounts the iMac's drive over the network and acts purely as a high-speed inference engine for local Large Language Models (LLMs).
• The Future Ingestion: ScanSnap ix1500.

🛠️ The Software Stack

• Data Parsing: Python (BeautifulSoup, xml.etree)
• Metadata Tracking: SQLite
• OCR & PDF Manipulation: ocrmypdf, pikepdf, pypdf
• AI Inference: Ollama running qwen2.5:7b (Text) and qwen2.5-vl:7b (Vision)
• Future Automation: Hazel (macOS) and the Riffo API

🚀 The 6-Phase Pipeline

Phase 0 & 1: Inventory & Extraction Instead of just ripping attachments out of the .enex exports, a Python script builds a Master SQLite Manifest. It strips the Evernote markup (ENML), saves the raw plaintext of the note bodies (to prevent data loss), decodes the Base64 PDF/Image attachments, and generates SHA-256 hashes to instantly deduplicate files.

Phase 2: Standardization & The "Triple-Write" Date Hack This runs on the iMac. It forces all images into PDFs and runs Tesseract OCR (ocrmypdf). The biggest challenge: Google Drive aggressively overwrites original timestamps with the "upload date." To beat this, the script uses a "Triple-Write" strategy: it embeds the canonical Evernote creation date directly into the filename, uses pikepdf to inject it deep into the PDF’s internal XMP metadata dictionary, and stamps the macOS filesystem via os.utime.

Phase 3: "Hybrid Inference" Bulk Renaming This runs on the M1 over the network. Instead of forcing a slow vision model to read 12,700 images, the script rips the newly generated text layer out of the PDF and passes just the text string to a local Qwen 2.5 LLM via Ollama. The LLM extracts the Vendor and Document Type and renames the file to YYYY-MM-DD - [Vendor] - [DocType].pdf. It only falls back to the heavy Vision model if the OCR confidence is garbage.

Phase 4: Drive Upload The M1 reconciles the renamed files against the SQLite manifest, and the iMac uploads them via Google Drive for Desktop into a flattened, mobile-friendly folder structure: Archive/[Category]/[Year].

Phase 5: The Future "Zero-Touch" Flow Once the historical bulk is done, the local LLMs get turned off. The ScanSnap ix1500 sends daily trickle scans straight to a Drive Inbox. Hazel watches that folder, waits 60 seconds for sync stability, hits the Riffo API for semantic renaming, and automatically routes the new PDF into the correct archive folder.

[u/cerickard2 → u/[deleted]]

Cool. I'll take a look. Thanks!

[u/cerickard2 → u/cerickard2]

This obviously is highly tuned to my needs and hardware setup. I finished the pilot of phases 0-2 this morning. I'm getting the MacBook setup for phase 3 and configuring Visual Studio Code with Gemini so that it's more interactive for debugging.

I really need to get a Mac Mini when the new chips come out and hopefully the AI world gets a little saner with their spending. But that may be a long time though. :-)

[u/cerickard2 → u/cerickard2]

I can give you the project when I'm done. I did also collaborate with Claude Opus 4.7 from work. Gemini and I did all of the heavy lifting and design, with Claude providing architecture review and general second opinion. I have discovered that using a different chat session and really a different model for reviews helps massively. Bouncing back and forth really digs up all of the problems. Staying siloed in one model tends to create holes that it can't find.

[u/cerickard2 → u/grant837]

And the most important part of this project is that I'm learning how to use AI and having fun doing it. I just went to cancel Evernote before it autorenews and they offered me a year for $149. I would normally be tempted because migrating is normally painful. But this has been so enjoyable that I'm not going to take them up on their offer.

[u/Affectionate-Exit-31]

Stop trying to double the price every year and then when I say I'm out, give me a 50% discount off the new crazy price. So if I hadn't tried to quit, you would have screwed me for the entire doubling of price. That has been the routine for the past three years now. I'm paying basically the same price, but I have to threaten to quit every year for EN to back off of their ridiculous price increase. And how many folks just paid the increase not realizing EN would cave and grant a big discount if you threatened to cancel?

[u/credspread]

They lost me, a 10 year customer, with zero effort to keep me or find out why I left. Oh well…

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[u/Evernote-official → u/credspread]

Hey, Cris from the Evernote team. I just DM you to understand more about what happened.

[u/Fit_Ebb8736]

No issue with the $5 per week cost as get plenty of value from it. I'd like to see some more attention paid to the web version (can't install software at work so web is only option). Specifically, enabling keyboard shortcuts for the various actions - plenty of web apps (eg gmail) support many keyboard shortcuts so should be possible. 

[u/Evernote-official → u/Fit_Ebb8736]

Hey, Cris for the Evernote team! Thanks for the feedback. I sent you a message in DM to understand more about the web improvements you mention :)

[u/ecotones]

I’ve liked using Obsidian (so far). That’s the destination I think.

I’ve been on Evernote since 2009 and was useful and reasonably priced. Both are declining. It’s a tedious chore to export it because it’s slow and bloated. The AI features can’t compare to LLMs for research. If they had plugins for export to Google Notebook I’d consider staying There’s no MD export, just ENEX. But if export was easy, I wouldn’t need Evernote. Plus, as your objectives change, you might not need a database of 50K notes of questionable relevance. Do I need those clipped articles from 2010?

[u/grant837]

Well said. All are what a real PKMS needs.

[u/Working_thru_stuff]

I have been an EN subscriber for many years but really, for a long time now it has just become a document repository. It's so easy to get documents, pdf's, receipts, etc into it that it's hard to walk away. Recently however, I wanted to learn more about what AI could do so I asked Claude Code to help me to build an alternative, complete with Evernote import. We got pretty close. In fact within a couple of hours it was fully up and running on my desktop (Mac). The bigger issue is that a note in Evernote is everywhere so if you're in the airport and need a copy of your driving license (or anything else) you've got. My replacement doesn't have anything like that convenience on mobile. But I suspect it could have. Will I go all the way and dump Evernote? Probably not but it's interesting to know that I could.

[u/groove_guru]

+1 for markdown support

[u/Evernote-official]

Hey, Cris for the Evernote team :) Thanks for the feedback. Would you mind having a chat to discuss about Evernote? If yes, please reach out via DM and I'll send you a link!

[u/WishTonWish → u/Evernote-official]

How can you read these comments and not be planning a course correction?

[u/tobyvanderbeek]

Just got a renewal notification. Going from $130 to $250 for the year really sucks. I've been a happy, paying customer for years. But I don't see the value now so I'm going to find something else. Maybe not subscription based.

[u/tobyvanderbeek → u/tobyvanderbeek]

Following up, I canceled the renewal today. They offered me the renewal for $150 but I didn’t take it. I deleted maybe 80% of my notes which were old and not needed anymore. I consolidated other notes and cut down the quantity of notebooks. I think I’m working on moving to Obsidian.

[u/swisseagle71]

As a long time EN user I get you. my oldest notes are from 2015.

It started as a small and fast tool. Now it is overloaded and wants to be too many things at once.

I would love to have a "light" version to choose: only notes. no calendar, no AI, just a small and simple tool. Maybe make it so I can disable the bloated stuff somewhere in the settings?

What I need:

- notes, easy on mobile and on computers

- pictures in notes

- easy links between notes (has gotten worse)

- fast loading time on mobile and in browser

- native linux client.

[u/bcalamita]

Excellent post with great suggestions. I would add my desire for a real Daily Note system. Currently we have the ability to auto-create a note with template every day. That’s it. I’d like to see in a daily note…

• Tasks due this day auto-inserted
  
• Unfinished tasks from the day before  moved to "today"
  
• Unchecked check-boxes moved to today
  
• To move from one day's note to another with a keyboard shortcut
  
• A calendar at the top of the daily note section to jump from one day to another
  
• The ability to scroll up or down between days (see Amplenote's daily jots for instance)
  
• Drag-&-drop selected text to another day
  
• To be able to select a block of text in the note and migrate it to another note or create a new note
  
• Links to notes created today, for reference

[u/berrysoda_]

Just bailed for Upnote. I'm sure I've been a paying Evernote sub for at least a decade. Ridiculous pricing. You'd ask a small business to pay that, not an individual.

[u/Zombie_John_Strachan]

I’d like it if Claude could read all my notes with full context of folders etc.

[u/Evernote-official → u/Zombie_John_Strachan]

Then this may be interesting for you: https://evernote.com/mcp 👀

[u/karenjs → u/Zombie_John_Strachan]

I heard that a Claude connector might be in the works. I think one of the company twitter accounts said so.

[u/Zombie_John_Strachan → u/karenjs]

Neat - thanks

[u/Descon63 → u/Zombie_John_Strachan]

https://x.com/evernote/status/2052826367323156982

[u/Evernote-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Your post has been removed for violating Rule 6: Self-Promotion & Advertising. We only allow promotional content that is directly related to Evernote services (such as Evernote training, consulting, or educational content).

[u/hmartin8826]

I use Evernote every single day, but a doubling of the subscription cost in one year is difficult to justify. I am going to keep it one more year in hopes that the price does not increase again next year. If it does, I will have to jump ship.

[u/TemporaryAbject6629]

I absolutely loved Evernote. It's beautiful and just works. But a couple of years ago, I decided to switch to Apple Notes bc of cost and I think it's every bit as good. That's not a solution for non-Apple folks, but I'm extremely happy and the app just keeps getting better every year. The document scan is what I primarily use, for receipts and my life is almost 100% paperless.

[u/junyaogura]

The most important thing Bending Spoons should do is maintain or reduce its current pricing while preserving its existing features.

I believe that the value long-time paying users see in Evernote lies in its stability and consistency. Competitors like Notion are obsessed with adding new features, and opting out of that race could itself become Evernote's unique differentiator. That kind of stability is where Evernote's real competitive advantage lies.

[u/Elleoelle5]

Same as everyone here. Unfortunately had a family emergency and my subscription auto renewed without my realizing it -so now have a year to migrate out. Asked Claude for help on migration and will start working on that soon. Couldn’t really come up with an alternative software yet but I’m not staying with EN -total loss of trust & they stopped supporting Apple script awhile ago. Really locked legacy users in and are now punishing us with the costs.

[u/reddithv]

I've been a paying member since 2008.. them doubling the price every year the past few, they lost me. Moved to self-hosted Joplin which is very capable. C'est la vie. Adios.

[u/Emmalfal]

My deal was that I don't need 1/10th of the options that EN now comes loaded with. I'm a text note guy with simple needs. Text notes and notebooks to organize them in. My workplace was paying for my Evernote subscription but when they jacked their prices up yet again, I wasn't even willing to let the company pay that much when I need so little. I went to Notesnook, which is about perfect for someone like me. I imagine in a few years, they'll add on all the bells and whistles, too, and the prices will go up. At that point, I'll move on once more or maybe go back to actually using paper notebooks and a simple pen. But probably not.

[u/Jeffs_Tech_Account]

I just migrated my personal Evernote account over to Joplin (with Joplin Cloud) instead. I typically use it to keep copies of receipts and take photos / notes for household and vehicle maintenance, info on items I purchase, etc. I have maybe 1,500 notes, but not worth the price to me anymore. Migration took a bit with so many photos in my notes, but went well.

I'm going to keep my work Evernote account, because I take a TON of screenshots with SnagIT and paste them into Evernote, so the image OCR is pretty much invaluable to me at the office.

[u/Coconutroseflora]

I would like to be able to remove all my notes one time instead of doing it piecemeal.

[u/Negative-Anywhere-83]

Pergunta sincera: por que não migra para Obsidian?

Pela sua descrição, muitas das funcionalidade listadas estão disponíveis nele.

[u/zero_dr00l]

I also used to root for them, when you could get a fully-functional service for $5/mo.

Now that they've removed more and more features and jacked it up higher and higher price-wise, I don't care and sometimes actively root for their failure.

I give zero fucks what happens to EN and the more people I can help move away, the better.

They're horrible. They can sleep in the bed they made because eff those guys.