Why I Ditched Multiple Note-Taking Subscriptions for Notion

I was a long-time Evernote subscriber, but eventually I started looking for a replacement. Standard Notes looked like a good candidate, but I replaced them both with Notion. Here are my reasons why.

How I Use Note-Taking Applications

Note-taking applications are popular because they let you capture thoughts and ideas quickly and easily, and they sync across your different devices.

I do very little actual note-taking in the traditional sense. I don’t attend lectures or anything like that, but I do some real-time note-taking during business meetings. Most of my typed notes are quick notes that capture some idea or fleeting thought that I don’t want to forget. My longer notes are drafts of different things I’m working on.

The majority of my notes are information captured from other sources, such as clipped web pages, downloaded files, scanned documents, or photographs captured with my phone of products or product packaging. I have over 10,000 notes, and they’re all important to me.

I Was An Evernote Early Adopter

I first started using Evernote on July 12, 2009, and became a paying subscriber on Jan. 6, 2010.

Evernote used to call their product your big external brain. One that doesn’t forget. For that to work, you need to be able to capture information easily and smoothly, and retrieve it quickly and accurately. Capturing everything in one place is great, so long as the process isn’t clunky, and the search is fast and accurate.

That was the case for almost the entire time I used Evernote. But things changed over the last year.

Evernote’s Superpowers

Evernote still stands supreme at creating notes. You can type them, photograph them, scan them, clip web pages, or email them to Evernote. Evernote will watch a directory and upload files that are dropped in it or sent to it from a scanner. You can even record sound clips.

The search is first-class too. You can tag notes, search in note titles and contents, search in PDF attachments. You can also search for terms that appear in photographs or in handwritten notes, because of Evernote’s built-in OCR features.

My Issues With Evernote

You can probably tell I’m still a huge fan of Evernote. So why am I no longer using it?

There were a couple of reasons. The Android Evernote app stopped creating notes from photographs. I was a subscriber, so I contacted Evernote support. Nothing they suggested fixed the problem. Even a fresh install on a brand-new phone didn’t solve the issue. The fix eventually came in the form of an update, seven months later.

That’s too long to wait for a fix, for a product you rely on every day, and that you’re paying for. I’d become disillusioned with Evernote as a company anyway, when they changed the tier pricing and aggressively stripped back the features of the free plan, limiting free users to 50 notes, and syncing to one device only.

The changes to the free plan didn’t affect me directly, but they were indicative of a ground change within Evernote, which had been bought by new owners. That, and the slow pace of the fix for my issue, hinted at a change of focus from service quality to profit.

Throwing Standard Notes Into the Mix

Long before those seven months were up, I’d started looking around for a replacement.

I tried many note-taking applications, and found Standard Notes to be closest to my requirements. It doesn’t have all the features of Evernote, but it has the ones I really needed and used the most. Plus, as a major bonus, Standard Notes has a native Linux desktop application, something that’s missing from the Evernote lineup.

To give Standard Notes a thorough trial, I took out a subscription. I needed that to access some of the features, such as notebooks and the web clipper.

Standard Notes is a fantastic note-taking application but, because of my particular circumstances, I did hit two showstoppers. Standard Notes says it doesn’t have a size limit on notes, but using notes over 1MB can affect performance. I’ve got lots of notes bigger than that. Sometimes it was very slow, and felt jerky and laggy in use. However, the biggest issue was trying to import from Evernote.

As expected, you need to export from Evernote, then import it to Standard Notes. It didn’t go well. The process kept terminating as though it had been completed, but it hadn’t. About one third of my notes were imported, and they had badly mangled formatting. If I was coming to Standard Notes as a fresh user, I’d have no problems. But, because of my decades of note baggage that I couldn’t abandon, it wasn’t the solution I needed.

Notion: A Sane Way Forward

Calling Notion a note taking application is doing it a disservice. It is a collaboration-focused tool allowing you to create wikis, manage projects, create and share documents, and much more. A document can contain text, images, links, videos, and interactive elements like to-do lists and kanban boards. It also has tens of thousands of free templates you can use to create content, and many more that you can buy if you want.

Obviously, a note is just a document, so Notion can also be used as note taking application, on steroids.

On Notion’s free tier, I conducted a trial import from Evernote. It was painless. You provide Notion with your Evernote credentials, and it contacts Evernote’s servers directly. In a few moments your notes start to appear in Notion. My entire database of notes was imported as a background task, in about three hours. That in itself was impressive. All the formatting was intact, no notes were missing, and metadata such as tags was present and correct too, which was even more impressive.

Notion does almost everything I’d hoped for, and it lets me carry on working the way I want. Alas, there’s no Linux client. Still, I’m used to working in my browser, because that’s what I had to do with Evernote. I’ll forgive that for the perfect and painless migration.

Take Note

Not by accident, the entry-level subscriptions for Evernote, Standard Notes and Notion are all closely priced. If you don’t need the advanced features, you can use them for free. I know people who swear by the free tiers of Evernote or Standard Notes. All three are great products, but for the foreseeable future, Notion is the best fit for my particular use cases.