Evernote

When it comes to taking all manner of notes and using them to get work done, having an app that syncs across all your devices and has a browser version, too, is indispensable. Evernote has long been a leader among note-taking and syncing apps, though the company has taken its fair share of criticism in recent years for adding excessive features without polishing core ones, hiking its prices, and gutting the free version. Nevertheless, in terms of functionality, you'll be hard-pressed to find a service that does everything Evernote does, which is why it remains the Editors' Choice.

The only app that comes close to Evernote's prowess is Microsoft OneNote. If you already have a Microsoft account, and you are not heavily invested in Evernote, OneNote is the only app I'd consider as a replacement at this time.

In this present article, I review all aspects of Evernote as a service, including a detailed analysis of its prices and plans. I do not, however, go into great detail about any of the apps specifically, although there are some differences among them and what you can do in them. To keep it platform-agnostic, I stick to images of and references to Evernote's web app here.

Pricing, Plans, and Value

Evernote offers three tiers of service for personal use: Basic (free), Plus ($34.99 per year), and Premium ($69.99 per year). Students are eligible for discounts. The company also has a Business plan, which costs $12 per person per month. See PCMag's review of Evernote for Business for more.

The Basic option has become very limited in the years since Evernote first launched, such that its restrictions keep it from being a useful tool for many people. I do not recommend it except as a way to get a sense of the app's interface. The main problem with the free version is that you can only sync between two devices, although you can access your notes via the Evernote web app from any browser. You cannot save any data offline to your two devices, so you can't get your notes if you don't have an internet connection.

Evernote uses cloud storage, and the total amount that you get expands every month. Unused storage from one month does not roll over. With the free account, you get 60MB of storage per month, and that isn't much if you attach files to notes. Also, the biggest file you can upload to a Basic account is 25MB. The free account doesn't come with any tech support either. There is at least one perk in the free account: the ability to search handwritten text in images. That said, with the 60MB of storage per month, you probably won't be uploading many handwritten notes.

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The Plus account offers a lot more. You can sync across as many devices as you need, and you can upload up to 1GB of data per month. With Evernote Plus, you can save selected notebooks offline so that you can read and edit your notes even if you don't have an internet connection. You also get the ability to forward emails into Evernote and have them show up in your account as a new note, which you can't do with the Basic account. If you need support from Evernote, it's available via email only. I recommend the Plus account to Evernote users who see the Premium plan as too expensive (and it is) but who still want to get as much as they can from the tool.

Unfortunately, the Plus account has limitations that aren't advertised front and center and which you might not even miss until you need them. Version history is one example. Say you need to restore a previous version of a note. Try to access your note history, and you'll be greeted with a prompt to upgrade to Premium. When you run into this suggestion to upgrade from Plus to Premium, there's $7.99-per-month option, so you don't have to commit to the annual fee. It's kind of like an $8 hostage fee.

Premium includes everything that's in Plus, and more. Storage increases to 10GB per month. You can annotate PDFs that you upload. When you search for text, Evernote looks not only in your notes and images, but also PDFs and Office files you've uploaded. Customer support can take place via email or live chat. A presentation mode is included that lets you turn notes into slideshows with no additional effort on your part. You also get the ability to scan and digitize business cards. Premium really is the way to go, but as I said, it's too expensive.

Prices for Competing Services

Evernote's prices are high among note-taking and syncing apps. But price isn't the whole story. To gauge the value of Evernote Plus and Premium, we can compare how much other services charge and whether they offer similar functionality.

A few apps are completely free with the only upsell option being to add more storage. Microsoft OneNote and Google Keep are the best examples. You get 10GB free with Google and 5GB free with Microsoft. That space is handled by OneDrive and Google Drive, respectively, and it's shared among other apps you use within the ecosystem. If you choose to pay for more storage, 100GB with Google Drive costs $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year, while 1TB goes for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year.

Comparing Microsoft's prices gets trickier. If you just pay for more storage, it's $1.99 per month for 50GB. But if you buy a subscription to Office 365 Home, up to five people in your household get 1TB of space each (so 5TB total), plus all the Office apps for a grand total of $99.99 per year. For just one person, Office 365 Personal will do nicely at $69.99 per year for the same 1TB of space and apps. If you need Microsoft Office anyway, it's an enticing reason to use OneNote. But OneNote is available to anyone for free, regardless if you have a subscription to Office.

In terms of features, functionality, and apps supported, OneNote comes closer than any other note-taking app in how closely it matches Evernote. Google Keep is nowhere near as powerful.

Another app, Zoho Notebook, is 100 percent free. The company makes money through other cloud-based business apps, which it hopes you'll check out in the process of using its note-taking app.

Bear for macOS and iOS looks like a pared down version of Evernote, with intentionally fewer features. Its Pro version costs $1.49 monthly or $14.99 annually. One reason it costs so much less than other note-taking apps is because you're responsible for providing your own storage.

Milanote (web only) is designed for creative types in that it's built for storing and viewing images differently than other services. Milanote's free version limits you to uploading 200 notes. A paid version with unlimited storage costs $12.50 per month or $119.88 per year. It's the only service in this category I've seen that charges more than Evernote.

The Evernote Way

Evernote is one of those applications that you either get or struggle to understand. It's so flexible and open that when you first start using it, you can easily get blank-page syndrome. On the company's blog, you can find tips and use cases about Evernote, which can help you understand not just how to use it, but why.

In brief, Evernote is a place to record and save all your thoughts, notes, voice memos, images, files—whatever you upload—in the cloud so that you can get to all of it from your computer, smartphone, tablet, or anywhere you have an Internet connection and a browser.

It comes with an excellent search tool that lets you find anything you've uploaded to your account. In addition, it offers a wealth of tools for sorting and finding your notes in other ways. Text-based tags, geolocation tags, notebooks, and stacks of notebooks all offer more ways for your to categorize and organize your notes in whatever way works for you, no matter how organized or disorganized you are.

Evernote, OneNote, and Google Keep are similar in their core functionality, although Evernote has more features and a few unique ones. For example, Evernote adds geolocation tags to your notes when you have location services enabled, which is a great help to business travelers who might remember where they were when they took a note but don't remember anything about the content.

Comparatively, Google Keep doesn't have as many ways to stay organized. You can label notes (similar to tags in Evernote), but any sense of organization goes out the window. OneNote lets you separate notes into Notebooks, Sections, and Pages at least, but its Web app is very slow to load them, which could bring productivity to a crawl.

Apps, Design, and Basic Features

As mentioned, Evernote has several apps, including ones for Windows and Mac, which give you offline access to your notes. Evernote has mobile apps for Android and iOS, although for access to your notes offline on the mobile apps, you need the appropriate tier of service. There's also a web app that works in any browser; the beauty of having a web app is that you can access your notes no matter where you are or what device you have on hand. While a web app may sound like a standard feature, not every note-taking and syncing service has one.

Generally speaking, the apps all have a fairly orderly look to them. They resemble other productivity apps (or vice versa), with a three-paneled design. Evernote uses rich formatting, so there are plentiful menus for changing the typeface, point size, alignment, and adding bold, italics, highlighting, and so forth. Some people find formatting distracting, and if it's not your jam, I would suggest looking into Bear, which is for Mac and iOS only. It doesn't even have a web app, which I see a major negative point. Anyway, the Bear app and another competitor called Laverna both support Markdown language. Markdown is, very simply put, a language for applying formatting using very simple coding. If you've ever typed asterisks in a messaging app to make something bold *like this*, that's Markdown. It's not for everyone.

The Evernote has a minimal design. At the far left is a column of icons for starting a new note, searching notes, accessing shortcuts, viewing all notes, viewing all notebooks, and seeing your tags.

Not every feature from the desktop app shows up in the web app, however. The search function in the web app doesn't work in real time, for example, so you have to hit the Enter key to find applicable notes. In the web app, you can't select notes en masse to move them, and you can't merge notes.

Two Premium-only features don't show up in the browser-based version either: Context and PDF annotation. If you want to annotate, crop, and rotate PDFs and image files uploaded to Evernote, you have to do it in one of the desktop apps.

Advanced Features

Evernote has several advanced features that many other note-taking apps don't have. The ability to search for text and find it in images, whether those images are snapshots of a page of typed text or contain handwritten text, is perhaps the most remarkable example.

You can take pictures of whiteboards, presentations, business cards, advertisements, recipes, or anything else you want to save and trust that Evernote will make all the text in the image searchable. I'm always amazed at how well this feature works, although to be fair, it's not 100 percent foolproof. From time to time it misses something due to a glare on the image or some other problem. OneNote offers this capability, too.

Premium and Business users can enable a unique feature called Context that suggests related notes and news articles based on keywords and metadata for the note you're writing, editing, or viewing. In practice, I find the Context suggestions to be more of a distraction than an aid, but it all depends on how you work and what you do with Evernote. You can customize the suggestions so that they only come from certain sources, and there's an option to disable it.

Another advanced feature, Work Chat, puts an instant messaging window right into your Evernote workspace. It's available to all Evernote members, including free Basic members. You can invite anyone to chat with you while you're in Evernote, though they must sign up for an account to use the tool. I love the concept of being able to collaborate quickly and easily from the same window in which I'm working, although with the rise in popularity of team chat apps, many people already have a preferred method for getting in touch with colleagues and collaborators that's equally as convenient.

My personal favorite advanced feature is the web clipper. It's a browser extension that helps you save the contents of an web page, skipping the ads on the page if you wish, directly into your Evernote account. For saving articles I want to read and recipes, it's a miracle worker. A few Evernote competitors offer a web clipper now, too, including OneNote, Simplenote, and Google Keep.

A feature called Conflicting Changes offers a much-needed service but has never worked as well as I would like it to. When Evernote detects something amiss in a note as a result of a syncing issue, it lets you know by saving copies of the note to a folder it creates called Conflicting Changes. Conflicts occur if you edit a note offline without first syncing changes from a previous edit on a different device. User error can cause conflicts, but slow syncing or a device crash can be to blame as well.

In any event, I've always wanted Evernote to show me the conflicts in such a way that they make sense and I can act on them, such as highlighting what's different between two versions. As it stands, you just get raw chunks of text or whatever the format of your notes, and a time and date stamp of the save. There's no easy way to reconcile the two files without reading them word for word. It could be nothing more than an extra space or a punctuation mark on one version but not another. You'd never know that, though, because the differences are not visible.

Evernote plays nicely with other apps, a huge advantage when integrating Evernote into your personal or business life. Every paying member gets a unique Evernote email address that they can use to forward emails into their Evernote account. The app can connect to Slack, allowing you to type a command into Slack and have the post automatically show up as a note in Evernote. It works with workplace collaboration tools, such as Atlassian Confluence, as well as personal apps, such as Instapaper and Pocket.

If there's an app or online service you want to connect to Evernote and don't see supported, you can always look to see if connectivity is possible through IFTTT or Zapier, because they both support Evernote as well. IFTTT (it stands for "if this, then that") and Zapier are online tools that help people connect apps that don't necessarily connect to one other natively.

An Ever-Changing Value Proposition

Evernote remains one of the best note-taking and syncing services there is in terms of features and functionality. It's still an eminently worthy Editors' Choice, despite some problems, particularly with creating customer loyalty. Changes to the paid plans, including stiff price hikes, have left many members questioning their allegiance to the service, however. Though I have a hard time suggestion anyone ditch Evernote in favor of another service, I have an equally hard time recommending it to new users.

If you're already into Evernote, it's very difficult to quit. Stick with the Plus plan, which is less expensive than the Premium plan, if you can make do without those few extra features. You can always upgrade in the months that you need it for $7.99. But if your mind isn't yet cemented into this app, and especially if you want a free app, OneNote is worth a try.