Well, Evernotes past year or so was a bummer as a customer. Don’t take it from me; just have a look at the Evernote Reddit, and it echoes exactly what I saw for quite some time:

• The new Android App was much slower than before – scans of documents suddenly were barely usable – it took around a minute to snap a picture of a document and scan it, and the app sometimes crashed in the process.
• Mac App also got terribly slow and memory hungry; the old app was fast.
• New Pricing model – I mean… why…

As my renewal would have come around soon, I’ve started looking into all sorts of alternatives, and the most promising one seems to be the open-source note-taking app Joplin.

As I rarely need the online Sync for note-taking exporting from Evernote and importing everything into Joplin was easy, just two or three notes that had issues, but that was an easy fix — or better said a cleanup as those notes were ancient and not needed anymore. And OMG, the web clipper of Joplin is so fast and has a few features I like a lot.

My workflow for Document scans currently runs through Dropbox, something I’ll look into when I got more time. But for now, that’s enough, and the Dropbox App gives me a nice PDF that I can Import and File where it’s needed. Also, having documents in the Note-taking app is something I stopped a while ago, so the PDFs live in a separate file structure that works for me.

The really cool thing about Joplin is that there are tons of Plugins available to tweak the app to your needs. And suppose I ever need Joplin to sync my data to secondary devices. In that case, there are several ways of getting this done, as it supports Dropbox, Nextcloud and Joplin Server – which is just another Container to run somewhere.

So far, I’m happy having liberated my notes into a System that works better and provides a lot of flexibility.