Evernote has gotten seriously better

Almost doubling the subscription price of a program is usually not a recipe for customer satisfaction, but I can now make an exception for Evernote. Yes, the note-taking app that many people seemed ready to leave for dead three and a half years ago, when a European software company I had never heard of bought the app that I’d already been relying on for more than a dozen years.

The Nov. 16, 2022 TechCrunch headline on Kyle Wiggers’ post about Bending Spoons buying Evernote practically sighed, calling it “the end of an era.” By then, Evernote had fallen greatly from its heights a decade earlier, when it was a frequent home-screen occupant of iPhones in Silicon Valley and visionary CEO Phil Libin talked about making the company a “100-year startup.”

After Evernote’s introduction in 2014 of a business-card-scanning feature that I still rely on, I had not seen many new features useful to my own work. And I was still experiencing too many note-synchronization glitches between my devices, despite the vow of new management to focus on the app’s core note-taking functions.

All this had me wondering if the premium account that had been a fixture in my Web-services budget since 2015, and which had increased from $45 a year to $69.99, was an expense I would be better off zeroing out. The obvious alternative was Microsoft’s OneNote, which I was already paying for with my Office 365 subscription.

But some genius at Microsoft elected to retire the company’s Evernote-to-OneNote importer in September of 2022, making any such migration a lot more difficult. And then the new management at Bending Spoons got to work improving the product–and one of the first things the people at that Milan-based firm addressed was note sync.

They made enough progress that when the company announced a steep rate hike at the end of 2023–from $69.99 to $129.99–I grudgingly decided to re-up for one more year and see where things stood. Eight months later, I was pleasantly surprised to see words I typed in my laptop’s copy of Evernote appearing my phone’s copy of the app a second later.

Today, that lag is barely discernible.

And last year, Evernote added a feature that directly helps one of my core tasks as a journalist, writing down what people say. This AI Transcribe tool that once served up long, unbroken blocks of text has gotten increasingly accurate and useful.

When I tested this Saturday afternoon by having the Evernote app on my iPad record and then transcribe a video of a 15-minute talk from the HumanX AI conference, the transcript that it generated in 40 seconds was just about as accurate as the Read AI transcript on the conference’s site (aside from botching a company name) and added bullet points and numbers to match the speaker’s pacing.

Evernote’s new management has also done a good job of communicating with its customers, posting detailed release notes for the app’s Windows, Mac, Android and iOS/iPadOS versions (why is that so hard for other companies?) to go with its frequent updates. The app still needs a word-count function, but overall it seems immensely improved from two years ago.

Meanwhile, Evernote’s cross-platform competition hasn’t done as much to earn my business.

OneNote still doesn’t have a built-in business-card-scanning feature–that requires a separate app–and sees fewer updates than Evernote, with less detail published about the content of these updates. I don’t see the same hustle at Microsoft.

And I just don’t want to trust this function to Google Keep, the free app Google had the temerity to announce in 2013 literally a week after the company killed off its beloved RSS client Google Reader. Twelve years later, a lot more of my digital life now happens on Google services, which makes me even less interested in handing over this extra bit of it to that company.

Yes, $129.99 is a serious amount of money for a Web app and service–but not in the context of one that I use and find useful multiple times a day.