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🦉 WE READ 544 OWNER COMMENTS
Evernote: what owners actually say
Evernote's long-time users praise its capture, search and OCR but deeply distrust the company's ownership, pricing and data-lock-in direction, with many actively migrating to alternatives like Joplin and Obsidian.
What owners complain about
- Data lock-in and export difficulty SOME
A paying user since 2008 says they stopped trusting Evernote when the company made it difficult to export all notes and positioned itself as 'the sole custodian of my data'. Others echo frustration at lack of data portability across SaaS apps generally, with Evernote cited as a specific case.
- New client lacks feature parity with legacy SOME
The newer Electron-based client software 'never even achieved feature parity with their legacy client software', leaving basic core use cases incomplete for users who relied on older features.
- Mobile app performance is poor FEW
One long-time user notes the mobile app 'wasn't exactly screamingly performant, to put it nicely' — a direct statement about sluggish performance on mobile.
- Tag-based organization was damaged FEW
A paying customer reports that a change to tag hierarchy behavior — now only listing notes at the bottom of the tag hierarchy rather than those in the middle — broke their organizational workflow.
- Distrust of current ownership and pricing SOME
Multiple commenters express concern about Bending Spoons (the acquirer), with one citing a pattern of buying apps, raising prices to 'insane values' and 'milking existing customers'. A separate commenter says they 'can't imagine ever going back to evernote at the current price'.
- Buggy features and lost focus SOME
One user notes task management is 'buggy'. Another criticizes the company for prioritizing merchandise (Evernote-branded socks, Moleskine partnerships) over 'bugs smashing, better search or faster/more reliable sync' during its VC-funded era.
What owners love
- Excellent OCR
A user since August 2008 calls the OCR 'fantastic' and says it 'never failed to amaze' when demoed to others. Another user specifically lists 'the super good OCR capabilities' as a core reason they stay.
- Best-in-class all-in-one capture
Users describe it as a 'catch-all app' — scanning documents for a paperless workflow, archiving website snapshots, and attaching notes to calendar events. One commenter says 'there's simply no better place to collect everything'.
- Powerful search and reliable sync
Users praise 'powerful search and frequent syncing' and describe it as a 'digital mind' they can 'see, sort and filter' — making it hard for them to imagine working without it.
- Deep lock-in creates loyalty
A user who returned to Evernote says it is 'difficult to abandon Evernote after you built all your digital life around it' — indicating that for heavily invested users, the ecosystem remains sticky despite complaints.
Surprising patterns
- Ex-users are highly organized evangelists for alternatives: Joplin, Obsidian, Logseq, and Zim Wiki are repeatedly recommended by name in these threads, with detailed migration paths described (Evernote import features, self-hosted sync, Syncthing integration).
- The 'paperless office' / 'digital shoebox' use case — using Evernote primarily to scan and store physical documents — appears to be one of the strongest reasons users stayed despite dissatisfaction with the company's direction.
- Several commenters describe being paying customers for over a decade (one since 2008) and simultaneously expressing active distrust — a pattern of loyalty to the product but alienation from the company.
- Some users report using workarounds like obsidian-livesync or Geeknote (a CLI tool for editing Evernote notes in terminal editors) to get the functionality Evernote itself doesn't provide, suggesting a gap between power-user needs and the official client.
WHO SHOULD SKIP IT
Buyers who prioritize data ownership, easy export, or predictable pricing should skip Evernote — the comments repeatedly describe export friction, distrust of current ownership, and price increases as primary reasons users are leaving.
Synthesised from 544 real owner comments across 5 platforms. Every point is grounded in the comments — no marketing, no AI guessing. How we do it →