REVIEWS / NOTE TAKING / OWNER INSIGHTS
🦉 WE READ 535 OWNER COMMENTS
Evernote: what owners actually say
Long-time users praise Evernote's OCR and cross-platform reach but are fleeing in droves over trust erosion, data lock-in, and aggressive pricing under Bending Spoons.
What owners complain about
- Trust collapse after export restrictions COMMON
A paying user since 2008 explicitly states they no longer trust Evernote because the company made it difficult to export all notes and wants to be the sole custodian of their data. Multiple commenters cite lack of data portability as a deliberate lock-in strategy.
- Bending Spoons acquisition seen as predatory COMMON
Users describe Bending Spoons as a company known for 'buying mobile apps, raising prices to insane values, and milking existing customers' to fund further acquisitions. The acquisition is widely viewed as a death sentence or enshittification event.
- New client never matched legacy features SOME
The Electron-based replacement client reportedly never achieved feature parity with the legacy version, and the mobile app is described as far from performant, with basic core use cases being buggy.
- Tag-based organization was broken FEW
A long-time paying user reports that Evernote damaged tag-based organization by changing it to only list notes at the bottom of the tag hierarchy, not those in the middle — a specific regression that frustrated power users.
- Lost focus on core product SOME
Users cite Evernote selling branded socks and Moleskine notebooks instead of fixing bugs, improving search, or making sync faster — a sign the company prioritized monetization gimmicks over the product.
What owners love
- OCR capabilities were class-leading
A user since 2008 describes the OCR as 'fantastic' and says it 'never failed to amaze' when demoing to colleagues. Another user highlights 'super good OCR capabilities' as core to their workflow.
- Genuine cross-platform ubiquity
One user praises Evernote for working across Blackberry, iOS, and Android — historically rare — and notes they have thousands of pages of notes accumulated across devices since 2008.
- Versatile all-in-one digital shoebox
Users describe using it for document scanning, website archiving, notes tied to calendar events, and task management — a catch-all that consolidates multiple workflows into one app.
Surprising patterns
- Multiple commenters express genuine surprise that Evernote still exists as a company, suggesting the brand has faded from cultural relevance even among tech-savvy users.
- The most vocal critics are not casual users but long-time power users and paying customers since 2008-2014 — the exact demographic you'd expect to be most loyal.
- Nearly every comment thread about Evernote spontaneously turns into a recommendation thread for alternatives (Joplin, Obsidian, OneNote), with users actively boosting specific alternatives unprompted.
WHO SHOULD SKIP IT
Anyone who values data ownership, open formats, or predictable pricing — the comments overwhelmingly indicate Evernote is actively hostile to export, has broken core features, and is now owned by a company users describe as designed to milk existing customers.
Synthesised from 535 real owner comments across 5 platforms. Every point is grounded in the comments — no marketing, no AI guessing. How we do it →