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by thecodrr 1309 days ago
Shameless plug but for the past 2 years we have slowly been working to replace Evernote with Notesnook [1]. Sounds weird to say "replace Evernote" when Evernote is absolute shit (no offense) but one of the main reasons we went this route is because Evernote did one thing right: It made personal note taking approachable & actually fun. Nowadays, a lot of the modern note taking apps (Notion, Slite etc.) are focused on the "enterprise user" i.e. they prioritize business focused note taking with features like collaborations, integrations etc. Private & personal note taking is no longer the hype which, in my opinion, is really sad.

I might be mistaken in my viewpoint however, of later I have noticed a huge trend toward providing user experiences that target a team workflow. Personal workflows are an afterthought, at best. For some tools this works out but for note taking apps I think it creates a huge void. Not everyone wants a thousands ways to integrate, publish whole websites, buy & sell, and create presentations using their notes app.

[1] https://notesnook.com/

6 comments

Do you guys optimize for local-first? Can I drop in to start editing without having to wait for network lag or sync? Is multi-device syncing rock solid?

Can I add pictures and links to other entries?

Can I import my existing Evernote notes?

If I wanted a team workflow, I'd use Google Docs and Notion. This is for just personal note and knowledge base I can tap into quickly via my phone.

> Do you guys optimize for local-first? Can I drop in to start editing without having to wait for network lag or sync? Is multi-device syncing rock solid?

Yep. Everything is offline-first stored right on your device. Syncing works mostly well but there a few rough edges which we are sorting out.

> Can I import my existing Evernote notes?

Yes. We have an official importer: https://importer.notesnook.com/

The one feature I loved in Evernote (when I was using it as a paid customer a few years ago) was that I could upload a pdf and it would be indexed for search. I ended up using Evernote as an extensive pdf library with very rapid search of all my pdfs. Does notesnook offer anything like that?
> Does notesnook offer anything like that?

No, and the main deterrent for this is our commitment to keeping everything E2E and client-side. Something like Tessaract or Paddle might work for OCR but I haven't looked too deeply into it.

I have been using ocrmypdf to do it on my own computer, but creating a searchable index of all my pdfs is either very time-consuming or requires me to pay for Adobe Acrobat Pro, neither of which has been very appealing. I've been trying to find a way to upload pdfs that already have OCR embedded (or as a separate text file) and have the OCR text indexed for search across all of my pdf collection.

Thanks for responding to my question. I wish you success in your efforts.

GPLv3, needs(?) an account, has a paid version but I'm not sure what extra features it gets. Can write notes offline and sync later when online. On Play Store but not F-Droid. Download button from an Android web browser sends you to the Play Store, but if you choose "all platforms" and scroll down to Android, there are .apk downloads.

Dug deeper and I see paying gets you more storage for things like attachments.

I would love to see this on F-Droid, looks pretty good otherwise. I don't love needing an account, but I guess that's probably the easiest way to handle syncing. SyncThing integration would've been cool to decentralize things.

Can people host their own server if they want? Not sure if it's just the client on GitHub.

> Can people host their own server if they want? Not sure if it's just the client on GitHub.

We are working on open sourcing the sync server so it can be hosted later on.

F-Droid is also coming.

Expensive, 5 fold the price I paid for Evernote last year (Evernote used to give very generous discounts). For Electron app on macOS. Which could vanish moments notice....

I don't feel tempted.

Is it Electron-based?
Yes.
In what format does this store the notes?
HTML but you can easily export to MD, HTML, PDF or Text.