Ga naar voor meer gratis cursussen. Wat is Evernote? Evernote is een digitaal notitieboek. De digitale versie van een schrift waarin je foto´s plakt en opschrijft wat je niet wil vergeten. Het kent drie belangrijke functies: - Leg alles vast Wat je ook ziet of wat je ook hoort, de kans is groot dat Evernote jou kan helpen om het te onthouden. Evernote is een digitaal notitieboekje. De digitale versie van een schrift waarin je foto´s plakt en opschrijft wat je niet wil vergeten. Alles wat je ziet en hoort kan je vastleggen in Evernote. Of het nu post-it geeltje is waarop je hebt geschreven, een foto die je ziet, een poster waar je langs loopt, of een website die je bekijkt.

Ga naar voor meer gratis cursussen. Evernote is a cross-platform app that serves many purposes—it can be your digital file cabinet, note-taking tool, daily journal, task or project management system, recipe-keeper, and more.

So, what is Evernote? It’s a note-taking app designed to collect and organize text, pictures, videos, and audio recordings.

These notes are then backed up to the cloud. This allows the user access to their notes from any platform.

But why do people use it? How do people use it best? And is it best for your purposes?

What is Evernote?

No two workflows are alike, but Evernote could help keep you productive and organized.

First, Evernote is relatively easy to use. There are tutorials everywhere because of its popularity and wide user base. With a shallow learning curve, you won’t have to take much time to understand the app.

Evernote organizes your notes into Notebooks, which are essentially file folders.

What Is Evernote Web

The notes themselves are text files with a standard blog-style GUI for formatting text, inserting images, or putting in basic code blocks.

The two most useful features are note tags and the Evernote Web Clipper browser extension.

Note tags work like the tags in a blog post or like a hashtag. This gives you a second method for organizing notes. The tags are useful for searching through notes and categorizing them for later use. All notes tagged with “biology” or “research,” for example, can be found and searched through, no matter what Notebooks they might be in.

Now let’s get into the Web Clipper, one of Evernote’s most useful features.

What is Evernote Web Clipper?

Evernote Web Clipper is a browser extension that copies web content directly to your Notebooks. It’s hard to imagine using Evernote without Web Clipper.

Once installed, Clipper lets you grab images, text, and even whole web pages. These can be sorted into whatever Notebook you choose. You can also add tags when you clip.

Why would you do this? How is it useful? Well, for one, you can grab simplified versions of web pages and send them to your notes. If the web page is one you need to look at frequently for research, it’ll save you time. It’s also useful if you need to access the info on that web page while you’re offline or traveling.

If the website in question is littered with annoying ads and pictures, the Web Clipper can strip them out.

Being more productive with Evernote

Anyone who needs to save a lot of information, access it anywhere, and organize it for reference would find Evernote to be handy.

Students can organize their classes into Notebooks. Ideally, they’d store all of their class notes there, accessible from their laptop or their phone. They could use the tagging system for easier studying later on. If you learn a test is on three specific topics, you can sort your notes by those topics by searching the tags. And since the notes are stored to the cloud, you won’t lose them. And depending on the price tier you choose, you could share them easily with other classmates.

Teachers could get similar use out of Evernote by sorting their lectures by topic. Teachers could also open up a Notebook for each student or each class. Then, all personal notes on the class or individual could go in the Notebook. Professional development could also have its own Notebook. That way, all of the lectures or classes you attend could be saved and sorted later. Those training notes could then be shared with colleagues.

Writers of all stripes are perhaps the most obvious audience for Evernote. Research gets a Notebook. Article, blog, or book ideas get a Notebook. Timelines, characters, persons of interest, word-building all get a Notebook. And the mobile nature means Evernote is always close at hand. Get an idea, jot it down, save it to the cloud.

Lastly, though it requires some extra work, Evernote can be synced with your calendar. This could help your productivity by tying your notes or reminders together with actual dates. You can also set it up so that your calendar events all go into a Notebook automatically, allowing you to take notes on the meetings during or after the fact.

Those are just a few use cases you might want to consider. Before you do, let’s take a look at the pricing structure.

What is Evernote’s price and what do you get?

Before you spend a dime on Evernote, consider checking out the free version, which is serviceable and allows syncing between two different devices.

If your needs are more complicated, should you pay money for Evernote? Is it worth it? Let’s take a look.

The pricing plan is relatively simple to break down.

What comes in the free version of Evernote?

The free version comes with cloud syncing between two devices. One mobile sync to a phone, one sync to a work or home computer. Simple and easy, and it has all of the full note-taking features described above.

The limits on storage and uploads are pretty small. You can upload 60MB of data a month, with a 25MB maximum size for each note. This isn’t a ton of bandwidth, but for more text and simplified website clips it’s sufficient. PDFs and image-heavy notes, which use more data, will run into this per-month cap and even the individual note cap.

Also, your notes can only be made available offline on desktop or laptop. For travelers or those with spotty connections, this might not work.

Features of Evernote Premium

The Premium version of Evernote runs $7.99 a month and adds a few more features.

The note-taking features are the same as the free version. Other features are expanded.

First, the upload limit increases: 60MB a month for the free version becomes 10GB for Premium. Note size jumps from 25MB to 200MB.

Probably one of the most useful added features is app integration. So if you want to combine your Evernote with Slack or Google Drive, Premium will allow you to do it.

The Premium edition lets you scan documents or business cards and forward emails directly to Evernote. You can also make notes and search through the PDFs you add. Sharing options are more robust, and you can make presentations out of your notes.

Premium Evernote also comes with AI suggestions that relate to your notes. This AI takes the content of your notes and suggests possible web pages that seem relevant. The suggestions aren’t always useful because the AI isn’t terribly robust. The signal-to-noise ratio of useful web page suggestions to unrelated links largely isn’t worth it for this feature alone. You could end up spending more time ignoring the AI’s nonrelevant suggestions than taking them.

So, is Premium a good buy? If you’re uploading a lot of very large notes, maybe. If you need to pull files from Google Drive into Evernote, possibly. If PDFs take up a large portion of your notes, and you need them searchable and annotated, probably.

It also may be worth it for offline access on both desktop and mobile platforms.

Features of the Evernote Business version

Evernote Business has all of the features noted above, plus team collaboration and team administration features.

The pricing is a little bit annoying because you need to have at least two users. And the $14.99-a-month price tag is per user. So if you’re just looking to expand your account with business features and more bandwidth, you’re out of luck.

The team and sharing features are what you’d expect. Anyone on the team can share and collaborate on notes. Permissions are assigned by the creator of the note. An assigned admin has greater control and access to notes, Notebooks, and sharing permissions.

The monthly upload starts at a flat 20GB overall, plus 2GB per user.

Is it worth it? Probably not, but to answer that question, we have to look at the alternatives on the market.

What is Evernote’s competition?

Of course, Evernote isn’t the only note-taking app on the market. There are plenty of Evernote alternatives that do the job better, depending on the features you prioritize.

Let’s take a look at some of the alternatives to Evernote.

Bear

Bear is a popular note-taking app but is available only for Apple devices. There may be a web version in the pipeline, but that’s not something we can judge at the moment. But if you’re taking notes on your iPhone, Mac, or iPad, Bear is a solid choice.

It’s free unless you’re syncing between devices. Then you’ll have to choose to pay $15 every year for the privilege. Still, if you do math, that’s cheaper than Evernote’s Premium addition.

You can tag notes in Bear with keywords, just like in Evernote. Bear uses a hashtag system instead of a separate tag field, so it’s a little faster. The text notes and Markdown compatibility are comparable to Evernote and its Codeblock functions. It doesn’t have Evernote’s sharing or team collaboration tools; it’s designed for one user.

We’d recommend Bear for single users who just need to take notes. It’s elegantly designed and fast, suffering from none of Evernote’s general feature-bloat problem.

If you have simple needs and are already invested in Apple architecture, Bear is a solid alternative.

OneNote

Microsoft’s note-taking software is a relatively new offering and is part of Microsoft’s Office suite.

OneNote can be accessed via browser or through the desktop or mobile app. It’s more free-form than Evernote and might appeal to note-takers who enjoy less structure. The notes are organized into notebooks, like Evernote. The notes are backed up to your OneDrive instead of a separate account, like Evernote. The similarities end there.

Instead of traditional pages, each individual OneNote scrolls sideways or down infinitely. Think of it like a digital reel of butcher paper. You can throw images into it alongside the text, with each block of text independent from the others. You can also draw over or around your notes.

OneNote works fine as a text note-taker but shines as a loose brainstorming tool.

However, OneNote isn’t free. It comes packaged with the other Office products in Office 365. Microsoft has a complicated pricing schema, with ongoing or subscription prices. The price also changes based on the home or business versions, but you’ll pay anywhere from $8 a month to $12.50 a month, depending.

Google Keep

Google Keep is a free note-taking software that comes with your Google account.

Keep has an interesting format: when you log in to Keep, you’re given a kind of digital corkboard. Your notes will appear as small boxes on the corkboard and can be arranged as necessary. You can also pin certain notes that you use frequently. They’ll show up at the top of the screen.

You can change the color of the notes, add labels, or add reminders right from this corkboard. You can also add drawings or images with a click of an icon.

Sharing is also pretty easy. You can add a collaborator to any individual note—it sends them an email invite.

It isn’t the most robust note-taker, but it is free and has a solid visual presentation. It’s also mobile-friendly.

Our only real caveat here is to be aware that Google has a track record for abandoning software. This may be relevant only if you’re thinking of adopting Google Keep for a large company or for mission-critical notes. If Google Keep is for your personal use, it’s probably not a big deal.

Is Evernote the best fit for you?

What is Evernote’s defining, most persuasive feature? That depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and how you take notes. Do you want to share your notes with team members?

And, lastly, consider your budget.

If you want to spend as little money as possible (ideally, nothing), Google Keep and Evernote’s free versions are solid choices. Evernote has more features but is bloated. Google Keep is faster but also simpler.

If sharing your notes is more important, Evernote Premium and Bear have robust collaboration options.

If you’re a visual person who enjoys more physical-looking notes, Google Keep and OneNote fit the bill.

As you can see, Evernote isn’t the only game in town. It’s not even the best game in town. But it is pretty versatile and well-supported, and it works fine for many people.

Check out our full review of Evernote for a more detailed breakdown of what Evernote does best and where it needs work.

Even if you’ve never used it, you’ve probably heard of Evernote. It’s a note-taking app that can help you organize your digital life, and it’s been around since 2004. You can use Evernote to take notes, organize your files, and take clippings and snippets from virtually anywhere on the web.

But is Evernote any good? What does Evernote do well? Where does it fall short? Should you subscribe to Evernote?

We’ll be answering those questions in this review. We’ll take a look at Evernote’s core functionality and provide a rating for each of its main features before giving it an overall rating.

First, let’s take a look at exactly what Evernote does and how well it does it.

Note-Taking in Evernote: B-

As a note-taking app, it’s not exactly surprising that Evernote’s greatest strength and primary focus is note-taking.

Evernote’s default organizational schema relies on the convention of Notes and Notebooks. Individual files are saved in Notes, which can then be organized into thematic Notebooks. Multiple Notebooks can be combined to create Notebook Stacks. It’s that simple.

But as straightforward as Evernote’s organizational structure may be, actually taking notes in Evernote isn’t as good as it could be.

On both desktop and mobile, Evernote’s UI is clean and makes use of familiar icons to indicate the tool’s core functions. Here’s how it looks on desktop:

Clicking the “+” icon creates a new Note. Easy enough, right? Similarly, the button beneath the New Note button creates a New Meeting Note—but Evernote fails to tell or show us the difference between a regular Note and a Meeting Note. Presumably, a Meeting Note is a template for taking minutes during meetings, but we shouldn’t be left to guess what this is.

The same goes for the “Work Chat” button below the Search icon. Hover over it and you’ll see the “Work Chat” label. But click on it, and it expands into a new pane that describes the button as the Sharing button. Which is it? If you’re coming to Evernote expecting Slack-like features, prepare to be disappointed.

Evernote’s UI could certainly do with a refresh. But one of Evernote’s most useful note-taking features is the app’s template gallery. Evernote comes with dozens of note templates split across three main categories: For Work, For School, and For Life. These templates help you take notes quickly. Sample templates include personal planners, calendars, meeting agendas, blog-post worksheets, habit trackers, and more. There are even templates for David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity methodology, if you’re into that.

As we pointed out in our comparison of Evernote and Notion, Evernote makes it quick and easy to create text-based notes on the fly. However, it lacks a default naming convention for new Notes. If you’re the kind of person who makes dozens of little notes to yourself throughout the day, it won’t take long before your Evernote is full of Untitled Notes. This can quickly become counterproductive and tedious.

One aspect of Evernote’s desktop app that some users may find annoying is that it does not allow you to resize the primary pane. With so many tools allowing users to customize their workspace, the fact that Evernote doesn’t feels weirdly restrictive for little apparent reason. Not the biggest deal, but an annoyance for sure.

Search in Evernote: A-

Evernote’s search functionality is very impressive.

For starters, Evernote boasts very strong optical character recognition (OCR) technology. (That’s not surprising, once you learn that Evernote founder Stepan Pachikov created Paragraph, an OCR system that Apple acquired and implemented into its Newton handheld computer in the late 1980s.) That means that Evernote can effectively search scanned images of handwriting as quickly as it can search typewritten notes.

Evernote’s OCR is very accurate and can effectively recognize even words written in sloppy cursive handwriting. That is great news for users who like to digitize handwritten notes instead of creating digital ones. Evernote can recognize 28 different typewritten and 11 handwritten languages. It can also scan uploaded images and photos for handwriting to recognize—think pictures of whiteboards or photos of handwritten Post-it Notes, for example.

The other aspects of Evernote’s search capabilities are also very strong. Evernote has a diverse range of advanced modifiers and its own search syntax, which makes finding stuff much easier. Evernote can also search for text strings across a wide range of document formats, including Microsoft Office files and PDFs. Unfortunately, that feature is restricted to Evernote’s Premium and Business plans. You can search by the date a Note was created, or even the location where it was created.

One area where Evernote’s search function—and the tool as a whole—falls short is how well it runs. Even searching for simple strings on desktop can quickly bog down Evernote to the point of having to force-quit the application. This has been a persistent problem with Evernote for a long time, particularly on mobile. For an app that wants to help people remember everything, this is a pretty glaring issue.

Web Clipping in Evernote: A

Evernote’s Web Clipper is arguably one of the tool’s most useful and popular features. Evernote’s Clipper is like bookmarks on steroids.

Web Clipper, which is also available as a stand-alone extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, lets you “clip” elements from a webpage to Evernote. You can clip almost anything: paragraphs of text, images, even entire webpages.

Web Clipper also allows you to specify whether it should preserve webpages exactly as they appear when clipping, or just a “simplified” version of a page. Simplified clipped pages strip away all of the images, special formatting, and even ads from a page. This makes Web Clipper an invaluable tool for serious research projects. Clipped items are categorized and stored just like regular Notes. That means they can also be searched like regular Notes—again, very handy for larger projects.

Clipped items can also be annotated in Evernote. For example, you could clip a webpage of a breaking news story that’s relevant to your business and then add your comments to the story before sharing it with a colleague. You can add highlights to draw attention to specific parts of a clipping.

One of the biggest selling points of Web Clipper is that once an item has been clipped and saved, it will be preserved in Evernote until you decide you no longer want it. Clipped items, links, and pages will all be preserved, even if the live pages or links break.

Evernote does a fairly decent job of “guessing” where clipped items should be stored. In addition to Recent Notebooks, Web Clipper will also suggest potential Notebooks where saved items should be stored. This feature doesn’t work perfectly every time, but it’s accurate enough to be a worthwhile addition.

Collaborating in Evernote: D

Wat Is Evernote

For years, Evernote has tried to break its way into the workplace. Unfortunately for Evernote, there’s just no reason to bring it to work with you.

Evernote’s attempt to appeal to the work-based productivity crowd essentially involved the creation of a Slack clone called Spaces. It looks like Slack, works like Slack, and feels like Slack—well, almost. Spaces even copied Slack’s UI (but not the fun colors).

Spaces is a perfectly fine feature; there’s just no reason to use it instead of Slack. Even Spaces’ page on Evernote’s website seems to struggle to find a reason to use it. Evernote says, “Every member of a space has access to everything in the space. So the information you need is easily accessible and always at your fingertips.”

Isn’t that the absolute bare minimum you’d expect from a work-based collaboration product?

Unfortunately, a lack of imagination isn’t Spaces’ biggest flaw. The feature also lacks much of the functionality that teams need to collaborate effectively. Incredibly, Spaces doesn’t allow users to comment on Notes. Two people cannot edit the same Note simultaneously. There’s no way to see who’s editing what. Spaces isn’t even properly integrated with Evernote’s Work Chat.

These shortcomings aren’t just disappointing—it’s amazing that Evernote would release a collaboration product that doesn’t allow people to actually collaborate on anything.

What Is Evernote

Evernote has made more than its share of mistakes in recent years, but Spaces is one of the biggest disappointments. Even if Spaces could match Slack in terms of functionality, it would still be a tough sell, unless everyone on your team was using it. With so many critical features missing, it’s hard to see Spaces as anything but an attempted cash-grab.

Integrations in Evernote: A-

One of Evernote’s major selling points is its many integrations with popular software products.

Evernote offers add-ons and plugins to integrate with a wide range of software tools you’re probably using at home and at work. Evernote offers integrations with both Gmail and Outlook, which is a big plus. You can also connect Evernote to Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Slack.

Although Evernote offers plenty of integrations with popular tools, they aren’t available to everyone. The most useful features of some integrations—including the Outlook, Google Drive, Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams integrations—are only available to Business subscribers. That makes sense as an incentive to upgrade, but it’s still frustrating.

What Is Evernote Software

Overall, integrations are one of Evernote’s stronger points. It’s just a shame that their more helpful functionality isn’t available to more users.

Evernote Pricing: D-

What Is Evernote Plus

Now that we’ve looked at Evernote’s core features, it’s time to talk pricing.

Put bluntly, Evernote is expensive for what it offers. Yes, Evernote does have a free version. But its limitations can feel pretty punishing at times.

Evernote’s Free plan offers no integrations at all. Users of the Free plan can’t digitize business cards or create contact notes, either. There’s also a 60MB—yes, megabyte—upload limit on clipped items. If you’re planning on using Evernote to help with a major research project, you’ll hit this restriction very quickly. In short, the Free plan is fine if you need a bare-bones note-taking app and little else.

Evernote’s Premium plan costs $7.99 per month. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s hard to justify spending almost $100 a year on Evernote when competing apps like Notion and OneNote offer so much more for free. Then there’s the issue of Evernote’s many bugs and stability problems. Evernote certainly doesn’t feel like a premium software product.

However, the pricing for Evernote’s Business plan is even harder to justify. Evernote Business costs $14.99 per user, per month, with a minimum of two Business users per subscription. That’s pretty steep for a supposedly collaborative product with very few collaborative features.

On the surface, Evernote’s pricing appears to align with other similar software products on the market. But once you start comparing Evernote’s functionality to other products and look at their pricing, it gets harder and harder to recommend Evernote.

Evernote’s Overall Grade: C-

If we had evaluated Evernote 10 years ago, this review would have been very different.

What Is Evernote 5

It would have been much easier to recommend Evernote before it underwent its radical pricing restructure. Some might argue that Evernote gave far too much away with its freemium product, which “spoiled” the product’s early adopters. But the emergence of competing tools such as Notion and OneNote makes it even harder to endorse Evernote.

What Is Evernote And Do I Need It

It’s a real shame to see a formerly beloved software product fall from grace the way Evernote has. Evernote isn’t a bad product. It does some things very well, arguably better than any other product on the market. It just doesn’t do enough things well enough to warrant the price.