Why people are leaving Evernote

Evernote was, for the better part of a decade, the note-taking app. From its founding in 2007 through to around 2017, it was the default recommendation for anyone who wanted to capture, organise, and retrieve information. The user base grew to over 150 million. The green elephant was everywhere. "Just put it in Evernote" was the answer to every organisational question.

That era is over. The users who stuck with Evernote through the slow years are now leaving in numbers, and the reasons are remarkably consistent across the community.

The acquisition changed everything

Bending Spoons, an Italian software company, acquired Evernote in late 2022. What followed was a pattern familiar from private equity acquisitions: aggressive cost-cutting, price increases, and minimal product investment.

Within months of the acquisition, roughly 250 employees were laid off. Prices were approximately doubled. The free tier, which had already been cut from unlimited device sync to two devices back in 2016, was gutted further: free users were limited to one notebook and 50 notes. A retention analysis scored Evernote 24 out of 100 post-acquisition, the lowest grade in the analyst's entire series, with users describing the product as "destroyed."

The pattern is extraction rather than investment. The company is capturing revenue from the existing user base while investing minimally in the product. For users who chose Evernote as a long-term home for their knowledge, this feels like a betrayal of the original promise: that Evernote would be the place where you stored things for life.

The product problems

Even before the acquisition, Evernote had been accumulating product issues that frustrated its most dedicated users.

Performance. Version 10, released in 2020, was a complete rewrite that launched slowly and resource-hungry. The web clipper consumed so much browser memory that users reported being unable to have more than a few tabs open while it was running. The app that was supposed to capture everything was making the rest of your computer less usable.

Sync reliability. Users regularly report sync failures between devices, which for a cloud-based notes app is the fundamental reliability expectation. Notes edited on a phone don't appear on the desktop. Changes made on one device overwrite changes made on another. For a tool that promises to be the single home for your knowledge, sync issues undermine the core value proposition.

Identity crisis. Over the years, Evernote tried to be a note-taking app, a project management tool, a collaborative workspace, a task manager, and a calendar. The product accumulated features without a clear vision, and the core functionality, capturing and finding notes, suffered from the sprawl. Long-time users describe a tool that stopped knowing what it was trying to be.

Keyboard shortcut conflicts. Evernote registers global keyboard shortcuts that interfere with other applications, and many of them can't be changed or disabled. For users who work across multiple tools, having Evernote hijack system-level key combinations is a daily frustration.

Privacy concerns. Evernote's privacy policy historically allowed employee access to user notes, which raised concerns among users storing sensitive information. While the policy has been updated, the trust damage was done, and users with confidentiality-sensitive content (lawyers, medical professionals, researchers) moved to tools with stronger privacy architectures.

What users are looking for

The users leaving Evernote aren't abandoning the idea of a knowledge management tool. They've learned from Evernote that having a single system for capturing and retrieving information is valuable. What they want is the same core value with none of the problems.

Reliable performance. A tool that stays fast as the library grows rather than degrading with use.

Search that works. Evernote's search was once its competitive advantage: it could search inside PDFs, images (via OCR), and handwritten notes. Users expect at minimum this level of search capability, and ideally semantic search that finds things by meaning rather than by keyword alone.

Data ownership. After watching Evernote change ownership, change terms, and change pricing, users want their notes in a system they control. Bring-your-own-storage and open export formats provide insurance against the next acquisition or the next price hike.

A tool that knows what it is. A focused, excellent knowledge management tool rather than a mediocre everything-tool. Capture, organise, find, use. The original promise of Evernote, delivered by a product that hasn't lost sight of it.

No platform lock-in. Evernote's proprietary note format makes export difficult and lossy. Users want open formats and portability so that switching tools, if they ever need to again, doesn't mean losing years of accumulated knowledge.

The broader lesson

Evernote's decline is a cautionary tale about what happens when the company holding your knowledge prioritises its own business model over your needs. The users who trusted Evernote with a decade of their thinking are now paying the cost of that trust, measured in the hours it takes to migrate to a new system and the knowledge that's lost or degraded in the transition.

The lesson isn't "don't use note-taking tools." It's "choose tools that are architecturally designed so your knowledge survives regardless of what happens to the company." Storage you own, open formats, model choice, and portability by design are the structural protections against ending up in this situation again.

Frequently asked questions

Is Evernote going to shut down? There's no announced shutdown, and Bending Spoons appears to be running Evernote as a revenue-generating business. But the pattern of minimal investment, staff cuts, and price increases doesn't suggest a company investing in long-term product development. Users should plan for the possibility that the product continues to degrade and act accordingly.

What's the best Evernote alternative? It depends on what you valued most about Evernote. If you valued the capture-everything approach and powerful search, Fabric provides semantic search across all file types, automatic organisation, and AI-powered retrieval. If you valued the simplicity, Apple Notes or Bear may suit. If you valued the offline-first architecture, Obsidian is worth evaluating.

Can I import my Evernote notes? Fabric supports importing from Evernote. Your notes, notebooks, and tags come across, and the content becomes searchable by meaning alongside everything else in your library.

Related reading: Migrating from Evernote, Evernote keyboard shortcuts, Where does your knowledge live?. Related pages: Fabric vs Evernote, Best Evernote alternative, Importing to Fabric.