Essential Tool for Note Organization

Evernote is one of my 3 essential tracking apps, next to Email and Basecamp. Email tracks communication threads, Evernote tracks my notes, and Basecamp tracks my tasks. It's hard to imagine living without any of these three foundational tools.

Pros

Evernote is the ultimate personal digital notebook. It's actually built as a collection of notebooks which allows you to document, well, everything you need to in a highly organized way. I've found that almost all of my thoughts start with Evernote and it serves as a great foundational app for lists, ideas, and concepts that you need to jot down and reference later. The cloud-based approach means your notes instantly live everywhere across all of your devices which is essential, especially because 80% of my use within Evernote is short, quick interactions and I never know on which device I'll need to access something. I don't have time to wait for it to load or to go through a bunch of UI to decide where to put my note.; luckily - Evernote does a good job of keeping the notebook selection process fairly simple so you can make your note and move on with life. I've also found Evernote's search feature to be very strong compared to other applications. I've grown to rely on the search more heavily as my notebook collection has grown.

Cons

Sometimes note creation is a tad clunky, mainly related to the "Name" of a note. I'll start typing out my note very quickly and then realize that i'm actually in the Name field which is disorienting and leaves my having to cut/paste the Name section into the description. I typically don't know what I want to name a note until I've finished writing it. This problem exists in both the mobile app and desktop versions.

More than just a note taking an it's so much more

Pros

Overall I started using this application for my notes while attending school and I learned more of the in's and outs and the power of taking notes with this app. This app is great if you are in need of having to take notes on the go and having them organized at the same time which the app does for you.

If you answer yes to the following questions you will benefit from this application:
Do you often have trouble finding something to write with or paper to write notes but you only carry your phone at all times?
Do you often talk to your self and come up with good ideas but not enough time to write them down?
Do you take pictures and save them in your phone as notes but have trouble sorting through embarrassing photos?
Do you have a scanner app on your phone to scan documents just to be able to e-mail that as an attachment?
Have trouble keeping your thoughts and notes organized?

If you answer yes to one or all those questions basically this app does this for you on the go all in one app. You can take regular notes like a traditional pen on paper on your screen with the widget. You can make a voice note from the widget as well without having to open the app fully. If you think it's a waste of time trying to scan a paper on a physical scanner and then transfer that to your computer and send that important e-mail because you are always on the go or out of the office? No problem this app does that for you.

Cons

I have been using the app for more than 2 years and I have to admit that even though it's a great app it does have a few flaws but they are just minor in comparison to all the good things it gets right.

You can only have 3 devices per account unless you pay for the premium version. I personally think that the premium version offers a lot of more versatility to the app but I don't pay for this service and keep using the free version. I normally carry this app on my phone, tablet, and have it on my computer so I can sync all my notes together. I understand that this might not be too much of a con but I don't need much of the premium features that come with that premium fee. You might keep getting ads to upgrade every once in a while if you are a free member. Another drawback that I have is that sometimes the app will randomly crash while typing my notes and even though it does save this before exiting the app making sure that I don't lose any of my work. I do find that this does get me a bit frustrated and sometimes I have to be restarting my device or just the app itself losing some of my valuable time. I value my time and when you are either a college student or a business sometimes you cannot afford to lose that important test notes for your midterm or client information.

I just call it My Digital Memory

We use it for both saving and keeping updated important information for our (small) company: credentials for commonly used services, settings, guides for the software used, templates of how-tos for different situations. Basically, everything that could have been kept in disparate folders and notes flying around. Another application - when conducting secondary market research, creating compendiums of various articles on different topics: the article's text is saved "forever" together with the active URL. All that's needed it's just to organize it by tagging and/or assigning to specific folders/notebooks. As a bottom line, using Evernote has significantly decreased the amount of lonely (yet important) paper notes flying around and made it super easy to find basically anything that needed to be recorded.

Pros

This is by far the best and the most functional software to make notes of any kind, keep necessary information and synchronize it across any type and any number of platforms: I use it simultaneously on Macbook, two Windows computers and iPhone and it always synchs smoothly. Unlike many other alternatives, there is a great system of nested notebooks which makes it super easy to group and arrange the information. Other great options: saving PDF files inside, add notes by sending whatever to an assigned email address, tagging, search in everything, and of course, collaboration options. Other small but great add-ons are Web clipper for desktop and mobile browsers and external mobile apps.

Cons

I've been using this software since 2010 and still sometimes feel overwhelmed with a plethora of settings and tweaks. I understand how overly complex and frightening it can look to a new user, that will most likely compare it with Apple Notes or so. Over the past years, Evernote has made some positive changes in the overall design, as well as the functionality (and simplicity of creating) of tables and pictures editing. However, this is still not enough to be called easy. Additionally, there can be great problems with document formatting when copying something from Web.

Perfect for small business in need of a flexible solution for File Management, Sharing & Collab

Pros

Love the flexibility, especially the way you can embed different files within Evernote, and render them within itself (e.g. you can view Office, Xmind, PDF and other files in your notes, either as attachment or as inline render (which is very useful).

There's also some nice features like password-protected redaction of words/information in a note, classic note links (useful for cross-linking of notes) etc.

And all these wrapped within the most important thing about Evernote - its platform agnostic nature, and very robust search engine (OCR enabled).

Cons

It is hard to use - the use case is not obvious and many users and companies failed to harness its power because Evernote doesn't have a very natural way of using it "correctly". There's just too many ways to use it. And it is really difficult to keep Evernote "organised" - for personal Evernote, you can say that's perfectly fine because you probably shouldn't have tried to organise your notes (you should treat it as a brain dump, and use search instead of trying to find things navigationally), but for business, you need to organise your stuffs and Evernote still lacks the ability to enforce certain control on that. You have to rely on your team members' ability to regulate themselves and tag notes rigorously and consistently.

It also has certain limitation that's not very desirable, e.g. lack of password-protection feature of an entire note, lack of more levels when it comes to organisation of notes in notebooks (no further stacking, bundle of notebooks etc.), and you almost certainly have to use Tags instead of Notebooks to effectively organise your notes.

The best personal note taking App - still medicore in business use

I love Evernote for my personal Projects. I would not trade it for any other application in this segment for my personal and private Projects. In Business Projects my enthusiasm falters as the rugged edges which I am happy to tolerate in spare time projects are getting annoying fast when there is team efficency or pressure from clients. In my Opinion Evernote business has been somewhat bolted onto the most popular Note taking and management application, trying to utilize an extremely versatile and powerful core for business cases. It leaves me with a somewhat stale taste as I whish to use a business application which is not the add on to something else but an A priority project that receives maximum attention. Then again in the time I used Evernote I have been positively suprised time and again and I am sticking with this, at least for some more time.

Pros

I use Evernote personally for about when it first emerged on Iphone and Ipad. Since then it went up and down and donw and up, it was a Rollercoaster Ride. Sometimes I came close to quiting, the again I carried on with it. Everything became more severe when I started to invite Colleagues and Friends for personal and professional Projects. a great Boost always was - most knew the product and had next to zero animosities or better to put it the other way round: Even the not-so-much bunch of people were okay in colaborating via Evernote. On Top of it, it was available on their favourite Platform (no one had to switch form Android to iOS or vici versa). Everyone knew how to use the editor, things didn't look to pretty at the start but then, after a while, like a game you get the hang of after a couple of rounds, it got better and better. Tables, Images, even embeded Videos. It all got together. Also we could choose which data would be encrypted and which was okay to stay unencrypted. Thinsg synced fine and we also had an integrated chat. Basically, Evernote had covered a lot of the needs we had as a team as wel as a band of friends in private Projects. The Features you require are there and they are easy to use.
Also, the team behind evernote is quick regarding upcoming Platform changes and usually Evernote is up to the newest iterration of the Operting System it runs on verry quickly.

Cons

Speaking of the features which are there...as it is often the case with growing platforms, there are some which are just not...my type of thing. Document templates might be something for some people, but not for us. Also, the Features are not homogenous on the different platforms. Thats right, if you want to do search-and-replace you better do not try to do it on a mac. Right Features like this are missing. Inviting People also can get a real pain in the arm in case they use Evernote privately without a busines account, as can the abominable dialogue for sharing notes on mac. It is absolutely clear that evernote is incredibly ambitious by supplying native clients for iOS, Android, Windows, MacOs PLUS a Webfrontend. This realy is awesome but it leads to raged edges when you are power user, save a team of such working cross Platform un complex projects.

Long time user

Pros

Evernote stores important data and information that may be used later. It is a focal application for data acquisition that may be used in any business venue, especially in a business like yours where there is data gathered from many different sources and where many different work procedures need to be implemented for running the business efficiently.
Neither data may be lost nor timed actions depending on the information may be missed or miss-executed.

We can say that Evernote:

1. Stores information in a form of files called "Notes".
The Notes can contain text, files (any kind of file), photos, hyperlinks, audio recordings, video, screen clips, business cards. There are some features specific to the way Evernote can store information contained in a web page as;
1. Full page
2. Article
3. Simplified article
4. Screenshot
5. Bookmark
The web clipping functionality has not been implemented nearly as well in any competing product such as OneNote.

2. Notes are grouped in the "Notebooks"
Notebooks are like the Collections of related Notes, which indeed is very intuitive.

3. Notes can be “Tagged”
The Tags add finely "textured" categories - as a form of the "metadata", allowing for finer "indexing" of information and more useful aggregation of notes with the same tags/categories.
For example; in a "Project" notebook, we can have tags such as:
1. Collecting data,
2. Preparing data,
3. Analysing data,
4. Presenting a proposal,
5. Project implementation
6. etc…
In this way, the "Kanban" project management applications, such as Trello, can effectively use the Evernote notes as "cards" on Kanban dashboard lists. There is also a product called "Kanbanote" which can visually display tagged Evernote notes in a Kanban dashboard sequence of subsequently executed lists of actionable cards. In that way, a Note becomes an actionable "Kanban Card".

4. Notes can have "reminders" added.
The reminders allow for the Calendaring and time tracking of activities related to the information contained in Notes and Notebooks. Evernote can effectively be used as a Task management application saving time and money and simplifying employee training.

5. Information can be shared
Every Note and Notebook can be shared as a "dynamic" Note so that the people you share the Note with can review your content and add changes - or the Note can be shared in the "Static" form as a message containing the information of the shared Note. The message can be sent as an e-mail or as any other kind of message.

6. Information can be searched for, located and retrieved
One of the real strengths of Evernote has been the capability to perform a full-text search, searching not only within the Note title or contents but also within the attached documents, where I would definitely point out the PDF text search that can be performed over the internet on the Evernote servers.

8. Scanning, OCR and data patterns recognition
Evernote Premium subscription, that I definitely recommend, also has the neat option of scanning documents and business cards of your clients and customers, performing optical character recognition on the Evernote servers, connecting with your contacts management application, such as Google contacts or similar - and proposing a way to store the OCR-ed information in your Contacts with quite accurate matching of the information for the card to the fields of your contact management application.

Cons

e main deficiency with Evernote is you cannot create notes and share them without sending them via email, twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or with a general link. It would be great to allow one person access to certain notes through the website, similar to Google Drive. I don’t believe this functionality is available though. Maybe this is part of their business features, we have not evaluated this portion of Evernote at this time. Another deficiency with this program is the size of storage available for free. Evernote offers 60 megabytes of space with their free level of the program.

Productivity, content curation, and collaboration in one tool

I use Evernote to optimize my productivity. It takes care of all the reminders for me. I curate and share my inspiration boards, and allows me to easily turn them into new content that I can share with the people that will eventually polish it and give it final shape before it can go online. I import Typeform questionnaire answers to Evernote for this same goal, and I have set up a number of Gmail filters that let me know when to pitch my posts for guest posting or to get valuable links for my domain.

Pros

Many things I like about Evernote, but I would say that my favorite is the fact that I can use it as the "hub" that contains (and sometimes triggers) most of my daily tasks. I would love to be able to review Evernote together with Zapier, as I am currently making the most out of the capabilities that both tools offer when they are combined. Evernote by itself is an extremely helpful productivity tool, and I love the fact that I don't always need to be online to update or create notes. I mostly use it to jot down ideas for new posts or articles as they come to me, and I also keep a couple of notebooks for content curation. I can add stuff from the real world as easily as I can clip websites or anything that I see on the go. To keep up with my content creation calendar, I connect Evernote with Gmail, Typeform, and Calendly. Although there are more Zaps available, these are the ones I use the most often to keep track of my contacts, review questionnaire answers that I then turn into blog posts, and keep track of appointments and phone calls. I easily share my notes and

Cons

Evernote doesn't have many flaws as I see it, but I did find a few times that some of the capabilities in other collaboration tools such as Google Drive would be handy for Evernote. I wish there was a way to keep track of my actions (such as what Basecamp does with the "everything" section). I also would love to be able to share something with a co-worker in "view only" mode (this can be done in Google Drive). As far as I've been using the tool, it does not have either of these options. Also, the way that every document or PDF has to be uploaded to a page is sometimes not ideal, as I would also like to have the option to just upload something to my notebook or to Evernote itself for safekeeping or to be able to reference it within a note.

A consolidated repository for everything important

The tool is extremely feature rich. There are utilities that I am yet to explore but the fact that Evernote is loaded with features makes it a perfect tool for both professional and personal uses.

Pros

From the name itself, one might feel that Evernote is literally a note-making software (which it is) but its utility is beyond "just making notes". It is one of those reminder boxes, note-making books and a repository all at once where you can "dump" all of your important things - Be it notes, links, photos, articles, audios, important files and just about everything. What I really like is the fact that you can sift through the type of content you save in Evernote. This makes it easy for me to go back to the stuff I have saved.
1) After having used other note-making software where their prime and perhaps only USP was the ease with which they let me make notes, Evernote definitely goes many steps ahead - It understands that "notes" for a professional or for a human can be beyond just text. Notes, figuratively, really are anything that is important to us. Hence, Evernote fulfills these needs by providing options like enabling audio recording and saving them as notes.
2) I like the fact that I can make separate notebooks for similar themed notes. It eases my job while searching from archived notebooks. To be able to assign tags to each notebook further makes the job easier.
3) Web Clipper is one of the most useful features especially when I am shopping online. I can just save a particular item through the web clipper option to be seen as a "wishlist" item in Evernote. It is especially constructive when I am shopping from multiple sites/apps and want to create a central wishlist repository for all the picks I like. It is equally useful for other purposes like - saving/bookmarking articles, newspieces or anything I find online that is worth keeping or remembering.
4) You can set reminders to yourself. This is another feature that makes Evernote a truly holistic software and in fact, much like a Saas.
5) Similarly, apart from creating your go-to repository for everything important, you can chat with others as well.

Cons

Evernote runs on Basic (which is free) model and a Premium model. The free version inevitably comes with its limitations like - Monthly upload limit is extremely less especially considering the fact that, it has so many features to save your data. Where it provides so many features, it sets itself back with the space limitation which is minimal. The paid version (Premium), however is pretty cheap, but feasible only if you really are a heavy note-making user.

Top of the line

Ability to retrieve older documents with ease. I can also, whether mid-conversation or during a meeting or presentation, quickly retrieve information that I've forgotten or to elaborate on someone else's ideas.

Pros

I've used this software since 2013. This is one program that I CANNOT live without. I store EVERYTHING in Evernote. I probably don't even use 1/2 of of the functions available with this software, but I'm still determined to master it though! Pro number one for me is the convenience! I use the browser version and the app, when on my Mac, and the app on my phone, too. The capture tool on my Mac makes storing emails, screenshots, receipts, pictures, audio clips and all other document formats super easy to save for later. Evernote is also able to easily collaborate with all the other storage software(Dropbox, Drive, Box, OneDrive, Acrobat, etc.) and the syncing is better than any other software I've used to date. I can literally save something in EN on my Mac and my phone instantly buzzes with the notification of the change. The search function is also amazeballs. Because EN uses OCR technology to "read" the text in files, if I searched for "sandwich" (I'm hungry), I would get a list of every file in EN that has the word "sandwich" anywhere in the file. Worrying about naming your files so that you can find them later are OVER! Some examples of the many mediums that I store in EN are: cards that are given to me for special occasions, pictures, tags off of purchases I make, user manuals for all the devices in the house, coupons, audio clips (usually made while driving), and recipes. Basically, for me, it's a one-stop shop to store the verbal, written or digital tidbits of life

Cons

Now, the "downside". Using this program since 2013 should tell you, that any downsides EN does have, are vastly overshadowed by it's shine. Shifting your lifelong organizational habits from a file/ folder based system to En's "note/ notebook" system overwhelms some people, I'm sure. I struggled with this, myself! Don't let it, though! If you remember, I already applauded the awesome search capabilities of EN. When I use search, and don't dig, or go "searching" manually through my folders, my task management becomes much more efficient. Organizing EN is definitely a "Con" for me, though. I really haven't done it. I store and search. EN would definitely become even more efficient for me, if I spent some time cleaning it up. Another thorn for me, is getting the info. OUT of EN, if I'm not sharing it to another integrated application(like dropbox). EN makes it's own document extension. When you download, or try to email something with your default email client (EN has it's own email client that looks like chat, visually), the item you are sending has a .enex extension (ex. "doc.enex") NO programs can open this file extension. So, converting these EN , .enex files, to Microsoft Word (.doc) or Adobe portable document format (.pdf) wastes time and inconveniences the user. Lastly, there is the cost. EN is one of the more expensive options for information storage, but there is a free version available. You only need to subscribe when increased storage space is needed.