I have been using Evernote for more than 2 years and have been its premier user for 2 years. But I just moved from Evernote to Bear and here are the 8 reasons.
* Reason #1 I don’t like the MacOS app
I can’t change the name of a folder by right clicking on it. I have to go to the notebook setting page to do that. And “notebook setting” sounds like where you change if the folder is shared or private, if it’s local or should be synced, nothing but to change its name.
* Reason #2 I hate the iOS app
The main panel is a list of notes in order of the latest update time.
You have to click on the upper “All Notes” to choose among notebooks. And on the top of the list of notebooks, there is your 5 most recent modified notebook.
I just hate the idea of latest update/recent modified. I don’t want to and cannot remember what notes or notebooks I opened recently. The reason why I am using a note organizing app is to free myself from remembering where I kept all the stuff and just either locate it in the folder I know it belongs to or search by keywords. The main Notes panel, which is a complete mess of all the notes listed in last modified time order, is simply a stupid idea. I never went through or even looked at the notes listed here. It’s just too much time investment. I need to go over all 5 notes or notebooks one by one to decide if they are the one I want. And most of the cases, they are not.
What makes it even worse is that it is placed as the entry panel. Every time I opened the app, I looked at this page, and I thought to myself, Oh God I feel so lost, where should I start looking for the piece of note I want.
* Reason #3 Bad Writing Experience
Evernote is by no means a product for people to write with. It’s designed to be a place to keep your stuff organized but not a place for you to write your notes. One biggest flaw is there it doesn’t supports Markdown. And I don’t understand why the indentation for lists is so big. It feels so weird when I tried to use lists as sub-headers.
Also, Evernote doesn’t help you remove any formatting when you copy paste texts into a note, which can be pretty annoying a lot of the times. I have to use shift + cmd + F to clear the format a lot.
* Reason #4 I Cannot Have notebooks in notebooks in notebooks
There is only 2 layers of Evernote notebooks. You can stack a group of notebooks but that’s all you can do. While in Bear, you can infinite nesting using as many levels of tags as you want.
* Reason #5 The Web Clipper Doesn’t Work as Well as Before
It takes too long to clip the page. Sometimes I feel I can just copy and paste manually. Not to mention that a lot of the times, at leas 20%, the process just freezes there or ends up failed.
* Reason #6 The Increasing Price
Less and less features are available for free users. Now a free account can only be accessed on 2 devices. If you have a work computer, a personal computer and a cell phone, sorry you have to choose 2 from the 3. Also you cannot forward an email to save as a note anymore. To access all these features, the Evernote Premium charges $69.99 per year while Bear only $14.99, almost 4x less.
* Reason #7 Bad Fullscreen Experience
It comes handle if you want to fullscreen your note to present it to people or just for a clear reading experience. However, first to use the presentation feature in Evernote, you need to be a premium user. And more importantly, the font and layout will be changed. I am using a serif font for my notes but after entering the presentation mode, it is changed to sans serif.
* Reason #8 Unused Features
Evernote provides more advanced features than Bear. But I find myself seldom use some of them.
- Discover related content: I know there is related content in my notes. But 99.9% of the time, when the note I am reading is not the one I want, I will think about a better keyword to search for it rather than looking at the 3 suggested related content, which comes back to the latest update problem I complained above. I just don’t have time for the uncertainty.
- Annotate PDFs: I don’t annotate my PDFs.
- Browse the history of notes: I really wanted to revert a note to a history state one time and I was so happy that I purchased the premium so I have this feature available. But only to find that I can view the history, but cannot revert it back to a history.
- Access notebooks offline: I seldom lose my connection to the Internet. I can imagine this being very useful to business people who fly a lot. But not so much for me as a student.
- Work Chat: If I want to collaborate with others, I always use Slack or Google Drive or Dropbox Paper. Having everyone in the team to register and use Evernote is too big an effort and I just can’t suggest it in meetings. Not to mention there are many other nice tools designed specifically for collaboration and concurrent users.
Things that I want to see in Bear
* More customization on pictures inside a note
Now images can be visualized inline as full previews or smaller thumbnails. I also want to be able to change the size, to cut it, etc.
* Scan docs as PDF or pic
* Enable 3D Touch
* Tables in a note
In a word, Bear is just a better tool which tackles just the right number of tasks in an effortless way. And I highly recommend you trying it out if you haven’t.
