Long-standing note taking service Evernote announced today that it is giving free users access to 14 premium features. These features were only available to personal or professional subscribers previously. Now, they are available to all Evernote users.
Note that personal subscribers benefit from this change as well. Six of the features were limited to professional subscribers.
Evernote
Evernote’s premium features that are now free
Here is the list of features that are now free:
- Note history and restore — option to view and restore old versions of notes.
- Offline notes and notebooks — access notes while offline. Updates are synced the moment Internet connectivity is restored.
- PDF annotation and export — annotate PDF documents, e.g., use highlight, reactions or anonymize content, and export notes or entire notebooks as PDF documents.
- Business card scanning — scan business cards to add the information to notes.
- Spreadsheet preview — view spreadsheets added to notes in Evernote.
- Boolean, geographic, document & image search — use new search options to find content. This includes finding text in PDF and Word documents, images or scanned documents.
- Email notes and share notes via email — options to use email to add notes to Evernote and to share notes via email.
- Customize global shortcut keys and the create button on mobile.
- Create custom templates.
The elephant in the room
While it is great to see that Evernote is pushing previously paid features to free and personal users, there is still one issue: free users are limited to one notebook and fifty notes. Evernote imposed the restriction at end of 2023.
While 50 notes may be sufficient for some users of the service, many may run into the limit quickly, if they use Evernote regularly. One option to deal with it is to delete old notes regularly. May work for some users, but one of the great features of note taking services is that you can keep a history of notes, if you want to.
Considering that Evernote charges $14.99 per month for its cheapest plan, many users may prefer to use an unrestricted service. I mentioned alternatives in the linked article above. If you want a recommendation, try the open source Joplin app. You can import Evernote notes into it and never look back.
This was not the first time that Evernote reduced functionality for free users of the service. Back in 2016, Evernote restricted free user access to 2 devices from unlimited.
It is also interesting to note that the cheapest plan cost $29.99 per year back then, a sharp contrast to the current pricing.
Closing Words
Note taking apps are useful, there is no doubt about it. While the good old system of using paper notes won’t die anytime soon, digital notes offer several advantages. Search, the option to look up previous versions, and the ability to store thousands of notes need to be mentioned.
Now You: do you use a note taking app?
I save notes quite extensively, be they related or not to Web pages.
– Software : MemPad [https://www.horstmuc.de/wmem.htm]
– Firefox extension : Notefox: websites notes [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websites-notes/]
– Firefox extension : Text Saver [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/text-saver/]
Long time user of MemPad, I added recently ‘Notefox’ as it appears as an all/per-page/per-domain note saving utility with a toolbar button access and note reminder : most useful
I added as well ‘Text – Saver’ though it is in my experience similar to ‘MemPad’ but limited to Web pages, because it allows via the browser’s context menu, fast text copy and save with page’s url, date-time of saving, link to page, button to copy back to clipboard.
In my case I see no need of whatever other ‘Evernote’ and/or similar apps, and definitely not if subscription is required.
In my view many utility concepts are easily achieved with free code and a minimum of brains whilst many paid ones are nothing more than going from from A to C without passing by B (brains).