Remember when you were a kid, and you thought you’d never have to study again when you grow up?
Little did you know, keeping track of information is a workplace must-have. That’s why it’s so often recommended that people in business start taking notes and using them.
How should you take notes? Different strategies will work best for different people. Some prefer handwritten notes; others get by just fine with Google Docs or Apple Notes. Still, there are a lot of note-taking apps on the market that promise to help you boost productivity.
One of the most popular note-taking apps is Evernote. They promise an easy-to-use, organized, and totally paperless way to take great notes and reference them. Is it right for you? Read this Evernote review to find out.
What is Evernote?
Launched in 2008, Evernote has amassed an audience of over 200 million and become the de facto note taking app.
In recent years, with so many other note-taking apps on the market, it’s faced a bit of backlash. With Mac and Windows computers both having built-in note-taking programs, do you really need to pay for a separate program? Is the free version of Evernote worth it?
There have also been controversies about the most recent version of Evernote, v.10. Written from scratch in the Electron framework, some users complained that this version lacked some key features and was much slower than its predecessor.
Considering this, it’s important to review Evernote in 2022. Is it still worthwhile? Have the updates made to v.10 caused an improvement? Let’s take a look at what Evernote has to offer in 2022.
Evernote pricing
You can get started with Evernote absolutely free. Their free plan is perfect for many individual users, letting you upload up to 60MB of content and attach them to your notes each month.
If the free package doesn’t satisfy you, their tiered pricing model offers two other options. The Personal tier costs $5.83/mo billed annually or $7.99/mo billed monthly. The Professional tier costs $8.33/mo annually or $9.99/mo monthly.
Evernote Personal comes with 10GB of monthly uploads, while Professional comes with 20GB. Paid users can also connect to Google Calendar, access a vast library of widgets, integrate with tools like Slack, and annotate files.
They also offer a Teams tier for businesses, which costs $12.50/mo annually or $14.99/mo monthly. This tier comes with collaboration tools and additional storage.
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Evernote Review: Getting started
Evernote is available for web, desktop, and mobile on a range of devices. Whether you’re a Mac or PC user, you can get started by downloading the Evernote app or signing up on the website. Anyone can get started with Evernote for free, so you can see how you like it before you decide to go all in.
Features
When you sign up, you’ll get the chance to try a premium version of Evernote for seven days. Beyond that, you’re taken to this dashboard, which can toggle between light and dark mode. This sleek dashboard contains everything Evernote has to offer.
The tabs included on the Evernote dashboard’s right-hand menu are:
- Home: Thumbnails of recent notes, scratch pad, media clips
- Shortcuts: A drop-down menu where you can save your most important notes for easy access
- Notes: Your entire catalog of notes, plus options for making a new one
- Tasks: A to-do list feature only available to paid users
- Notebooks: Folders to help organize your notes
- Tags: Another organization option
- Shared with me: Your collaborative notes with other Evernote users
- Trash: Discarded notes
Here’s a more in-depth look at some of Evernote’s key features.
Home
On the Home page, you can view your notes and store “clips” uploaded or taken from online sources. You can also use the scratch pad as a sort of digital sticky note for quick reminders. “Web clips” are created with a Web Clipper browser extension; they’re annotated sections of web pages that you can keep and share.
Paid users can also clip and save emails. You’ll start seeing your files in this menu once you add them to your notes.
Notes
As an Evernote user, you’ll probably spend most of your time in the Notes tab. This is where you’ll find all the note taking tools among Evernote’s features. You can create and edit notes, making use of features like templates, text styles, and attachments.
You can group your notes into Notebooks, allowing you to organize them by topic, date, or anything else. Reminders and tags are two other features to help you keep track of your notes. Reminders will notify you when you need them, while tags are searchable in the Tags tab.
Attachments
When you add images and other attachments to your notes, you also have the option to annotate them. This menu lets you highlight important information by dragging and dropping text, shapes, and more. There’s also a handy “blur” tool you can use to pixelate faces and personal info. It’s especially useful for shared notes.
Tasks
Paid users get access to the Tasks feature. This reminder tool lets you schedule and check off tasks much like Apple’s Reminders app. It also integrates directly with your notes. You can create a to-do list within any note, and your list is automatically saved to tasks in real time.
Integrations
Free and paid users can integrate Evernote with Apple, Google, Wall Street Journal, and the financial news service Nikkei. Paid users can sync their notes with their Google Drive to get calendar alerts, save relevant emails, and easily add files to their notes.
Professional and Teams users can also integrate Evernote with team-based platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce.
Final Evernote review
Evernote is a useful and slickly designed tool. It has a few key features, like file uploads and annotations, that elevate it above standard notes apps and make it worth the cost for avid note-takers.
That’s just it, though: its utility is dependent on how badly you need to take notes. For the average note-taker, a stripped-down software like Simplenote should do the trick. If you want to make notes a fully-integrated part of your workflow, Evernote is a great note-taking app for you. They’ve also got iOS and Android versions for the same low price—free.
Final rating: 8.5/10
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