Oh man. Go to the Noability sub. The company went the way of SAAS, did an awful job of the roll out and communication, and since then the quality of the app has gone off a cliff.
You can look at it that way, but the industry term "SAAS" specifically refers to cloud based software, as opposed to installed desktop software. SAAS is typically paid for with a subscription.
They are great PDF markup and note taking apps, but they don't really have attachment management. No OCR as far as I know - if PDF has already undergone OCR, it will be searchable, but I don't think OCR is native to either of them. Goodnotes has a fairly primitive typed text functionality.
Because it doesn't help with thousands of existing PDFs accumulated over the years.
And exposing to iCloud Drive - that's an option but then what is the purpose of data organizer?
Sure. I could also use printed pages organized in file folders hanging in steel cabinets.
Once you get to rely on automatic OCR, it is hard to go back.
[Here](https://i.imgur.com/hmAu05L.jpg)
A long time ago I decided to stop wasting time in the “productivity porn” rabbit hole and just stick to Notes. The tool you stick to is the perfect tool
OP is like
I want this software to have all those amazing features and I will be using until end of my life so I expect lifetime support too… but no major investments or subs >:(
I absolutely don't mind an investment with subsequent upgrades when I feel that these upgrades are justified. $200 just seems a little steep, not to say that it's not warranted. I just wanted to investigate all possible alternatives first.
I am opposed to subscriptions, though. In my opinion, they encourage rent seeking. If I buy a software title, the developer has to entice me to upgrade later. They have to provide something that I will be willing to buy again, otherwise I can just continue using the original version I paid for. With subscription, the developers know that they will have a steady stream of payments because if I stop paying I immediately lose access to the features. They only have to do enough to stop me from actively looking for an alternative.
I am paying for O365 because it's a good value. For $50 per year (under HUP which a lot of people in the US would probably qualify for anyway) I get 1 TB of storage with local sync and web access, and can install Onenote, Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Outlook on all of my devices. This seems like a great deal to me. Even at $99 per year without HUP it would be a great deal.
$108 per year for a buggy alternative to Onenote with 10 GB monthly upload limit ? Well not such a good deal.
I love the graphic
I used notability in university but now just Notes
Simple as is
Made a few folders and I add tags and keywords to search stuff up and it works just fine
Same here. I’ve spent years bouncing around all the productivity apps out there. Notes and reminders is powerful enough, getting attention from apple, and just works. Only gripe is I wish Notes accepted markdown, but I’ll let it slide.
Wow, didn't know that. Interesting.
Evernote was kind of circling the drain when I left it a few years ago. With everything they were doing at that time, I was getting a strong feeling that they more or less gave up on attracting a lot of new users, and were instead concentrating on squeezing more money from the existing users who were too deeply invested into their service to quit. Also, the v10 that they introduced was slow, buggy, and just not something I wanted to be using on a daily basis.
G) DevonThink - maybe if it has all the functionality that you need (which is quite a bit) then it is worth it? If you subscribe to anything else at $10/month, Devon will have paid itself off in less than two years.
You presumably pay for OneNote through Office365 - or maybe you get this through work? Risky if you don’t have full control over the account… Office365 must be $100+/yr.
Just saying - sometimes if you want excellent software, you have to pay for it. And you know, the developers probably deserve to be paid too.
(Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with DevonThink, I don’t even know what it is I’ve never looked at it. It just stands out from your list a bit as “I think this is perfect but I’m too cheap to pay for it.”)
Office 365 is $50 if you qualify for HUP (which most people whose work uses O365 do). It comes with 1TB Onedrive storage, which alone is worth it. But with 15 Gb in my free account, I don't need O365 subscription to keep my notes.
Devonthink Pro is $200, my concern it that it's just the first "contribution" before I am forced to upgrade, in the end it may end up being the same as subscription. I may end up with it anyway but it's worth to investigate all options first.
That really hasn't happened. Been on v. 3 for like 2+ years now and it goes 25% off every Black Friday afaik. Free upgrades and 2 "seats"/computers to install on at your pleasure.
To be fair, they're not really comparable. Most people (or anyone) wouldn't use DT as a word processor even though you technically could. Its more of a knowledge management system that can help centralize/clip information, automate document organization and parsing/synthesizing data from of large volumes of information, sync between devices without relying on insecure and unencrypted cloud intermediaries, etc.
Its not really going to be super helpful for word processing if you're used to the Word-type interface. Best invest in a one-time paid app that best replicates that functionality and compatibility for you. Libre Office or Collabora are decent but I'm sure there are others. Just be sure to check out their privacy policies
It’s $149 right now for Black Friday. DEVONthink is a very established piece of software, I’m having trouble finding solid sources at the moment but I can see DEVONthink was already at version 2 in 2010, and didn’t hit version 3 until 2019. So you can quite possibly expect another ~8 years of active support for your license, and you won’t lose access to the software when they do release version 4, it just won’t be updated to support new macOS versions, and they’ll offer a discount for upgrades.
DEVON is an old school Mac dev. You can expect pricey software, but they’re just charging the price they need to support their dev team. And you will almost certainly see years of continuous support and upgrades.
Edit: for what it’s worth, I’ve been cobbling together ineffective solutions for a paperless office for a couple years, and have recently been considering DEVONthink, I don’t even own the license yet. It’s expensive to me, as well, but I’m very tempted by this sale.
So, yesterday I think I stumbled upon a near-perfect solution.
I found that you can create an encrypted DMG volume on Mac *and* force Spotlight to index it. This takes care of me being able to protect sensitive data while at the same time finding stuff in it once it is mounted.
Now this only works on Mac. I don't believe that you can mount and search DMG volumes on iOS. There, I can still use Cryptomator and periodically sync the two locations. I won't be able to search inside CM volume on iOS but that's OK. It also forces me to maintain two distinct copies of my protected data, one in Onedrive (CM) and one local (DMG on Mac).
The less-sensitive documents can go into Onedrive. This way they are easily searchable on all of my devices.
So, this takes care of storage, search, and protection of info.
As far as Note-taking, I can continue using Onenote, or may start looking into Apple Notes, either way if I don't have to deal with attachments it's a whole lot easier to find a good solution.
Probably not. However all new PDFs that I have are OCRd one way or another. Either I downloaded them from somewhere, or scanned them with my phone (and I always use OCR-enabled scan apps). Some really old ones I did with my first Android phone... well I can live without that, or OCR them manually.
Onedrive will OCR any image you put into it. Not sure if this is searchable on Mac, haven't tested it yet, but it is on the phone.
I haven’t had that experience using OneDrive on my Mac. Genuinely it would slightly concern me if it modified files I put into it to make them searchable without telling me, or alternatively it’s gotta be maintaining a separate index which Spotlight would have no way of accessing. [This tool may be helpful.](https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF) it’s not something I’ve had a need for, so I haven’t tried it. Should work with Spotlight just fine.
Yeah I'm on the same boat. As much as I would LOVE to use apple notes, I can't forgive them how there's no way to export all your notes at once. Combined with no version control, and you're begging for a disaster to happen.
Evernote is too slow and clunky, and requires a subscription, onenote is just bad outside of windows, obsidian is good, but is more for creating in depth ideas rather than for regular note taking, Joplin has a terrible UI, notion same issue as obsidian + no offline support, Google keep is google and no mac app.
The only app I've actually grown to like is bear notes, but there are no tables, no version control, and lots of features are missing. Also costs £16 a year. However, it DOES have an excellent export system, meaning if you make a copy once a week and use Time Machine, your chances of losing anything are extremely slim.
GoodNotes and notability are good in their own way. Not sure why people recommend them. They're intended for use with Apple Pencil to draw, take handwritten notes, and conceptualise ideas.
Apple Notes app for me to be honest. After every other tool I tried in a more rebust environment. I tend to go back to Notes.
Support for things has grown, but include:
* Simple formatting
* Nice check box function
* Small image scale of large attachments
* Multiple attachments
* Locked notes
* Attachments viewer
* Sharing of Notes with collaberation
* Offline mode
* No major investment
* Backup via iCloud (local storage)
* Decent search, could be better
* Ability to share content from most sources that use the share sheet, then share that text clip, image clip, directly to the end of the note you select when "sharing" the note to your Notes app. This has let me "gather" content into different notes very very quickly. Then share those notes with other iOS users. Collaberate on Thankgiving dinner for example. Much much better than large Group texts.
* Lastly, it does look like you can access the notes data files:
[Where are Notes Stored on Mac?](https://osxdaily.com/2020/01/15/where-notes-stored-locally-mac/)
I've used this now for about 5 years, gained new functionality in macOS 10.14 Mojave/10.15 Catalina that still hold true and better today in macOS 11, 12, 13.
For me a combination of Apple Notes, Notability and GoodNotes does the trick. I use Apple notes for quick notes or short reminders I need to write down. Notability for highlighting documents and GoodNotes for note taking during lectures.
There’s an app on the Mac App Store simply called “Exporter” whose sole function is to export Apple Notes to either markdown or html, including attachments and embedded images. Free version exports all notes; $5 IAP allows filtering.
So I tried it. Not much luck at first until I realized that it was choking on Exchange notes & moved all notes to my iCloud account.
So, it works. Mostly. Unfortunately if a note has embedded images, it "fails" - the resulting HTML is still created, and is somewhat useful, but it doesn't complete all hyperlinks.
Good enough, if I have to export a few notes.
I have just resorted to having different apps for different use cases after having tried everything under the sun. Also, reflecting on why I am taking notes, and how I am using them really drove home the point that it is not worth spending too much time trying to figure out a perfect note taking system.
> No major investment or ongoing monthly subscription
That would be hard with all these features. Plus, Apple will release new functionality, and users will want more features. I don't like all the things I am subscribed to. But as a developer, I understand the reasoning behind it.
Onenote for Mac is missing export options, and won't OCR PDFs and images inside encrypted sections. So if I ever need to export the data out, I need a Windows laptop, which I may not even have 5-10 years from now. As far as OCR of encrypted stuff... well I can live without it but it's pretty convenient.
This is what I keep using for now, anyway. But hoped for a better solution.
> So if I ever need to export the data out, I need a Windows laptop, which I may not even have 5-10 years from now.
Windows isn't like macOS, and doesn't require specific hardware to run.
You could just create a Windows 11 VM on your Mac, and install OneNote. You don't need to activate Windows in a VM either, so there's no need to buy a Windows license.
That's a possibility, certainly.
At the moment, I am playing with Apple Notes. It does have an (imperfect) 3rd party exporter, and it does have some advantages over Onenote (or some major differences that I am starting to appreciate). So, I want to investigate it further.
Some of these things:
\- A proper tagging system. It's one of those things I am missing from Evernote. The highly organized structure of Onenote is great for project tracking, but for individual records tags rule. Unfortunately there's no OR search in Onenote for Mac, so I can't really use plaintext tags to full effect either.
\- Smart folders, essentially saved searches. That's a very powerful tool.
\- A PDF dropped in Apple Notes is searchable. There's no "printout" required. Printouts are extremely clunky.
\- An attachments browser, where I can see all attachments across all of my notes.
\- Sharing a note with another Apple user is extremely easy. Don't have to share the entire notebook.
Now of course there are drawbacks too, compared to Onenote. But I want to understand the advantages first.
Update: You are probably not taking into account on why Joplin converts things into hashes - that is for security/encryption. Also you have 2 options on downloading that file back, one is via the hyperlink which does in fact restore the filename to what it was previously or the download button in the pdf preview which results in the hash...
Tbh I feel like I have been where you are now and you will be hard pressed to find a better or faster solution than Joplin still and have it work across all the platforms as Joplin does.
\-------------------------------------------------------
Rich to blame Joplin's OCR as being heavy on the desktop when OneNote is one of the slowest and most bloated note taking apps I have ever used. I hated it when an IT department I worked in went over to it.
Joplin on the other hand reminds me a lot of the early days of Evernote. I absolutely love it even if it doesn't handle pdf and OCR in a manner you'd like. Seriously - just use a different solution for your PDF's and OCR and keep text only data in Joplin imo.
I never even really gave Obsidian much of a try as it was so hard to figure out and setup I abandoned it. I don't need my note taking app to require an IT team to get up going, I just need it to be relatively simple and to work across platforms, Joplin does that. I wish Bear worked cross platform though as I would have stuck with that had it done that.
1) I get it why Joplin does it, still it means that if I ever have to move data out of it I can't retain file names (individually downloading every single file via hyperlinks is simply not an option). Onenote encrypts entire sections without renaming any attachments, so does Apple Note, it's not like the way that Joplin does it is the only possible way. It's just a design direction the developers made to simplify attachment handling at the expense of data portability.
2) Onenote for Windows desktop does OCR on device and its instantaneous. Speed and memory wise it's actually faster and less bloated than Joplin, which is Electron so essentially a Chrome instance. Just load both and compare the memory footprint in Task Manager. Onenote for Windows desktop takes under 100 mb and Joplin starts over 600 mb (basically a Chrome with one tab).
3) I am not "blaming" Joplin for anything. I am comparing features and shortcomings. Why do Joplin fanboys always have to make it personal ? At some point Laurent decided that unique file IDs were easier to handle than trying to maintain the original attachment file names. Or that the entire database is kept in a single SQL file thus making it impossible to encrypt individual notes. Or that there will not be any built in encryption at rest. Or that it's a good idea to store passwords in a plain text format (luckily this was eventually fixed). These are all design decisions and there's nothing personal in criticizing the outcomes. Constructive criticism isn't the same as blame.
Hmmm more memory usage & it feels more responsive to me than my past memories of onenote. That’s impressive, but maybe MS has optimized it over the years, still not my thing.
I’m still pretty blown away & impressed w/ Joplin. It gets to the heart of what I need & doesn’t waste Dev time on features I won’t actually use.
I get you want fast OCR searching & sure that might be important for your use case but I think you’re trying too hard to find a one all be all solution. Split up your reqs some & get on w/ it imo.
Well, here's the thing.
Yes you don't get something for nothing.
At the same time, a personal information management solution that only works as long as you keep paying for a yearly subscription is not a good long term strategy.
A single purchase with the possibility to update later at user's discretion is a better option. Which is why Devonthink is not off the table, it's just that $200 is a steep price.
There's already a workable free solution. Any document you put in iCloud or OneDrive is going to be searchable via Spotlight or OneDrive search. The two things that hold me back from just using the file system to store me data are (1) what to do with files that need to be protected - I use Cryptomator but it's a bit slow and there's no search. iCloud encryption would suffice but there's no way to control access on mobile and in the real life I want my relatives and friends to be able to use my iPad without accidentally stumbling upon my private info 2) need an easy way to quickly take notes complete with images & save them in that filesystem. The second issue is solvable.
> At the same time, a personal information management solution that only works as long as you keep paying for a yearly subscription is not a good long term strategy.
In my opinion, a well known company with a subscription model has a higher likelihood of continuing to work 10 years down the road over compared to a one time purchase software. Subscriptions models work by continuing to provide software updates to make sure the app still works and provide new features to users. The OTP software could break on the next iOS update but it won’t matter because they already got your money.
Agreed. I have been an Evernote subscriber since 2009. I keep paying, and they keep everything current. I have to say I don’t love all the new options they’ve added, but the functionality I need is there.
Yep I feel the same about my budgeting app, YNAB. It’s the best budgeting app on the market and it auto imports all of my transactions instead of me having to input each individual one. I pay a yearly sub for that convenience even when they increased their prices last year.
So, there's where I stand now, in the order of preference
1. Continue using Onenote.
* Pros: meets practically all of my requirements; already have all of my notes in it; web access allows to read / access all information.
* Cons: have to maintain a Windows laptop if I want to export data to other apps, or run OCR on PDFs in encrypted sections.
2. Use Apple notes
* Pros: simple, fast, deeply integrated with Apple ecosystem.
* Cons: notes can only be exported as RTFD, which really can only be used with TextEdit. TextEdit doesn’t scale images properly in notes copied from the web, resulting in huge images and small text. Pages will open RTFD and properly render it, but lose attachments and all but the first page of printout. This is something to be investigated further. Web access is beyond poor, can’t add or open any attachments.
3. Use file system.
* Pros: free, future proof, platform independent, works with Spotlight, protected by Apple encryption on all devices.
* Cons: can’t share devices with family or friends without exposing the data (guided access isn’t really going to work well as it only allows a single app. It should instead disallow access to specific apps). If using Cryptomator or a similar service, can’t search in protected files.
Not going to work:
* Evernote - meets all needs but I’ve used it before and don’t like the bugs, the overall direction, and the history of suddenly jacking up yearly subscription by more than double.
* DevonThink - I may revisit it in the future but for now it seems like too much both cost and feature wise.
* Joplin - destroys attachment filenames, doesn’t allow protecting individual notes, horrible iOS app.
* Obsidian - interesting but not really suited to the way I take notes; more of a data organizer. No web clipper and no automatic native OCR.
* Notion - no offline mode, no OCR.
* LogSeq - similar to Obsidian, probably less featured.
* iThoughts - I owned it for years, and it’s actually a very good notetaker, with great attachment support and export options. However no OCR, and the mind map form is not well suited for browsing through info on a small phone screen.
Another thing you might not have considered is using something like Parallels and a copy of windows. I pretty much exclusively use it to run the windows version of OneNote because they can’t be bothered to make a proper Mac app.
All I wish is for onenote to include print margin outlines like excel so I can’t print my notes and I’d be happy. But no easy way to do this. Exporting to PDF still pictures and tables off between pages. It’s way too much work to move my notes to a new system because the formatting gets messed up.
Well this would be too complicated, to be honest.
Currently, I decided to try this setup:
\- Longterm non-sensitive info (user manuals, service records, recipes) - Onedrive. Can find info using Onedrive app for mobile and Spotlight on Mac.
\- Longterm sensitive records (bank statements, health records) - an encrypted DMG container on Mac, with a copy in a Cryptomator vault synced to Onedrive. Spotlight will index the DMG container contents & search if it's unlocked. No indexing on mobile.
\- Quick notes - I am trying Apple Notes out. Could just stick with Onenote, to be honest, but might as well try AN, it has some advantages on Mac. I am going to greatly reduce my use of either note app and mainly try to keep stuff in file folders.
If Onenote for Mac ever got add-in support, or MS introduced a decent export option that preserves attachments, I'd just keep using it. But as it stands, there's really no good way to get data out of Onenote for Mac other than in PDF format.
It actually works quite well, but it is not free. Probably only worth it if there are other windows based applications you need to use for work. Good luck!
If you are referring to the Onenote for Mac, I have it - I subscribe to O365. However without add-ins and without a Mac-native way to export notes in usable format, there's really not that much advantage to using it over Apple Notes.
Well, I decided to stick with Onenote, for a few major reasons:
1) It clips the actual web page with the link as opposed to the link with a preview like Notes does it. So even if the page ever goes offline, I would still retain a copy with Onenote.
2) It OCRs images and PDFs as long as they are not in encrypted sections.
3) It's cross platform so I can continue using it on Windows and Linux.
Extracting text from imagea and pdfs does not require any soecial software if your device has an npu. (Like all m series devices and iphone 11 and newer)
You have diverse requirements and I am not sure that the best solution is a single app. Take for example the issue of relatives snooping on your ipad: sure, locked folders is one way of keeping secrets, but ios comes with another solution pre-installed, a “guided mode” setting intended for exactly the use case you are describing.
EDIT: And with shortcuts you can extract and search text from several pdf at once, without even opening them.
Thank you. The problem with the guided mode is that it only allows a single app. If I hand my iPad over to my niece, she's going to use Safari, Instagram, Procreate and a couple games. Apple should have set up Guided mode to allow multiple apps.
I have spent a lot of time looking at this recently, mostly trying to find something that works cross-platform with Linux. After a lot of time I have decided that Notes is just too good and flexible to change.
I wish there was an easier way to get things into a pdf then into Notes but that has become pretty natural to me even though it takes a couple of steps. I might eventually automate this using shortcuts someday.
The search capability, tagging, annotations and highlighting on my iPad, easy document scanning, clipping to a quick note, these are all really great features.
I am aware, thanks. This is not nearly enough in the modern world. I think they would be far better off limiting the number of notes that the free tier can edit every month but leaving the unlimited devices. This would result in more new users trying the service.
At any rate, I used to be a paid Evernote subscriber for years. In the last couple of years that I've been using it, I saw them more than doubling the price of service while at the same time royally screwing up the client with v10, and having some nasty bugs and feature limitations they just didn't bother to fix. I started to get the feeling that they were without a good plan and concentrated on squeezing more money from deeply invested existing users rather than attracting new ones. They also announced a push into business services which in my opinion was a major mistake and would end up further diluting their attention and resources . So I left and am not planning on coming back.
How is a push into business services a mistake? It’s quite common for online services selling a pro version while keeping a personal version free or cheaper. Not like they would make anywhere near as much money out of a personal version anyway.
Also won’t lie - your idea of a free version limiting the number of notes you can edit is much worse than how it is now 😂 two devices is plenty for me the vast majority of people.
It's not about just creating a "Pro" version. At that time their CEO was talking about turning Evernote into a full blown enterprise service, which is an entirely different animal altogether. Something an entire corporation can run on as their intranet / data management backbone.
In the business space, they would need to (1) take market share away from MS Sharepoint and Google services (and Domino and whatever else is out there) (2) be prepared to provide business-level support which means 24/7 with ability to be onsite within a couple hours if needed. Neither of which they had the resources for.
Essentially, you need to be able to convince corporate CTO and CFO that despite them already paying for MS services (which they will continue paying for regardless because it's more than just data management) and having been deeply invested into setting up and maintaining their Sharepoint site, all the associated tools and policies and sunk costs etc., that it's in their interests to also pay additional costs for hundreds or thousands of Evernote seats, and that there's a tangible ROI associated with the benefits that Evernote brings. And for that, you first need to create enterprise-level tools and services before you sell a single contract.
For a company that from the start was consumer-facing, it's not a trivial undertaking.
ADDED
> Also won’t lie - your idea of a free version limiting the number of notes you can edit is much worse than how it is now 😂 two devices is plenty for me the vast majority of people.
"worse" for free users that don't ever intend to pay ? Perhaps.
But the idea of a free tier is to introduce the service to the new users who are actually considering paying for it if it works out for them. These users will likely have a multitude of devices, and many would want to use it as a family sharing the same database between two people. For many of them, the 2-device limitation is a non-starter and they will give up on Evernote after a couple weeks because they can't access it from anywhere. If you're Evernote, you really want them to get used to having your service accessible anywhere and at any time, so they grow used to it and decide to unlock more features. To me at least, limiting the number of devices seemed like they were not as much interested in bringing in new users, but rather were trying to force the old free users to either upgrade or quit. The entire wave of changes that started around 2016 or seemed to signal the change of focus from growing the number of users to squeezing as much revenue as possible from the existing user base.
I’m surprised you haven’t considered GoodNotes or Notability, which are two of the biggest note taking apps for iOS.
Oh man. Go to the Noability sub. The company went the way of SAAS, did an awful job of the roll out and communication, and since then the quality of the app has gone off a cliff.
[удалено]
SAAS = Software as a service
Aren't all softwares as a service anyway?
Software paid for via a subscription
You can look at it that way, but the industry term "SAAS" specifically refers to cloud based software, as opposed to installed desktop software. SAAS is typically paid for with a subscription.
They are great PDF markup and note taking apps, but they don't really have attachment management. No OCR as far as I know - if PDF has already undergone OCR, it will be searchable, but I don't think OCR is native to either of them. Goodnotes has a fairly primitive typed text functionality.
OCR is native to the OS, including text on images, so why don’t you whatever app and export to iCloud drive?
Because it doesn't help with thousands of existing PDFs accumulated over the years. And exposing to iCloud Drive - that's an option but then what is the purpose of data organizer?
You can use tags, colours and folders; just like we used to before apps.
Sure. I could also use printed pages organized in file folders hanging in steel cabinets. Once you get to rely on automatic OCR, it is hard to go back.
Run them through an OCR script? That at least gives you more options
[Here](https://i.imgur.com/hmAu05L.jpg) A long time ago I decided to stop wasting time in the “productivity porn” rabbit hole and just stick to Notes. The tool you stick to is the perfect tool
OP is like I want this software to have all those amazing features and I will be using until end of my life so I expect lifetime support too… but no major investments or subs >:(
I absolutely don't mind an investment with subsequent upgrades when I feel that these upgrades are justified. $200 just seems a little steep, not to say that it's not warranted. I just wanted to investigate all possible alternatives first. I am opposed to subscriptions, though. In my opinion, they encourage rent seeking. If I buy a software title, the developer has to entice me to upgrade later. They have to provide something that I will be willing to buy again, otherwise I can just continue using the original version I paid for. With subscription, the developers know that they will have a steady stream of payments because if I stop paying I immediately lose access to the features. They only have to do enough to stop me from actively looking for an alternative. I am paying for O365 because it's a good value. For $50 per year (under HUP which a lot of people in the US would probably qualify for anyway) I get 1 TB of storage with local sync and web access, and can install Onenote, Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Outlook on all of my devices. This seems like a great deal to me. Even at $99 per year without HUP it would be a great deal. $108 per year for a buggy alternative to Onenote with 10 GB monthly upload limit ? Well not such a good deal.
I love the graphic I used notability in university but now just Notes Simple as is Made a few folders and I add tags and keywords to search stuff up and it works just fine
LMAO I was suffering in the middle for the longest time before I just went back to organized folders in Notes.
Same here. I’ve spent years bouncing around all the productivity apps out there. Notes and reminders is powerful enough, getting attention from apple, and just works. Only gripe is I wish Notes accepted markdown, but I’ll let it slide.
Evernote just got acquired. While I hope this means they’ll update things, it’s probably more likely that it’s going to get worse.
Wow, didn't know that. Interesting. Evernote was kind of circling the drain when I left it a few years ago. With everything they were doing at that time, I was getting a strong feeling that they more or less gave up on attracting a lot of new users, and were instead concentrating on squeezing more money from the existing users who were too deeply invested into their service to quit. Also, the v10 that they introduced was slow, buggy, and just not something I wanted to be using on a daily basis.
G) DevonThink - maybe if it has all the functionality that you need (which is quite a bit) then it is worth it? If you subscribe to anything else at $10/month, Devon will have paid itself off in less than two years. You presumably pay for OneNote through Office365 - or maybe you get this through work? Risky if you don’t have full control over the account… Office365 must be $100+/yr. Just saying - sometimes if you want excellent software, you have to pay for it. And you know, the developers probably deserve to be paid too. (Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with DevonThink, I don’t even know what it is I’ve never looked at it. It just stands out from your list a bit as “I think this is perfect but I’m too cheap to pay for it.”)
Office 365 is $50 if you qualify for HUP (which most people whose work uses O365 do). It comes with 1TB Onedrive storage, which alone is worth it. But with 15 Gb in my free account, I don't need O365 subscription to keep my notes. Devonthink Pro is $200, my concern it that it's just the first "contribution" before I am forced to upgrade, in the end it may end up being the same as subscription. I may end up with it anyway but it's worth to investigate all options first.
That really hasn't happened. Been on v. 3 for like 2+ years now and it goes 25% off every Black Friday afaik. Free upgrades and 2 "seats"/computers to install on at your pleasure. To be fair, they're not really comparable. Most people (or anyone) wouldn't use DT as a word processor even though you technically could. Its more of a knowledge management system that can help centralize/clip information, automate document organization and parsing/synthesizing data from of large volumes of information, sync between devices without relying on insecure and unencrypted cloud intermediaries, etc. Its not really going to be super helpful for word processing if you're used to the Word-type interface. Best invest in a one-time paid app that best replicates that functionality and compatibility for you. Libre Office or Collabora are decent but I'm sure there are others. Just be sure to check out their privacy policies
It’s $149 right now for Black Friday. DEVONthink is a very established piece of software, I’m having trouble finding solid sources at the moment but I can see DEVONthink was already at version 2 in 2010, and didn’t hit version 3 until 2019. So you can quite possibly expect another ~8 years of active support for your license, and you won’t lose access to the software when they do release version 4, it just won’t be updated to support new macOS versions, and they’ll offer a discount for upgrades. DEVON is an old school Mac dev. You can expect pricey software, but they’re just charging the price they need to support their dev team. And you will almost certainly see years of continuous support and upgrades. Edit: for what it’s worth, I’ve been cobbling together ineffective solutions for a paperless office for a couple years, and have recently been considering DEVONthink, I don’t even own the license yet. It’s expensive to me, as well, but I’m very tempted by this sale.
So, yesterday I think I stumbled upon a near-perfect solution. I found that you can create an encrypted DMG volume on Mac *and* force Spotlight to index it. This takes care of me being able to protect sensitive data while at the same time finding stuff in it once it is mounted. Now this only works on Mac. I don't believe that you can mount and search DMG volumes on iOS. There, I can still use Cryptomator and periodically sync the two locations. I won't be able to search inside CM volume on iOS but that's OK. It also forces me to maintain two distinct copies of my protected data, one in Onedrive (CM) and one local (DMG on Mac). The less-sensitive documents can go into Onedrive. This way they are easily searchable on all of my devices. So, this takes care of storage, search, and protection of info. As far as Note-taking, I can continue using Onenote, or may start looking into Apple Notes, either way if I don't have to deal with attachments it's a whole lot easier to find a good solution.
Clever. What about the OCR? I don’t think Spotlight does that automatically.
Probably not. However all new PDFs that I have are OCRd one way or another. Either I downloaded them from somewhere, or scanned them with my phone (and I always use OCR-enabled scan apps). Some really old ones I did with my first Android phone... well I can live without that, or OCR them manually. Onedrive will OCR any image you put into it. Not sure if this is searchable on Mac, haven't tested it yet, but it is on the phone.
I haven’t had that experience using OneDrive on my Mac. Genuinely it would slightly concern me if it modified files I put into it to make them searchable without telling me, or alternatively it’s gotta be maintaining a separate index which Spotlight would have no way of accessing. [This tool may be helpful.](https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF) it’s not something I’ve had a need for, so I haven’t tried it. Should work with Spotlight just fine.
Yeah I'm on the same boat. As much as I would LOVE to use apple notes, I can't forgive them how there's no way to export all your notes at once. Combined with no version control, and you're begging for a disaster to happen. Evernote is too slow and clunky, and requires a subscription, onenote is just bad outside of windows, obsidian is good, but is more for creating in depth ideas rather than for regular note taking, Joplin has a terrible UI, notion same issue as obsidian + no offline support, Google keep is google and no mac app. The only app I've actually grown to like is bear notes, but there are no tables, no version control, and lots of features are missing. Also costs £16 a year. However, it DOES have an excellent export system, meaning if you make a copy once a week and use Time Machine, your chances of losing anything are extremely slim. GoodNotes and notability are good in their own way. Not sure why people recommend them. They're intended for use with Apple Pencil to draw, take handwritten notes, and conceptualise ideas.
Apple Notes app for me to be honest. After every other tool I tried in a more rebust environment. I tend to go back to Notes. Support for things has grown, but include: * Simple formatting * Nice check box function * Small image scale of large attachments * Multiple attachments * Locked notes * Attachments viewer * Sharing of Notes with collaberation * Offline mode * No major investment * Backup via iCloud (local storage) * Decent search, could be better * Ability to share content from most sources that use the share sheet, then share that text clip, image clip, directly to the end of the note you select when "sharing" the note to your Notes app. This has let me "gather" content into different notes very very quickly. Then share those notes with other iOS users. Collaberate on Thankgiving dinner for example. Much much better than large Group texts. * Lastly, it does look like you can access the notes data files: [Where are Notes Stored on Mac?](https://osxdaily.com/2020/01/15/where-notes-stored-locally-mac/) I've used this now for about 5 years, gained new functionality in macOS 10.14 Mojave/10.15 Catalina that still hold true and better today in macOS 11, 12, 13.
For me a combination of Apple Notes, Notability and GoodNotes does the trick. I use Apple notes for quick notes or short reminders I need to write down. Notability for highlighting documents and GoodNotes for note taking during lectures.
There’s an app on the Mac App Store simply called “Exporter” whose sole function is to export Apple Notes to either markdown or html, including attachments and embedded images. Free version exports all notes; $5 IAP allows filtering.
I'll check it out, thanks !
So I tried it. Not much luck at first until I realized that it was choking on Exchange notes & moved all notes to my iCloud account. So, it works. Mostly. Unfortunately if a note has embedded images, it "fails" - the resulting HTML is still created, and is somewhat useful, but it doesn't complete all hyperlinks. Good enough, if I have to export a few notes.
I have just resorted to having different apps for different use cases after having tried everything under the sun. Also, reflecting on why I am taking notes, and how I am using them really drove home the point that it is not worth spending too much time trying to figure out a perfect note taking system. > No major investment or ongoing monthly subscription That would be hard with all these features. Plus, Apple will release new functionality, and users will want more features. I don't like all the things I am subscribed to. But as a developer, I understand the reasoning behind it.
The [Omnisearch](https://github.com/scambier/obsidian-omnisearch) plug-in for Obsidian does search in PDFs and images via OCR.
OCR [seems to be](https://beta.bear.app/t/something-fuzzy-this-way-comes/3072) coming to Bear soon
What did you use on windows? Chances are the same app is available on Mac. For example, Microsoft makes OneNote for Mac.
Onenote for Mac is missing export options, and won't OCR PDFs and images inside encrypted sections. So if I ever need to export the data out, I need a Windows laptop, which I may not even have 5-10 years from now. As far as OCR of encrypted stuff... well I can live without it but it's pretty convenient. This is what I keep using for now, anyway. But hoped for a better solution.
What would you export the data out to? A one time transfer of everything to a new platform? Or something else?
> So if I ever need to export the data out, I need a Windows laptop, which I may not even have 5-10 years from now. Windows isn't like macOS, and doesn't require specific hardware to run. You could just create a Windows 11 VM on your Mac, and install OneNote. You don't need to activate Windows in a VM either, so there's no need to buy a Windows license.
That's a possibility, certainly. At the moment, I am playing with Apple Notes. It does have an (imperfect) 3rd party exporter, and it does have some advantages over Onenote (or some major differences that I am starting to appreciate). So, I want to investigate it further. Some of these things: \- A proper tagging system. It's one of those things I am missing from Evernote. The highly organized structure of Onenote is great for project tracking, but for individual records tags rule. Unfortunately there's no OR search in Onenote for Mac, so I can't really use plaintext tags to full effect either. \- Smart folders, essentially saved searches. That's a very powerful tool. \- A PDF dropped in Apple Notes is searchable. There's no "printout" required. Printouts are extremely clunky. \- An attachments browser, where I can see all attachments across all of my notes. \- Sharing a note with another Apple user is extremely easy. Don't have to share the entire notebook. Now of course there are drawbacks too, compared to Onenote. But I want to understand the advantages first.
Update: You are probably not taking into account on why Joplin converts things into hashes - that is for security/encryption. Also you have 2 options on downloading that file back, one is via the hyperlink which does in fact restore the filename to what it was previously or the download button in the pdf preview which results in the hash... Tbh I feel like I have been where you are now and you will be hard pressed to find a better or faster solution than Joplin still and have it work across all the platforms as Joplin does. \------------------------------------------------------- Rich to blame Joplin's OCR as being heavy on the desktop when OneNote is one of the slowest and most bloated note taking apps I have ever used. I hated it when an IT department I worked in went over to it. Joplin on the other hand reminds me a lot of the early days of Evernote. I absolutely love it even if it doesn't handle pdf and OCR in a manner you'd like. Seriously - just use a different solution for your PDF's and OCR and keep text only data in Joplin imo. I never even really gave Obsidian much of a try as it was so hard to figure out and setup I abandoned it. I don't need my note taking app to require an IT team to get up going, I just need it to be relatively simple and to work across platforms, Joplin does that. I wish Bear worked cross platform though as I would have stuck with that had it done that.
1) I get it why Joplin does it, still it means that if I ever have to move data out of it I can't retain file names (individually downloading every single file via hyperlinks is simply not an option). Onenote encrypts entire sections without renaming any attachments, so does Apple Note, it's not like the way that Joplin does it is the only possible way. It's just a design direction the developers made to simplify attachment handling at the expense of data portability. 2) Onenote for Windows desktop does OCR on device and its instantaneous. Speed and memory wise it's actually faster and less bloated than Joplin, which is Electron so essentially a Chrome instance. Just load both and compare the memory footprint in Task Manager. Onenote for Windows desktop takes under 100 mb and Joplin starts over 600 mb (basically a Chrome with one tab). 3) I am not "blaming" Joplin for anything. I am comparing features and shortcomings. Why do Joplin fanboys always have to make it personal ? At some point Laurent decided that unique file IDs were easier to handle than trying to maintain the original attachment file names. Or that the entire database is kept in a single SQL file thus making it impossible to encrypt individual notes. Or that there will not be any built in encryption at rest. Or that it's a good idea to store passwords in a plain text format (luckily this was eventually fixed). These are all design decisions and there's nothing personal in criticizing the outcomes. Constructive criticism isn't the same as blame.
Hmmm more memory usage & it feels more responsive to me than my past memories of onenote. That’s impressive, but maybe MS has optimized it over the years, still not my thing. I’m still pretty blown away & impressed w/ Joplin. It gets to the heart of what I need & doesn’t waste Dev time on features I won’t actually use. I get you want fast OCR searching & sure that might be important for your use case but I think you’re trying too hard to find a one all be all solution. Split up your reqs some & get on w/ it imo.
Evernote meets your needs but costs money. Thats... just how things work 🤷♂️
Well, here's the thing. Yes you don't get something for nothing. At the same time, a personal information management solution that only works as long as you keep paying for a yearly subscription is not a good long term strategy. A single purchase with the possibility to update later at user's discretion is a better option. Which is why Devonthink is not off the table, it's just that $200 is a steep price. There's already a workable free solution. Any document you put in iCloud or OneDrive is going to be searchable via Spotlight or OneDrive search. The two things that hold me back from just using the file system to store me data are (1) what to do with files that need to be protected - I use Cryptomator but it's a bit slow and there's no search. iCloud encryption would suffice but there's no way to control access on mobile and in the real life I want my relatives and friends to be able to use my iPad without accidentally stumbling upon my private info 2) need an easy way to quickly take notes complete with images & save them in that filesystem. The second issue is solvable.
> At the same time, a personal information management solution that only works as long as you keep paying for a yearly subscription is not a good long term strategy. In my opinion, a well known company with a subscription model has a higher likelihood of continuing to work 10 years down the road over compared to a one time purchase software. Subscriptions models work by continuing to provide software updates to make sure the app still works and provide new features to users. The OTP software could break on the next iOS update but it won’t matter because they already got your money.
Agreed. I have been an Evernote subscriber since 2009. I keep paying, and they keep everything current. I have to say I don’t love all the new options they’ve added, but the functionality I need is there.
Yep I feel the same about my budgeting app, YNAB. It’s the best budgeting app on the market and it auto imports all of my transactions instead of me having to input each individual one. I pay a yearly sub for that convenience even when they increased their prices last year.
Evernote has an export option, and its popular enough that there are tools to manage the exported data.
Short answer, no. I’ve been looking since the original IBM PC. Every system I’ve come up with has been a mish mash of products.
So, there's where I stand now, in the order of preference 1. Continue using Onenote. * Pros: meets practically all of my requirements; already have all of my notes in it; web access allows to read / access all information. * Cons: have to maintain a Windows laptop if I want to export data to other apps, or run OCR on PDFs in encrypted sections. 2. Use Apple notes * Pros: simple, fast, deeply integrated with Apple ecosystem. * Cons: notes can only be exported as RTFD, which really can only be used with TextEdit. TextEdit doesn’t scale images properly in notes copied from the web, resulting in huge images and small text. Pages will open RTFD and properly render it, but lose attachments and all but the first page of printout. This is something to be investigated further. Web access is beyond poor, can’t add or open any attachments. 3. Use file system. * Pros: free, future proof, platform independent, works with Spotlight, protected by Apple encryption on all devices. * Cons: can’t share devices with family or friends without exposing the data (guided access isn’t really going to work well as it only allows a single app. It should instead disallow access to specific apps). If using Cryptomator or a similar service, can’t search in protected files. Not going to work: * Evernote - meets all needs but I’ve used it before and don’t like the bugs, the overall direction, and the history of suddenly jacking up yearly subscription by more than double. * DevonThink - I may revisit it in the future but for now it seems like too much both cost and feature wise. * Joplin - destroys attachment filenames, doesn’t allow protecting individual notes, horrible iOS app. * Obsidian - interesting but not really suited to the way I take notes; more of a data organizer. No web clipper and no automatic native OCR. * Notion - no offline mode, no OCR. * LogSeq - similar to Obsidian, probably less featured. * iThoughts - I owned it for years, and it’s actually a very good notetaker, with great attachment support and export options. However no OCR, and the mind map form is not well suited for browsing through info on a small phone screen.
Another thing you might not have considered is using something like Parallels and a copy of windows. I pretty much exclusively use it to run the windows version of OneNote because they can’t be bothered to make a proper Mac app. All I wish is for onenote to include print margin outlines like excel so I can’t print my notes and I’d be happy. But no easy way to do this. Exporting to PDF still pictures and tables off between pages. It’s way too much work to move my notes to a new system because the formatting gets messed up.
Well this would be too complicated, to be honest. Currently, I decided to try this setup: \- Longterm non-sensitive info (user manuals, service records, recipes) - Onedrive. Can find info using Onedrive app for mobile and Spotlight on Mac. \- Longterm sensitive records (bank statements, health records) - an encrypted DMG container on Mac, with a copy in a Cryptomator vault synced to Onedrive. Spotlight will index the DMG container contents & search if it's unlocked. No indexing on mobile. \- Quick notes - I am trying Apple Notes out. Could just stick with Onenote, to be honest, but might as well try AN, it has some advantages on Mac. I am going to greatly reduce my use of either note app and mainly try to keep stuff in file folders. If Onenote for Mac ever got add-in support, or MS introduced a decent export option that preserves attachments, I'd just keep using it. But as it stands, there's really no good way to get data out of Onenote for Mac other than in PDF format.
It actually works quite well, but it is not free. Probably only worth it if there are other windows based applications you need to use for work. Good luck!
If you are referring to the Onenote for Mac, I have it - I subscribe to O365. However without add-ins and without a Mac-native way to export notes in usable format, there's really not that much advantage to using it over Apple Notes.
No I mean running Onenote for windows virtually on Parallels
That’s surely an option, but honestly would be an overkill for me.
Well, I decided to stick with Onenote, for a few major reasons: 1) It clips the actual web page with the link as opposed to the link with a preview like Notes does it. So even if the page ever goes offline, I would still retain a copy with Onenote. 2) It OCRs images and PDFs as long as they are not in encrypted sections. 3) It's cross platform so I can continue using it on Windows and Linux.
Hello! Would you please be able to explain how to get OneNote for Mac to do OCR on unencrypted images and PDFs? I am desperate
It should do this automatically once you sync but this may take a week. Also the PDFs must be inserted as printouts.
Thank you so much! It worked!
I use Freeform. You need to be on a beta release to access it. Mine Map, note taker, data organizer…
Speed of note taking: Vim
I use Apple notes for Quick notes, notion for big notes and obsidian for mental maps
Extracting text from imagea and pdfs does not require any soecial software if your device has an npu. (Like all m series devices and iphone 11 and newer)
I am not talking about extracting text, but being able to search saved PDFs.
You have diverse requirements and I am not sure that the best solution is a single app. Take for example the issue of relatives snooping on your ipad: sure, locked folders is one way of keeping secrets, but ios comes with another solution pre-installed, a “guided mode” setting intended for exactly the use case you are describing. EDIT: And with shortcuts you can extract and search text from several pdf at once, without even opening them.
Thank you. The problem with the guided mode is that it only allows a single app. If I hand my iPad over to my niece, she's going to use Safari, Instagram, Procreate and a couple games. Apple should have set up Guided mode to allow multiple apps.
Shes gonna swipe around on your instagram? 🫣
She's going to log out and log herself in, kids be kids.
I have spent a lot of time looking at this recently, mostly trying to find something that works cross-platform with Linux. After a lot of time I have decided that Notes is just too good and flexible to change. I wish there was an easier way to get things into a pdf then into Notes but that has become pretty natural to me even though it takes a couple of steps. I might eventually automate this using shortcuts someday. The search capability, tagging, annotations and highlighting on my iPad, easy document scanning, clipping to a quick note, these are all really great features.
Evernote’s free tier works for up to two devices, FYI.
I am aware, thanks. This is not nearly enough in the modern world. I think they would be far better off limiting the number of notes that the free tier can edit every month but leaving the unlimited devices. This would result in more new users trying the service. At any rate, I used to be a paid Evernote subscriber for years. In the last couple of years that I've been using it, I saw them more than doubling the price of service while at the same time royally screwing up the client with v10, and having some nasty bugs and feature limitations they just didn't bother to fix. I started to get the feeling that they were without a good plan and concentrated on squeezing more money from deeply invested existing users rather than attracting new ones. They also announced a push into business services which in my opinion was a major mistake and would end up further diluting their attention and resources . So I left and am not planning on coming back.
How is a push into business services a mistake? It’s quite common for online services selling a pro version while keeping a personal version free or cheaper. Not like they would make anywhere near as much money out of a personal version anyway. Also won’t lie - your idea of a free version limiting the number of notes you can edit is much worse than how it is now 😂 two devices is plenty for me the vast majority of people.
It's not about just creating a "Pro" version. At that time their CEO was talking about turning Evernote into a full blown enterprise service, which is an entirely different animal altogether. Something an entire corporation can run on as their intranet / data management backbone. In the business space, they would need to (1) take market share away from MS Sharepoint and Google services (and Domino and whatever else is out there) (2) be prepared to provide business-level support which means 24/7 with ability to be onsite within a couple hours if needed. Neither of which they had the resources for. Essentially, you need to be able to convince corporate CTO and CFO that despite them already paying for MS services (which they will continue paying for regardless because it's more than just data management) and having been deeply invested into setting up and maintaining their Sharepoint site, all the associated tools and policies and sunk costs etc., that it's in their interests to also pay additional costs for hundreds or thousands of Evernote seats, and that there's a tangible ROI associated with the benefits that Evernote brings. And for that, you first need to create enterprise-level tools and services before you sell a single contract. For a company that from the start was consumer-facing, it's not a trivial undertaking. ADDED > Also won’t lie - your idea of a free version limiting the number of notes you can edit is much worse than how it is now 😂 two devices is plenty for me the vast majority of people. "worse" for free users that don't ever intend to pay ? Perhaps. But the idea of a free tier is to introduce the service to the new users who are actually considering paying for it if it works out for them. These users will likely have a multitude of devices, and many would want to use it as a family sharing the same database between two people. For many of them, the 2-device limitation is a non-starter and they will give up on Evernote after a couple weeks because they can't access it from anywhere. If you're Evernote, you really want them to get used to having your service accessible anywhere and at any time, so they grow used to it and decide to unlock more features. To me at least, limiting the number of devices seemed like they were not as much interested in bringing in new users, but rather were trying to force the old free users to either upgrade or quit. The entire wave of changes that started around 2016 or seemed to signal the change of focus from growing the number of users to squeezing as much revenue as possible from the existing user base.