I've been using Evernote since September of 2010. I started as a passionate user, and it quickly became an indispensable part of my workflow. Then, the product started to go south, slowly but steadily. The clients became more complex, heavier, and uglier. They added a ton of features nobody asked for. And they didn't improve the one that mattered: editing notes. At some point, they changed the CEO, who promised they would focus on note-editing and nothing else. And then they changed it again. Years later, Evernote is as ugly, heavy, and clunky as ever. 

I switched to Bear for note-taking a couple of years ago and never looked back. Bear has a fantastic markdown editor. It is light, clean, and flexible, and it makes writing notes enjoyable. However, I kept using Evernote as a digital store for documents. I found its built-in OCR very handy, and I didn't want to lose it. I like storing documents with a certain structure instead of as plain files, so I kept using Evernote.

Since Bear doesn't support OCR, I had explored multiple alternatives to replace Evernote and failed to find one that looked appealing... until today, when I learned that Apple Notes has a great built-in OCR! It seems they added this functionality at the end of 2019. So Notes + Bear will be.

Goodbye and good luck Evernote, it was quite a ride!


Update: A reader asked how did I move my notes. It turns out that Apple Notes has explicit support to import from Evernote: