Emigration from Evernote to Google Keep: my personal experience

I want to share my experience of moving from one very convenient (but conceited) note-taker to another (less functional, but more careful with the volume of my wallet and conservatism regarding the choice of operating system version).

I have been using Evernote for about four years since I entered the university. Before that, I used a standard notepad on my phone and a notepad on my PC. Whether my life has changed after the transition to Evernote - no doubt. Evolution is usually a long process, but I literally evolved from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens right after I installed the green elephant clients on my phone and laptop.


There was no need to keep in mind tons of information (the names of the subjects, the names of the teachers, the crib to the control). “Yes, there is an ordinary notebook for this,” Uncle Vasya from Pupkino will say, and he will be right, but the spotter, who is always with you, and allows you to access the previously saved information in a matter of seconds, this is still a little different experience. .

I wrote notes more often in Evernote than in notebooks, since the functionality of the built-in text editor allowed me to (relatively) roam their formatting. Also, I did not need to use a third-party tudushnik, because Evernote coped with this task.

I never called myself an educated or rational-thinking person, so I kept all the passwords in the same place, among the notes, simply by signing them with the “password” tag (I heard about 1Password, but it never came to its use). The free functionality of the note-taker suited me perfectly. I have not used it on more than two devices at the same time. But the trouble came from where they didn’t wait for it: the mobile application on my phone started to get very buggy: when you started the application, you had to wait as long as 6 seconds for the Google Suite , and saving notes with their synchronization began to take much longer. I understand that this was due to the outdated version of Android 4.2 (yes, I realize that the starper, but when I upgrade to a newer version, I will not be able to use banking applications, which is very critical for me). After some time, support for devices with my version of the operating system stopped altogether.

Search for alternatives

I had to choose an alternative, of which in my case (the antediluvian version of the OS), besides Google Keep, there was no one at all. (OneNote is not as loyal to such Old Believers as I am). So, I installed a new application with a yellow icon on the phone - and lo and behold - it works as fast as a student the night before passing the coursework. I really liked the possibility of color categorization of notes: for each set of tags I have a certain color. Among the minuses, it is worth noting the lack of a hierarchical structure of tags: in Google Keep, the list of tags is located in the left side panel, and the lack of a desktop client (I partially solved this problem by installing a browser extension).


Google Keep is completely free (although I didn’t pay for Evernote, but still), but it’s not possible to apply a dark theme (I hope it will be delivered soon).

I will list my subjective pros and cons of Google Keep compared to Evernote.

pros

• Color highlighting notes.
• Support for the antediluvian version of Android.
• The performance of a mobile application.

Minuses

• Less functionality.
• The lack of a dark theme.
• A leaner level of tag hierarchy.

Actually moving

I did not find a way to transfer notes from Evernote to Google Keep directly, so I transferred everything to my Google disc for a start. For the move it was necessary to create an account in the cloudHQ service. Having created an account, you need to select a bunch of applications for work, in my case - this is Evernote and Google Drive. Then it remains to choose one-way synchronization. To do this, click on the arrow between the services icons and select the folder to transfer notes. Unfortunately, notes are transferred in PDF format, so it’s convenient to only view them - you cannot edit them.

Total

According to this resource, on October 2018, Android version 4.2 is installed on only 1.5% of devices. Given this aspect, you can only pat those developers who support this minority of users.

Google Keep is quite handy with all the necessary average user functionality. I doubt that in the near future he will have a client for the PC, and besides this he has no significant drawbacks compared to Evernote.

In the article I described my transition experience, and I hope that it was just a little useful for a number of users who have the same limitations as me.