Evernote v UpNote v Notion – who will be number one?

The quest for a note taking application has plagued me for some time and so today I am pitting some of the titans against each other. Evernote v UpNote v Notion – Let’s find out who will be number one. As I have searched for a notes app, these are the three that have emerged as the top contenders – you can read a few steps along the way for me here:

• Notes Apps – The Saga Continues
• How to choose a notes app
• Review of UpNote

My first app of this type was Evernote – then years ago when they limited the features of the free version, especially limiting you to 2 devices, I switched and migrated everything to Microsoft OneNote – which I used for some years.  Then I decided to pay for Evernote Plus (remember that), and I switched back to Evernote.  By the time lockdown began I had switched back to OneNote.  During lockdown I discovered Nimbus Notes and thought it was the answer to all my hopes, but some issues with the integrity of my notes and one or two other things made me bite the bullet and try and build something in Notion.  I based it around Danny Hatcher’s edit of Thomas Frank’s Note taking system in Notion.  I used this happily for a while but it always felt a little bit risky – so I went back to Evernote.  I briefly played around with apps like Notejoy, Notesnook, Slite and Obsidian but having rejected them all, and OneNote by this time, it seemed my options were Evernote or Notion.

Then last year I discovered UpNote.  A newer app in a lot of ways and so there are still some things missing (though a lot of these have been added since I found it) and some foibles that need resolving.  So, in December I pitted these 3 apps against each other in a head to head.  I thought I would share my findings with you.

You can find my thoughts here on what I am looking for in a notes app but by and large the things I consider fall into the following areas:

1. Capture – How easy is it to get stuff into the app
2. Edit & Format – what can you actually do with the notes themselves
3. Organisation – what options does the app give you
4. Retrieval – once stuff is in the app, how easy is it to find it again.

Before we dive in – I am looking at the premium versions of both Evernote & UpNote here and the free version of Notion.  The cost will become a factor at the end.  Evernote is ~£45-50 a year (at the time of writing), UpNote is £24.99 for a lifetime subscription and Notion is free.

Capture

The hands down winner here is Evernote.  With the Evernote helper on desktop, the amazing web clipper and the ability to send email to your Evernote Inbox makes getting information into Evernote fast, easy and possible to do without breaking your workflow even when not in Evernote itself.  Evernote also comes with great widgets on Android and iOS to quickly capture thoughts, notes and ideas.

Runner up for me was UpNote.  A lot of the functionality is the same, but not quite as good, as Evernote’s.  The web clipper is good, but not as good.  The global shortcut to create a new note is great, but the small box that comes up is a little bit more intrusive than the Evernote Helper and the widgets on mobile phones, cannot be placed in the dock.  Critically, you cannot send emails to UpNote.  Which is a bit of a let down here.

In last place was Notion.  On desktop, there is no quick way to capture and the work around using using a Chrome Browser extension call ‘Save to Notion’ and a 3rd party keyboard hotkey app seems to no longer work.  You cannot create notes in Notion without going into the app so far as I can see.  The web clipper (or the Save to Notion) extension are both really good, but the functionality is not quite as good as Evernote’s.  I’d put it on a par with UpNote.  You can get e-mails to Notion using some third party services but the emails never really display well in Notion so I hardly ever bothered.

Edit & Format

Here Notion is actually the winner, though I say that with a major caveat.  The use of slash commands and the different options available for formatting your notes mean that it is fast with a good set of options available.  The option to include columns is really helpful for making notes more visual and the block based editor means that moving stuff around within the note is really straightforward.  However, the colours on offer are not that good, too dull for me, and if the note is part of a database then the icon and the properties (even when they are fully hidden) means that the actual content of your note begins half to 2/3rds of the way down my screen which is really not good.

UpNote and Evernote are almost equals here with UpNote just about snatching the runner up position.  Evernote is better at moving stuff around within the note and the colour options are better (in light mode – for some reason they don’t work so well in dark mode in my view) but the UI and the different formatting options are more limited than UpNote.

Formatting notes on a mobile in Evernote is complicated because of how the menus work and the options that make it best within Notion on a computer, are not available on mobile.  UpNote on the other hand is pretty straightforward at this.

Organisation

This is a key part for a notes application and will be the most controversial section as it is where my opinions on what is and what isn’t good will show through.   For me, UpNote is the clear winner here, with Notion not far behind and Evernote coming last.  It should be noted that Evernote has recently improved its note linking which impacts this a bit, but this new feature is still quite clunky in Evernote.

UpNote offers a nested hierarchy of notebooks, inline tags, really good features for linking notes, note pins and quick access options as well as options to have a personal aesthetic for the app and the actually process of organisation is really quick both to do and to sync.  In Evernote, the notebook hierarchy is much more basic, the tagging is more basic and there are no personalisation options at all.  I find it slower and more clunky to organise stuff.  With Notion, it is all built around relational databases.  This is how notes are placed in notebooks, given tags and linked together.  The customisation of the aesthetic here is really good.  The two issues are that, depending on how complex your system of relational databases is, will massively impact how fast it is to organise notes.  Second, you have to build it yourself or get a template which requires tweaking.  This means it doesn’t work ‘out the box’ and there is the ever present impulse to tinker, to add and tweak the different relationships and views to improve the functionality of the app.  All this take time.

Retrieval

Getting information out of the notes app is also key.  You have to be able to find your stuff once it’s saved in the app or else what’s the point?

Evernote wins here simply because the search options are so good.  Finding things manually depends on how many notebooks you have.  As you can only nest things on one level, you could have hundreds of notebooks within a stack and therefore this process would not be simple.  The multiple nesting levels improves this in UpNote.  Evernote’s search features will bring up notes (as in the titles), notebooks, tags and note content and it is surprisingly good at putting the right stuff at the top of the search list.  It also has a quick switcher making this process incredibly fast.  Searches can be saved and added as shortcuts in the favourites list which is also really good.  UpNote’s search is not as good, there is no quick switcher and the search only searches notes, though as tags are inline and in the body of the notes, these are included in that.  That said, every time I have used it, I have found what I am looking for within the first 10-15 items down the list with minimal difficulty.

In my opinion, this is where Notion has the potential to have big problems.  It is potentially very difficult to manually find anything.  You have to go to the correct view, in the correct database with the correct filter.  And there is the risk of creating something that is within a page that sits within a database, that itself is within another page, that is part of another database etc et etc.  You can lose things within the infinite depths of databases within databases.  The search everything quick switcher has the potential to be weak.  As far as Notion is concerned everything is the same – everything is a page.  It doesn’t know if it is a note, or a notebook or a tag or a task or project or event or whatever.  If everything is in Notion then the search will be looking through all of these things and in Notion, all things are created equal.  This just makes it less and less likely that you will find what you are looking for.  You can search within specific databases which does help but you have to go to the database itself in order to do this, slowing the whole thing down.

Evernote v UpNote v Notion

Who will be number one? All in the results I got were:

As you can, Evernote was the winner. 

But, Evernote costs £45-50 per year and having bought a lifetime subscription to UpNote a year ago and at roughly half the annual price of Evernote I have settled on UpNote as my notes app of choice.  Those two points don’t justify the extra cost.  And, if UpNote ever introduces an email feature, tidies up moving things around in the notes or improves their search, then this fantastic app becomes the hands down winner by quite some margin.

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