Evernote has had a rough few years. After the Bending Spoons acquisition, pricing was restructured and the free tier was aggressively cut — most of the recent negative reviews trace directly to that shift rather than any fundamental product failure. As a note organizer and cross-device capture tool, the core still works: rich-text notes, notebooks, tags, and search are all functional.
But the product has been coasting on legacy reputation. The Android app can feel sluggish on budget hardware, and sync reliability has had some rough patches reported by long-term users. The recent UI changes brought some improvements but also removed familiar patterns that power users relied on. For anyone still on a grandfathered free account, the current feature wall is a jarring experience.
At its best, Evernote is still a solid place to capture web clips, PDFs, and structured notes that you need to find later. But between Notion, Google Keep, and Obsidian at various price points, the reasons to pay the current subscription price are harder to justify than they were two years ago.
Verdict: A once-dominant note app that still functions well for paying users, but the pricing overhaul has damaged trust and the competition has largely caught up.
