I’ve used Evernote for a while for taking and keeping notes, lists, diaries. But recent changes to their free tier meant looking for another option. And the open source and free Joplin fitted the bill nicely.

Evernote provided a note taking application allowing me to keep lists, notes and scribbles in a single place and with organisation. And very good it is too with more sophisticated features than I’d ever need and the free tier worked nicely allowing me to keep those notes synchronized between two devices (my PC and phone). There were some drawbacks - limited to two devices and the lack of a native Linux version. I’d used nixnote2 to get round the Linux issue and while not perfect things were good enough so that most of my routine writing went into the application. Much less post-it notes and scribble pads.

But then the T&C changed to limit the number of notes you could take and being already well past that limit meant problems. I wasn’t the only one with plenty of users feeling aggreived.

This seems to happen a lot, companies offer free versions of products and then later restrict the free to entice users to become paying customers. But if the free was the major consideration for choosing that product in the first place all the company is doing is removing a major reason for continued use. Companies should only offer a free option they are prepared to sustain IMHO.

So, exported all my data out from from Evernote and imported in Joplin which worked very smoothly. Joplin has a native Linux application as well as Android versions, and can syncronise across multiple devices - in my case the PC, table and phone. So already an improvement. The synchronization can use a range of targets (anywhere commonly accessible to all the devices, in my case OneDrive) and everything uses markdown format so it is non-proprietry.

All in all a simple migration and an all round improvement.