Evernote has long been the go-to application for taking notes, tracking documents, organizing projects, and generally being the place to put anything you might want to find later.
However, in the last few years, Evernote’s reputation has suffered due to an aging interface, increased fees, a series of layoffs, and a new CEO. While there are no indications that the application is going away any time soon, and it still boasts (according to most accounts) a couple hundred million users, it doesn’t hurt to have a plan B in place in case you decide it’s time to bail.
Luckily, there are a number of applications such as Microsoft OneNote, Zoho Notebook, Simplenote, and Google Keep that are looking to compete as the place for you to keep your thoughts, ideas, and other stuff. In this article, we are going to tell you how (or if) you can migrate your Evernote data to one of these applications.
However, whether or not you plan to switch, it’s a good idea to know how to export your data, if only to have an independent backup of that information, just in case.
How to export your Evernote data
Evernote lets you divide your notes into separate notebooks. When you export your data, each notebook must be exported into a separate file in Evernote’s .enex format (you can also export to an HTML file if you want).
You can only export data using the Evernote local application for PCs or Macs; you can’t do it from the online version. To try it out, I used a Mac on which I’d installed version 7.9 of Evernote. Here is how you proceed; the process for a PC is very similar.
Now you’ve got your data, where do you want to put it? I’ve look at four of the best-known Evernote alternatives — Microsoft OneNote, Zoho Notebook, Simplenote, and Google Keep — to find out the easiest way to move your data to each (assuming you can). Two of them, OneNote and Notebook, offer importers to make things as simple as possible for you. Simplenote offers a fairly simple way to import your .enex files once you’ve exported them from Evernote. And Keep… well… not gonna happen.
Microsoft OneNote is perhaps the application most compared to Evernote, and Microsoft has taken advantage of that by offering very explicit instructions, and by providing its users with an importer to make things as easy as possible.
There is one exception: If you are using the Evernote client on a Mac, and you downloaded your version of Evernote from the Mac App Store rather than from Evernote’s site, you won’t be able to use the importer to automatically import your data directly. Instead, you will have to use the link in the importer (see below) that helps you import your Evernote .enex files.
However, assuming you have the correct version:
In my case, the move to OneNote worked well; each Evernote notebook was moved to a OneNote notebook, and all my PDFs, images, text, and other content (with the exception of one reminder) were immediately recognizable. Because OneNote divides its notebooks into tabbed folders, and Evernote does not, most of my new OneNote notebooks had one tab. However, one that had 114 notes was divided into three tabs; I’m not sure why.
Zoho also makes it very simple to migrate your Evernote data. You can import the data into Zoho’s iOS, Android, or macOS clients, or using the online version (I used this last). Along the way, Zoho has several warnings about being patient because of Evernote’s quirks, however, I had no difficulty.
As with OneNote, Zoho Notebook was able to important all my Evernote content and, from what I was able to tell, replicate my notebook structure nicely. The only difference was that, unlike Evernote, there were no “stacked” folders.
Simplenote is, as its name implies, a much simpler note application that is still on many “best of” lists. However, the process of moving from Evernote to Simplenote isn’t quite so simple.
To begin with, you can’t import into the online app, but need to use the Mac or PC version. And once again, Mac users are at a slight disadvantage: The version of Simplenote that you download from the Mac App Store doesn’t support importing. You need to use a version that is available on the Github site. (This can be especially confusing since the Mac App Store link is the one that’s on Simplenote’s main page.)
So assuming that you’re using a Mac, and haven’t installed Simplenote yet:
Unlike OneNote and Zoho Notebook, you cannot import more than one notebook at a time, and since Simplenote doesn’t use a notebook format, your notebook categorizations will disappear. One way to get around this is to create tags for each notebook before you export them from Evernote; you can import the tags and search for each set of notes in Simplenote that way.
Simplenote also doesn’t import images or other media, so if you’ve been using Evernote to collect business card images or other photos, you’re out of luck.
Google Keep
Google Keep is a very simple and useful note application — if you start it from scratch. There is currently no way to move data from Evernote (or any other app) to Google Keep, even if you wanted to.
It’s always difficult to get used to a new application when you’ve invested a lot of time, effort, and content in one such as Evernote. But if you can easily move from one app to the other — as you can with at least three of these notebook apps — then the hardest part is taken care of.