I’ve been trying different Mac apps to come up with an Evernote replacement since they’re moving to a more restrictive free plan. However, I’m kind of just ending back up at Evernote.

I mainly use Evernote for work related things. However, I have quite a few home things in there too. What I realized is that I could pull all of my personal stuff out and put it into Apples Notes app. Then I could reserve Evernote for work related things. This allows me to meet Evernote’s new criteria of 2 devices and not have to move all the things.

Notes is a really good app. I’ve been very happy with it and I have no real complaints. At this time however, I don’t really want to fill it full of work related stuff. I’d rather separate my personal and work life between the two apps.

I did try many other apps though and there are some great ones out there. OneNote is a very nice app, but in the end, I felt disorganized. The Mac app is lacking some features, and it just didn’t feel right. I think it’s because it has tabs and tabs have multiple notes, and then there are notebooks on top of that. Plus you can’t easily move notes between all the things. You kind of have to pick a path and stick with it. I tried it for a few weeks and I kind of liked it, but it also didn’t feel right for me.

I also tried a few Markdown apps and there. There are many good ones, but I really wanted a list of notes like Evernote has and most don’t have that. I did turn Sublime into a pretty nice Markdown app with some extensions and themes, but then there’s not a good way to search through all the files as they’re not really in the app; they’re all just separate files. I know I could do it, but it felt disjointed.

I also really like Simplenote. Felt a bit too basic for what I was looking for as I can’t make todo lists or highlight important things when taking notes. Simplenote is my go to app though when writing blog posts as I don’t have to worry about formatting issues. It would be really nice if the Mac app had markdown though. The web version does, but not the Mac app.

There’s a lot of other good writing or note taking apps for the Mac but I wasn’t going to pay for something without trying it. I did look at a lot of them though.

At the end of the day, I realized that I still like Evernote and I really like Apple’s Notes app. All I have to do is separate my personal and work notes and then everyone can be happy.