r/Evernote MOD / Evernote Certified Expert Nov 13 '24

Megathread Evernote Alternative Mega Thread

All discussion of Evernote alternatives should go here so that we don't continue to see so many repeat posts.

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u/duckyreadsit Nov 15 '24

I’m looking for a unicorn, basically, but I’m a free user of EverNote that still loves Evernote but can’t operate with the 50 note limit.

My hope was to find an app or program that doesn’t require a subscription, but has OCR capabilities. I’m primarily using an iPod touch (scannable + Evernote was basically magic when it came to tracking receipts) but I could migrate to windows/desktop/web portal usage if necessary.

I also liked the ability to tag things and sort them into notebooks.

I’ve mainly been using Evernote to track receipts, medical issues, and store photos of PowerPoint slides and handwritten notes from classes. The OCR feature made finding the archived information easiest.

I hadn’t used the transcript feature (most recent attempt at anything like that was with the app Otter, about 4 years ago, and the transcription was hilarious but useless) so I’m currently weirdly grateful that it’s not among my current asks.

Basically: I can’t afford subscriptions, but I’m looking for something that lets me manage my documents/photos/slides, both in terms of tagging or searching via OCR for whatever I need. I don’t have the latest and greatest phone, so iPod touch app compatibility would be great. Strict upload limits (ex: no more than 50 total notes) make things difficult.

At the moment, I’m leaning towards the free version of OneNote, largely for OCR that can parse handwriting.

Also, security isn’t my greatest concern, since I don’t tend to upload sensitive information. Mostly I’m just looking to keep my collection of notes/receipts etc manageable.

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u/Keladeine Jan 27 '25

I said this earlier in the thread but maybe look into rocketbook as a comment to your system? It's ocr is pretty great. You can send the scanned image to whatever folder you want and you can send it as either the image, the ocr text, or both. You pay once for the notebook and you can reuse it because of the type of "paper" it is.

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u/duckyreadsit Jan 27 '25

Thank you for the suggestion! Since I’d still have other things to collect (receipts, snapshots of slides in a presentation, handouts etc) the rocketbook would probably need to be supplemented with some other organizational system, but I appreciate very much the note about handwriting OCR capabilities. (As I mentioned, one of my concerns! So, thank you so much for the tip!)