What Made Me Switch from Evernote to Notion
Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence — Paul J. Myer
If you’re unfamiliar with either tool, they’re note-taking apps.
I was hesitant to learn about Notion because I loved Evernote so much. Due to its versatility, Evernote was a favorite of mine for various reasons.
My first reaction to Notion was, “I need to be a part of this.” Then, comparing them, I found a few things to be interesting.
Does this tool work on multiple devices?
Even within the past year, I have tended to jump from my mobile phone to my laptop, to my computer, previously a work computer, and then another laptop.
So it needs to be flexible and usable on multiple devices.
That’s what both Evernote and Notion are capable of doing. So I can have the same note on both of them, which would update on my other device.
Whenever I jump between devices, head into a meeting, or share information with someone, I can stay on top of the experience.
Recently, I’ve been using my iPad instead of my desktop. As a result, I can easily copy my notes from my desktop to my iPad whenever I write them on my desktop.
As a result, I bring the most current version to class or meetings. In addition, I don’t have to worry about transferring information.
Can I input notes or thoughts quickly?
This is where Evernote excels and is a bit better because it is easy to capture and a lot more seamless when it comes to Evernote.
In addition, they have a quick capture available on the desktop, browser, and all iOS devices.
Notion is a little bit harder because of the offline version, and I think because of its constant connection to the internet, it tends to be slightly slower than Evernote.
Is there an offline mode?
Can I utilize this when I don’t have WiFi? For example, when I’m running errands or, say, going to the hospital, there are some dead spots where I don’t have WiFi access.
And in those moments, I’m distraught because Notion doesn’t have offline support.
So I noticed that I was double checking the offline mode on Notion and found out that a lot of the content I have in my knowledge cloud is still there and accessible via offline mode.
So the only things that I saw that you could technically lose in the offline mode were the images and some of the templates. Otherwise, I think most items have been saved to a cache because I could access almost everything.
I will give this round to Evernote because I rely on those images in my hands.
So some of the other qualities I was looking into are:
Flexible Structure.
I ran into blockers in capturing my ideas because of the notebook tagging system. There are limitations to how you can structure your notes. There are only, like, maybe a couple of levels of note-taking. It was just hard to structure.
So this is why I chose Notion: I just wanted something that could capture precisely the depth of a specific topic and still maintain the top-level function of being simple to access.
So, regarding the flexible structure, Notion takes the cake on this one because you can take the same information, turn it into a board like Trello, a database, or a table like Google Sheets and still utilize functions.
It can also serve as a gallery. There are many ways to take the same information and translate it into a different view depending on your needs. That’s where Notion shines, where you take the same information and can translate it in many different ways.
Another thing that I love about Notion, specifically, is the fact that:
Handles multiple forms of content.
It is very similar to what I was talking about with the flexible structure, but it can capture many different types of content, even Google Sheets embeds, murals, or murals if you are creating roadmaps.
Also, the way that it drops in images reminds me very much of Dropbox Paper, where you can drop in pictures and they can go side by side. In addition, it can expand how it drops images; you can drop in the video.
It’s so flexible, and it looks perfect when it doesn’t, like, drop in an image, and it just looks nice.
You can add captions to those images and create a beautiful gallery, which is useful when capturing a lot of content while going through a project. You’re just trying to compare many different versions.
I like its self-referencing link.
Now, within Notion, you can link one page to another and have that link appear in other places, making it almost like a personal Wikipedia.
So if you’re trying to reference a link that’s deeply nested, you don’t have to reformat or restructure everything. You can link it to that page, and you’ll be able to find it.
Searching in Notion can be a bit slow because of its connection to the Internet, probably.
But I found that if you’re searching within a database, that’s almost immediate.
So searching within a database always goes fast. Searching across your whole Notion cloud takes a couple of seconds, not much longer.
Final Takeaways
Notion is a powerful tool.
It can capture information in almost infinite depth. So I’m willing to wait a couple of seconds for it and be patient when I don’t have access to the Internet.
Sometimes the ease of capture can be a negative when it comes to Evernote because you’re just going to get a lot of note bloat.
Note bloat inflates your entire notes, making it harder for you to access them in the future.
So hopefully, that helps. That’s literally why I jumped into Notion. I’ve been using Notion 100% since 2019.
I am not going to go back. Maybe another tool in the future might do what I need. But for now, Notion is a tool for me.
Do you prefer Notion over Evernote?
