Bye, Evernote

Handwritten Notes

Handwritten Notes offer significant advantages in a lot of use cases. They are fast, easy and distraction-free while also never running out of battery. Plus, you can format and arrange your notes however you like.

Of course, they don’t offer backups, automatic reminders and search/share features. But this might be fine for your short-term or spontaneous notes. Also, it might help you remember your notes better.

Standard Notes

Standard Notes is a simple open source notes app focussing on simplicity. By creating an account, you can easily sync your notes across devices with end-to-end-encryption.

Advanced users might be interested in the paid extended version or in hosting the sync server themselves.

Joplin

Joplin is a libre note taking and to-do app. Notes are organized into notebooks and can be searched, tagged, exported and synced across devices.

Nextcloud Notes

If you are using Nextcloud, the Notes extension is a good option for organizing your notes. You can edit them with every Nextcloud client and many third-party apps.

CryptPad

CryptPad is a collection of open source and privacy-friendly collaboration tools. It’s a complete online office suite that is end-to-end encrypted, no one except you (and whoever you give your access keys to) can access your data. It lets you easily create rich text and Markdown documents, presentations, spreadsheets, poll, forms & kanban in your web browser.

Everyone can host their own instance following the Administrator Guide. However, for less tech-savvy people, you can use the flagship instance, maintained by the developers of the project. The service is free up to a certain storage limit, with paid accounts for additional storage. You can even use the free service without registering if you want to. It’s worth registering though, as you can keep your documents permanently online this way.

Xournal++

Xournal++ (/ˌzɚnl̟ˌplʌsˈplʌs/) is a FLOSS note-taking software for PDF documents. It is a modern rewrite of Xournal which is extremely featureful.