Finally A Solid Replacement for Evernote
18 years ago I subscribed to Evernote, a document management system that allowed me to go paperless. Every bit of paper that comes into my house immediately gets scanned on my phone and entered into my account, where its accessible from my phone. That includes email attachments like PDFs, notes from meetings, invoices, medical bills, etc. No matter where I am, I can easily lookup that account number or receipt without needing paper or a laptop.
I happily paid the yearly fee as it increased over that time, but two years ago Evernote was purchased by Bending Spoons, an EU-based company that promptly laid off all of the US staff and doubled the the yearly fee from ~$65/year to $125/year. That was annoying, but it was easier to pay than switch. This year they doubled the cost again! In return they added a bunch of features no one asked for, while ignoring the problems with their core business of document storage.
One huge price increase I could swallow, but doubling two years in a row was the last straw. After researching the options and trying out a couple of commercial competitors, I picked this open source project:
https://docs.paperless-ngx.com
Not only does it duplicate everything Evernote does (Including OCR on images and PDFs), it’s actually way ahead in AI integration. The ability to auto-tag and do natural language searches eliminates the biggest problems with Evernote, and its free. And its phone apps also duplicate Evernote, making it easy to scan images with my phone, even cropping out the backgrounds, and access my documents remotely.
Of course, hosting your own server isn’t for everyone, but the whole process of exporting my 6,000+ Evernote notes and setting up the server was easy with Claude Code. The AI setup my server, imported all of my Evernote notes, setup a backup system, and even ran a security audit on the server.
Founder of Web Performance, Inc
B.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering
The Ohio State University
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