Migrating from Evernote to Bear
Due to the recent price hikes ($99 -> $250) and bugs (e.g. random deletions of portions of text) I am looking to migrate away from Evernote before my subscription renews in October. I have evaluated plenty of alternatives (Joplin, Obsidian, upNote, Standard Notes, Capacities, devonTHINK, Anytype, Craft) and have fallen onto Bear as the best alternative for my use case (no Ai, no tasks, no calendar, just notebooks/tags, nice design, fast editing/sync). Since I only use an iMac and an iPhone the Apple lock-in doesn’t matter. Also the recently released Web app reduces the issue. I have about 15 notebooks, 300 notes and 2000 attachments (1gb). I have some concerns and would love to hear what your take is on the following:
- As far as I can see in Bear there is no option to add a table of contents (toc) to a note and also there is no toc navigation pane to the right side of the note on the desktop application (as it exists in Evernote or Notion). The only way to access a toc is via the „i“-icon in the top right corner what could be annoying especially when dealing with notes that have plenty of sections (I have some notes with ~30 sections). Have you been experiencing this as limiting and have you even found a workaround? Are there plans to enable adding a toc directly in the note or to provide a navigation pane to the right?
- I have some notes that are quite large due to plenty of pictures (70-100mb). In Evernote they load fast but as soon as you want to edit it constantly freezes and takes seconds to display changes. How well is Bear performing with such „heavy“ notes? Is it easy to load, edit and sync them?
- As far as I understand Bear does not provide versioning of individual notes. Meaning I can only backup my entire note stack but after I edit a single note there is no version history that I can fall back onto if I ever accidentally delete something or realize after some time that I want to revert a section to a previous state. I have read on Reddit that some users have built their own python script to mimic a version history themselves. Since a version history is critical as a safety net for me I will need to implement this as well. What have your experiences been with that? Also I have seen that such a version history feature has been requested >2 years ago but nothing has happened as of today. Are there any plans to add that feature?
- In my Evernote notes I have a lot of internal links (links to other notes), highlights of text and tables. Will the links break or is there a way to have the links cleanly migrate to Bear? Is it correct that all Highlights will be removed? Will tables migrate cleanly or will they break? Is there anything else that might break when migrating?
- In my Evernote notes I also have about 2000 attachments (.png, .jpeg, PDFs, .txt, .xlsx). Will all of them cleanly migrate to Bear?
Thank you for any insights/help 🙏