After 10 years using Evernote, this year I finally started looking for better alternatives. At first Evernote was great. But it never evolved and the world moved on. So many new concepts have appeared: jardins digitais, backlinks, Zettelkasten, Evergreen notes, MOCs, etc. And Evernote is still the same, forcing you to be a note taker instead of a note maker.

This past July I tried to replace it with Notion but it didn’t work. Besides the fact that I didn’t really like the experience (it was slow and bulky), even though Notion was a clear evolution from Evernote (Markdown, backlinks, etc.) it didn’t fulfil all my requirements:

• No Cloud (local files only)

• Easy copy & paste from other sources

• Good UI (nice and fast)

• No data lockdown. Easily switch to another program

• Versioning (git)

And so, shortly after, I tergiversated and went back to Evernote. Now I was decided to wait for something that would answer to all my needs. I was quite sure that Athens might be the one.

Then I bumped (again) into Obsidian. And it was love at second sight! I had already installed it some months ago but had never really explored it. And besides, it evolved a great deal in these last months.

After exploring and experimenting a lot, I understood that Obsidian is amazing, does everything I need and more. So I decided to adopt it.

But this time I didn’t go all in. I decided to migrate one Evernote notebook at a time. And that approach paid out because it allowed me to better understand how to make Obsidian deal with each particular scenario.

I’ve been using it daily for two weeks and, unlike Notion, Obsidian is super fast, very simple, and using it is a lot of fun. This may be it. Oh, and it’s free! But it is so damn good that I decided to pay them $25 just because they deserve it.

This said, there are still some scenarios which I don’t know how to handle in Obsidian. Those notebooks are still in Evernote, waiting for me to find a solution for them. Or for Obsidian to come up with dynamic TOCs. No rush. I’ll wait.

I’ll update this article if something new comes up. Until then, I’ll be happily gardening my digital garden in Obsidian.

Greetings from Abapinho.