Evernote launched in 2008 under the leadership of Stepan Pachikov and later Phil Libin, who served as CEO from 2009 to 2015. At its peak, the app had over 200 million users and was considered one of the most important productivity tools in tech.
The core idea was simple: capture everything — notes, web clippings, images, audio — and make it all searchable. Evernote’s OCR technology could even search text within images, which was impressive for its time. The tagging system and notebook organization gave users a flexible way to manage information.
However, the company went through a rough stretch in the mid-2010s. Feature bloat, pricing changes, and management turnover frustrated long-time users. Many migrated to Notion, Apple Notes, or Obsidian.
Bending Spoons, an Italian software company, acquired Evernote in 2023 and laid off most of the existing staff. They’ve since focused on improving performance, reducing bugs, and modernizing the interface. The app has gotten noticeably faster under new ownership.
Evernote still offers strong features: web clipping, document scanning, template galleries, and cross-platform sync. The free tier is limited to one device, while Personal and Professional plans unlock more storage and features.
Whether Evernote can recapture its former glory is an open question, but it’s still a functional tool for people who’ve built their workflows around it.
