Saturday, February 25, 2012

App Showdown: Evernote-Catch-Springpad

There are a number of note taking apps available for Android. Over the past few weeks I have reviewed three of the most common ones and today I'm bringing it all together for a head to head comparison.

This is my first attempt at an infographic (as it were). So bear with me a little bit, but I think it turned out well.



As you can see, these apps match up pretty well against one another with the only major notes going to Evernote's lack of QR scanning for notes and the absence of rich text formatting via the Catch and Springpad apps. Depending on how you plan to take notes, either of those items could become important to you, but for the majority of users, these apps are all even.

Highlights:

Evernote: For me, Evernote paced this group with the quality feel of the app. The crisp and flexible UI, and sharp colors (mostly green) were appealing every time I opened the app. 

Catch: The app and sync settings were king of the hill for Catch. That might not seem like a lot, since it's about app taking, but behind-the-scenes features often make the best experiences.

Springpad: The customizable widget offered by Springpad is sweet. You can set up the widget to make the app perfectly functional for you. 

So how do you choose?

The feel of each app is quite different, and I didn't share that in the graphic as it really isn't a tangible thing. The best advice I can give you is to download all three. Take some notes, organize them, refer back to them, repeat that for a week or so and go with the one that is most intuitive to you.

I had been using Evernote for more than a year prior to starting these reviews. So while I tried to be unbiased in my reviews, I also didn't find any compelling reasons to switch. I will say that if I was starting from scratch, Springpad is hard to ignore, I use my widget all the time with Evernote and Springpad's is great.

Download the apps from the Market links below and try them out for yourself:

Let me know if these reviews help you to choose an app or ways that I could make them more useful. I'll probably be staying away from apps that I'm not already using for a while. I worked hard to use Catch and Springpad enough to write a solid review, but feel that I can be much more thorough if I take my time. 


11 comments:

  1. Evernote has unlimited storage also. Free accounts can upload 60MB per month. Premium accounts can upload 1GB per month. There is no limit on the total storage per user.

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    1. Good catch and thank you. Either I'm oblivious or Evernote could make this a little more clear - I've been using the app for nearly a year. I'll work on getting the graphic updated.

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  2. What about storage and memory requirements of each app on the phone?

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  3. Thanks for a good review. Can you also please comment in more detail on the 'sharing' ability of each across each of their feature sets?

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  4. I'm very interested in knowing which of them allow to upload pdf or Office files and organize them together with notes, audio notes, etc. I'm using a Galaxy S3 (http://migalaxys3.blosgpot.com).
    Thanks.

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  5. I think you mean its "all about note taking", not
    "all about app taking".

    I personally prefer to read my work and fix it with my brain rather than use a spell-checker. :D

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  6. Main advantage of Catch over Evernote is that Catch works in offline mode i.e. stores notes locally. Evernote requires you have online access to see your notes (unless you are a premium member).

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    1. not true. evernote allows you to view offline as well. im guessing is saves your current notes to cache and updates it when it has a connection

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    2. EverNote is really nice and handy app. But free version is very limited and suitable for just simple notes which You can use with other apps better. There are two main handicaps (3rd wish):

      (1)_Free version doesNOT have full OFFLINE access! You can use it offline to make new notes, or see old notes. But if your notes has changed last time in other device, You can see it in the other device only when online. No matter if sychronization has passed because it SYNCHRONIZE works ONLY HEADERS (names and time of creation) of notes. Full synronizations supposedly works in Premium version.

      (2)_Month data transfer 60 MB (free account) is more than enough for text notes. But it sounds like bad joke from ancient history if somebody intend to use advanced features of this app.

      (3)_I would like to imagine an application for diferent types of notes using my dropbox account. Let compare - 60 MB free vs. 2 GB free. I dont mind if I pay for app neither I dont mind to pay for services. But I dont like to pay many times for the same - sharing my data.

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  7. I use both Evernote and Catch and add them to my Cloudkafe account to view and manage them from a single platform. it's super handy!

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