I was never an evernote power user, but I find Notion to be much more intuitive and preferable with two exceptions: Evernote's inline audio tool is really excellent. Being able to capture snippets lightning fast inline is crucial to my workflow as a musician. And Notion is slow on startup. Hopefully they become profitable enough to decide a native mac client is worthwhile.

In general, Notion has the same feel to me that Slack did when it first came out: Just the right balance of cutesy, thoughtful detail in the UX, but in a way that doesn't feel superfluous because the underlying abstractions are also very well considered.

Choosing the emoji icons for pages, being able to /page to make a new linked page inline, @referencing pages, the interchangeable table and calendar views... none of it is particularly novel, but they're the best I've ever used at making it feel effortless to compose.

Could you please describe what you missed when you tried Notion and Joplin?

My issue with Notion is just picky little things that make it not fun to use. It looks great, is intuitive to me, and seems pretty powerful, so I want to like it. But, I hate having to be emailed a log-in code. Everytime it happens I think "oh yeah, this is why I never use Notion". I don't like that the desktop and mobile apps are just wrappers for the webview. As a user I feel like I have no control over anything. At least with Evernote and OneNote, I can literally see my database on my computer. With Notion, I am always aware that this is data on somebody else's servers. I've also had subpages completely disappear if I move their parent note, and I gave up on support and just accepted the loss.

Joplin looks good. I am going to give it a shot.

I use Joplin every day for work, and review notes on the commute home from phone. Love being able to write in Markdown, fully encrypted across all devices, full hierarchical structure plus tags support. The UI is "basic", but so are my needs. And if it goes away, I have an up-to-the-minute backup organized by those same folders and markdown files. Several new releases since I started using it 6 months ago.

The lack of tags support on mobile and the proprietary storage format is what drove me away from OneNote.

What was the reason from switching back from notion?

Not the original poster but it takes ages to open, and I have maybe 3-4 notes in there. It's especially bad on android.

Also the offline support isn't great which is a dealbreaker in the subway where internet goes in and out.