Have I mentioned how much I liked Keep? I’m sure I did, it was a big deal (at least for me) when I cancelled by Evernote subscription and went with Keep as a totally free option and it worked out great for me. Sure, Keep lacked the fancy HTML formatting that Evernote has, but it was fast and pretty much unlimited. Keep also had a couple pretty nice features most other note apps didn’t–especially free ones. One was OCR. You could search for text with an image or photo and it would find it. And you could extract text from an image any time you wanted.

Well, all was bliss until a few weeks ago when I actually started using it much more. I had a previous post prepared in which I explained how I stopped using my little paper notepads at work, but for some reason that post never got published. I don’t recall exactly why. Anyway, I stopped, cold-turkey. No more pen & paper at all. Everything digital. ALL notes at work are now digital, which makes them that much more useful. That unpublished post explained in detail what happened that made me decide to go this route, but it really does help a lot–not only saving on paper, but in the new ability to search and find anything in an instant and to document my daily work in our ticket system for the rest of the team to be able to search and find.

But, as I said, things also took a turn around that same time, or I just never noticed the issue before because I never used Keep quite so much. Here’s the issue: Since I’m typing notes into Keep much more often now, I have become much more aware of how it constantly saves everything to the web on-the-fly, as I’m typing and working. It constantly tells you this at the top of the Keep screen. Well, right around the day I started using it much more, it would occasionally pop up a message at the bottom of the keep screen that says “can’t connect right now, try again later.” I can understand that happening once in awhile due to maybe a server issue down the line, my internet connection, or maybe my corporate network connection at work being glitchy. It happens sometimes. But when this happens, Keep halts my typing. It lasts about 10-15 seconds, sometimes a bit longer, maybe up to 30 seconds being the longest, and I can’t type anything at all into Keep during that time.

When I’m on a phone call or working on an issue and trying to document everything at the same time, this can get quite frustrating. Like I said, it wasn’t bad when it was just once in awhile, but over the past week it has become constant. In pretty much every note I take there’s forced pauses. It drives me nuts now. I just don’t understand how Keep can’t allow the user to keep typing and just cache the unsaved data until the connection becomes available again, then save it. I thought that was the reason they have the constant notification at the top of the screen–so you know when your current work is or is not saved at the moment. I don’t think there’s any point to having that if you can’t even type anything in when you’re NOT connected to the internet.

Anyway, it became too much. I searched the web plenty of times and others have had this issue with Keep since 2017 or 2018. I’m not sure if it stopped their typing at that time, they didn’t mention that aspect of the issue, but this is my experience, and if it has been happening for a few years I’m shocked nothing has been done about it.

Maybe the Keep servers are overloaded now, with so many people using the free service these days, I don’t know. So I went on the hunt, yet again, for another decent free, or inexpensive, alternative note app. I tried a few more and would up with “Standard Notes.” It’s a simple app, much like Keep, completely free, but with a desktop app as well and a “Expanded” option for a small fee (or a LARGE fee if you only pay monthly). If you buy into their long-term 5-year plan, it’s only a little over $2/month. Pay only monthly and it’s $9.99/month. Huge difference. But the benefits of “Expanded” are plentiful. You get a 30-day money-back guarantee on the 5-year plan, so I’m into that right now, trying everything out and giving it a run for my money.

So far, so good. It lacks the OCR abilities that Keep has, but I can still use Keep for a few minutes at a time whenever I need to just pull text from an image, then save that text in Standard Notes. Everything else, however, is there and then some! It does the same on-the-fly saving of my notes, but without interruption at all, from what I’ve seen, and it offers full editing capabilities in may different tasty flavors I like, such as full HTML editing and even a full Coding editor complete with line count. There are plenty of other extensions to add details to the program like work count and other stats, printing of notes (which you would think is a given, but Keep never had it–I had to export a note (or several) into Google Docs and then I could print it. And it was pretty easy to use Google Takeout to extract all of my Keep notes, then use a plugin that Standard Notes Extended has to import those into Standard Notes. We’ll see if it holds up for the full 30 days, or if I get my money back. Right now it’s looking pretty good.