My switch to Standard Notes has been a success. There’s been a few bumps, but I’ve changed my habits and I can see the benefits of doing things using the Standard method (pun intended). First of all, it’s nice having a choice of editors to use “per note”. With Keep there was no editor–no way to even bold or underline anything–everything was just flat text. With Standard Notes “Extended” you have your choice of several different editor types per-note, so I can still have simple basic notes if I don’t want anything fancy in them–no formatting, no images, or I can opt for an editor specific to a note’s content. For example if I want full HTML formatting and included images I can switch a note to use the “Bold” editor, which includes full editing capabilities and encrypted image embedding. Or, if I have a to-do list I can switch to the “task editor” for that note and I get checkboxes and lists and I can check off and track what’s completely and not, very easily. There’s even a “Secure Spreashsheets” editor for a nice compact spreadsheet format, complete with cell calculation features.

I think the only other issue I’ve had switching over to Standard Notes is getting all of my 1000+ old notes out of Keep and into Standard Notes easily. I just finished up the last of those. I found that it was easiest to take each tag, select all of the notes in that tag in keep, then Export them to a Google Docs document and copy and paste that into one large Standard Notes note, then cut and paste them out of there individually as time permitted. This way, everything was still searchable in Standard Notes as I worked through splitting the notes one-by-one. I had to be able to easily find things in my notes, especially when I was working, so this made it very easy to find everything in the same application and I broke them out into separate notes to match what I had in Keep. That’s all done now, and I’m very happy with Standard Notes’ performance and options. I think this is going to be a great long-term solution. At least long enough to cover the 5 years of “Extended” I just paid for, which was extremely cheap if you consider it as a monthly plan. It’s $149 for 5 years, which is $2.48/month. Definitely cheaper than all of the other paid-plan note applications, including Evernote. If you just need basic notes though–identical to those offered with Keep, the plain Standard Notes is completely free. This gives you only the Basic editor, which offers no formatting options, just like Keep.