When comparing Evernote vs WPS Office, the Slant community recommends Evernote for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for video game design?” Evernote is ranked 6th while WPS Office is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Evernote is:
Evernote is designed to store a lot of different types of information from a lot of different sources in one place. Using the Web Clipper, native integrations, or a service such as IFTTT (If This Then That) you can use Evernote to store all your ideas, notes (both handwritten and typed), tasks, reading lists, receipts, and more.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Consolidates all your information
Evernote is designed to store a lot of different types of information from a lot of different sources in one place. Using the Web Clipper, native integrations, or a service such as IFTTT (If This Then That) you can use Evernote to store all your ideas, notes (both handwritten and typed), tasks, reading lists, receipts, and more.
Pro Powerful features for organising your notes
Evernote is designed to make it easy to keep your notes well organized, which aids in quickly finding/browsing old information. You can put notes into a single notebook and use search to access old notes, or if you're so inclined, organize notes extensively with hierarchical notebooks and tags.
Pro Can include images, and snippets from the web or a whole webpage via web clipper
With one click you can clip part or all of any webpage, including text, images, and links. Especially for those who use Google Chrome, this web clipper is a very rich add-on. The “simplified article” mode strips all graphical overhead from the page before adding the information to Evernote. It's also possible to add highlighting, tags, etc. before storing the note.
Pro Has OCR functionality to convert images to searchable text
A really cool and handy Evernote feature is the ability to automatically scan images for text.
Pro "Reminders" are a great way to combine your to-dos and notes
One of the note types is a "reminder," which can act as a to-do list. You can add all the usual formatting to reminders, including audio. Evernote will provide alerts when they are due and house them in a special location within the app.
Pro Easy to use
Evernote is easy to dive into because it doesn’t overwhelm you with advanced functionality from the start. As you get more accustomed to the app, you might want to delve deeper to see what benefits the more advanced features will offer.
Pro Native and offline-capable apps on pretty much every platform
Evernote has apps for Windows 7 and 8, Windows 10, Windows 11, Mac, Android, iOS (both iPhone and iPad), Blackberry, and Windows Phone. It also has a fully functional web app and chrome plug-in. No matter what device or platform you're on, you will pretty much always be able to access Evernote.
Pro Multipurpose
In addition to general note taking and to-do list management, Evernote lets you search through scanned documents, handwritten text, and images; collaborate with others through shared notebooks; record audio notes; and more.
Pro Trustworthy to store data in the long term
With many utility tools being constantly shut down by their creators, it's really important to consider the long-term risks of picking a home for all your notes. Evernote is a $1 billion company with a track record of exceptional security and goals of becoming a "100 year old" company.
Pro Powerful note formatting
Evernote has an extensive range of formatting options and note types. You can create checklists, reminder alerts, audio notes, or add images and attachments. It also has an awesome speech-to-text feature if you prefer to dictate aloud.
Pro Great selection for integrating with other apps
The Evernote app center page is nicely organized and has good quality integration of apps that can improve your productivity.
Pro Focused, uncluttered user interface
Evernote has a very clean and intuitive interface that's simple to understand at a glance.
Pro Evernote is synchronized
Pro Premium allows search in attached files and documents
With a premium account you are able to search through PDFs and Office Docs.
Pro Innovative hacks
To save emails, just forward them to your Evernote email address generated on account creation. It is of course one of many such hacks.
Pro Flexible image manipulation
Permits photos that are taken, to be processed when in automatic mode and saved as a photo, black and white document, colour document, post it note or business card. The automated mode is also good at cropping the document effectively.
Pro Best web clipper
Can clip to the web from desktop or mobile, using simplified format or original formatting. Very quick and flexible, and enables you to highlight, take notes, tag, etc.
Pro Can choose from a few themes
You can pick from a green theme, light, or dark theme. All are very clear and visually appealing.
Pro Effective with pictures or snapshot of boards
Take a picture of your white board/paper board and you have it instantly in evernote everywhere, ready for additional notes and classification
Scannable friend app is rather efficient to keep hand written note as well.
Pro Skitch integration
If you're on iOS and have Skitch installed, you can quickly annotate your notes using Skitch.
Pro Has conflict management and undo
Allows undo/redo when editing (i.e. all changes are finalized upon saving). If conflicts between synchronized versions arise, both copies are saved in Evernote.
Pro Excellent Microsoft Office compatibility
WPS has the best compatibility with MS Office files of all major office suites that support Linux.
Pro Ribbon-like UI
WPS is the only Linux office suit to offer a Ribbon-like UI for better ease of use. Although, if you wish to keep using a classic drop-down menu style UI, you can.
Pro Free version
WPS comes in three flavors: Free, Standard ($49.95) and Professional ($69.95).
Pro Cross-platform desktop and mobile
Available on Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
Pro Pdf viewer
Has support to view pdf files.
Pro Multilingual
WPS Office is available in more than 40 languages.
Pro Tabbed interface
Instead of open up a new instance of the program for each document, WPS opens each document as a separate tab, allowing for easy switching between them.
Pro Smooth integration with many different cloud services at the same time
WPS integrates with multiple cloud service's at once such as Dropbox, One Drive, Google Drive and more.
Pro Integrated backups
WPS will automatically save your document over time to prevent data loss.
Pro Encryption support
WPS allows you to encrypt and password-lock files.
Pro It is not owned by Microsoft
Supporting linux & open source and leaving Microsoft because of their greed and instability with updates etc.. (personal preference)
Pro View documents side by side
You can split the window allowing to view different parts of the same document, or open two documents for comparison, also imitating Microsoft Word.
Pro Clean edition when sharing your document
Text modifications can be verified at the margins, not mixed with the text, imitating Microsoft Word. On the other side, LibreOffice/OpenOffice don't have this very useful feature.
Pro Change pdf documents to word
Pro Available on snapcraft and flathub too
Cons
Con Free version limited to 2 devices
The free version has become very limited as a cloud based note taking app as there is now only sharing between two devices allowed.
Con Pay for offline use, search, and other functions
The free version of Evernote is highly limited. You have to pay if you want to access your notes without internet connection, search your notes or documents, or upload large amounts of data. The free version allows you to upload 60 MB of data per month, which is about 20 to 30 iPhone camera pictures.
At a certain point, they started charging you for "advanced" capability, which includes searching your own attachments.
Con Different features and functions per device
Desktop app has table creation. Android app lacks font color changes. Some functions can only be accessed on the desktop app. These include changing your default notebook.
Con Security issues
Evernote had their entire database hacked and compromised including customer user passwords. They responded by locking valid users out of accounts and forcing password changes but are still vague about their own security policies. They do not have a good track record for data security. They also do not offer local personal encryption of entire Notebooks as Microsoft OneNote does.
Con Buggy
A program with more features is always prone to more bugs. Evernote is definitely not the most stable note-taking program available.
Con No official Linux app
Evernote does not offer an official Linux app, although there are some third party alternatives available.
Con Constantly directs you to upgrading your account
The frequent reminders to upgrade your account can quickly become disruptive. You get notifications when using the app, and many of the features that show as available in the app are actually for paid accounts only (which, when you try to use them, will remind you to upgrade).
Con Syncing is slow
Con Prices have doubled since Bending Spoon purchase
I used to pay 7 €/month, now it's 13.
Con Very heavyweight for a to-do list
Evernote is a powerhouse program with many features. It uses a correspondingly large amount of memory to run.
Con Missing some basic functions
Con Not distributed
One cannot run Evernote on own servers. This brings with it the risks normally associated with handing over critical applications to a large corporation.
Con Bending Spoon have relocated to Europe and fired 129 people
Con Poor text formatting abilities
Text formatting in Evernote is buggy and unreliable. Bullets (outlining) are getting stuck or disappearing, tables are very static and prone to breaking and everything beyond the most basic formatting might cause an issue.
Con Basic and lacking handwriting function
Handwriting has basic functions, is attached as a picture
Con Bloated and complex
Evernote is too big, has too many features. Note taking apps need absolutely clean interface to allow unobtrusive note taking and not a struggle to search for which buttons to click. It focuses on the search feature so much that it doesn't encourage or make it immediately easy to organize your notes and thoughts. It's essentially a sophisticated notes dump with good search.
Con New web editor does not support Firefox
As of now, Firefox users must download a separate extension to change their user agent to trick the Evernote site into giving them the beta, or install Chrome.
Con No recurring and snooze reminders
Perhaps because it is not truly a to-do list app, there is currently no support for recurring events or snooze reminders. The company claims to be working on this functionality.
Con Lacks search and replace capability
Con Rather poor user interface
Slow, not user friendly experience, complex, and somehow limited.
Con Lacks right-to-left writing support
When you write in a right-to-left language (Arabic, for example), everything looks fine in the editor but the direction changes to the left again after saving the note.
Con Steep learning curve
Since Evernote has so many features built in, it's hard to know where to find everything until reasonable amount of time has been spent with it.
Con Easy to accidentally hit the wrong button on the mobile apps
The mobile apps have fairly small touch targets, making it easy to miss the button or accidentally press the wrong one.
Con No ability to re-order notes other than sorting
Evernote has no way to re-order notes, nor even to change their display order. Sorting is the only option, and the "official" workaround (for years now) is to prefix note titles with line numbers manually so notes will sort and display as desired.
Con Chinese software
Might be a security problem for some end-users.
Con Proprietary software
Although some versions/programs are free to download, they're all proprietary licenses utilizing a freeware model.
Con No HiDPI support
Problematic with 4K screens.
Con No equation editor in Linux
Equation editor for Linux has been "under development" for several years with no real additional info from the developers. Safe to say it's just not going to happen. No equation editor is a deal breaker for some, which is a shame. Otherwise this office suite performs very well.
Con Lacks ODF support
WPS Office does not support importing or exporting OpenDocument Format, the default file format of LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
Con Installing can be a hassle
A .deb file is offered, but missing fonts can be a problem.
Con No hyphenaton, no help or real forum
Lack of hyphenation in Writer is a terrible mistake. Reading the few forums about it will let you know that it breaks the words without rules and without hyphens in any language. The question was stated in 2013 and still doesn't have an answer. Their help system practically doesn't exist, everything leads you to a 404 page. Maybe this issue could be easily resolved by developers with a plugin or something like that, but the Linux community doesn't show interest for the product.
Con Ads
There are in-app ads.
Con Default font styles are not pretty
Con Only the basic office tools
WPS has software for word-processing, spreadsheets and presentations. No tools for database management, note-taking, graphics, etc.
Con Very slow to load
I looks like there is a splash screen, but it doesn't appear until just before the full interface loads, which can be about 20 seconds. It is often slow enough to cause the user to click again and again, resulting in the app loading multiple times in succession.
Con Some Ms Fonts are not available (ie Ariel)
Con Dumps configuration files onto the desktop that are visible to the user
Each of the apps in the suite has a .desktop configuration file that is created at first launch and remains thereafter. Removal results in re-creation.
Con There are better Office alternatives for Linux
In my testing of office suites for Linux, WPS Office was not as comprehensive as LibreOffice, and the resemblance to Microsoft 365 applications was better in OnlyOffice Desktop Editors. Moreover, Linux users can also access the online applications of Microsoft 365 via Google Chrome or other web browsers.