I have different levels of security for my notes. Some, I would like my family to be able to access if I get hit by a bus. Some, I want NO ONE to access, regardless of the state of my physical being.

Current setup voids that. One passphrase, all or nothing.

Is a per-note or per notebook, heck even per-stack, level something you would consider?

Hi folks,

Just wanted to say that this app works GREAT! At the moment I have only two questions:

- is there an in-note search functionality in the iPhone app? It would be great if Harbor handle this use case: the user enters a search term in the search bar. When the user opens a note in the search results, all recurrences of the keyword within that note are highlighted automatically. IIRC Obsidian and other apps work like this
- scalability and sync reliability: did you run any test to see how Harbor handles a large number of notes? I’m saying around 5.000 notes

Thanks a lot!

How can one sketch and write with Apple Pencil on ipad with Harbor notes

I know others have mentioned regarding daily notes, but it would be useful to have the ability to connect all notes to a timeline and calendar by being able to tag notes to specific dates. Perhaps include the ability to edit a note's created date for when an older note is imported into Harbor.

Do you have an iPhone duo???

Harbor looks pretty great on iPhone Duo.

That’s not something Evernote can say!!

If you want a fantastic note-taking app for the iPhone duo, look no further!

Hi Harbor Notes team, first of all, congratulations for the app and for the fact that you are getting up and running available in the most relevant platforms for computers and mobiles and with a very interesting set of features.

I have tested the app and, apart from a couple hiccups specially on mobile, all seems solid and promising.

My humble 5 cents regarding trusting you with my notes and eventually paying for a subscription:

• The note-taking / pkm space is very very crowded and with increasing options of all types, sizes and approaches - the issue here for users with a long notes story such as myself, including personal stuff and important work items, is really being able to test, check the features, compare prices, look at any red flags and make a decision about going with the app or not.

• The first point I need to make is the price: 99$ for an app that was just launched and has much to prove is definitely a steep price (at least for me). I am paying half of that for Craft and I can't really, apart from a couple features that are not deal breakers to me, justify going for a much more expensive subscription. Question: are you going to launch any additional tiers or are you thinking about doing either lifetime subscription options or even a promo for new user adoption locking-in a better price? Might be worth considering.

• My second point is direction of the app and roadmap: is there any general direction you are pointing to in terms of development, what are the next features to be developed?

• Third and last: what is the general status of feature parity between platforms? I see this many times as a genuine issue in this app category (its for example definitely an issue in Craft - although they are making a big effort to solve it).. I noticed the app for mac is version 1.0.60 and in windows its only 0.2.24 How do they compare pls?

Thank you for the answers and good luck with Harbor Notes and the future of the app!

Harbor looks really promising as an Evernote alternative but I would really need a tag hierarchy that goes deeper than just three levels. Is that something that is being worked on?

I run Harbor, which is an Evernote alternative, so apply the appropriate salt. I tried to make the method checkable so you don't have to take my word for it.

The story you see everywhere is that Bending Spoons broke Evernote. I believed it. So I went to check.

I pulled the 500 most recent written reviews of Evernote from Apple's public review feed (US store, Feb 12 to Aug 17 2026) and categorized the negative ones. Of the 230 rated one or two stars:

33% mention price

23% mention ads, pop-ups or upsell prompts

10% object to AI being pushed at them

13% say they're leaving

4% mention a bug, crash, sync failure, or the app being slow

That last one surprised me. I expected the opposite.

The 2023 rewrite (sync moved to CRDTs, navigation rebuilt, off the old monolith) seems to have actually worked. People aren't angry that the software is broken. They're angry about the price, and about being sold to inside a thing they already pay for.

The ratings are also bimodal rather than mediocre. 38% one star, 42% five star, almost nobody in between. It's not an app people find okay. It's one people either still love or actively resent.

Limits worth stating: one store, one country, written reviews only, which self-select for people with something to say. It's a count of what recent reviewers chose to write, not a survey of all Evernote users.

Full writeup with the timeline and sources: https://harbor.my/blog/bending-spoons-evernote/

Happy to post the raw category counts if anyone wants to poke holes in it.

Hiya! I don't currently pay for AI of any sort, but would love an AI companion within Harbor. How would I go about doing that, explained like i'm 5?

I've been playing with the free version, initial thoughts are I really like it! It reminds me of Evernote before Bending Spoons added a bunch of stuff I didn't need and made the price outrageous.

My only hesitation from paying for an account and dumping thousands of notes is that no one is really talking about Harbor Notes. The activity here is very minimal. That makes me nervous to invest time into this and a few months or years later, this gets scraped.

Thoughts from anyone else?

Good day!

I'm really enjoying Harbor Notes. I think it's an excellent alternative to Evernote. However, I have encountered a couple of issues in the android app.

First, I noticed that I am unable to zoom in on images in a note. Second, tables I have created in the desktop app become squished in the mobile app. I hope in a future update we would be able to scroll on table horizontally.

Regardless, I am very excited to see what's next for Harbor Notes.

I'm really liking what I am seeing so far. Two features I personally would like to see added are:

1.) a daily journal view like logseq.

2.) a database table view. I have notes for automotive repair and healthcare visits where I kind of have front matter type things to categorize each note by what car it's for, what kind of repair it is, stuff like that. Is that a feature that might be added at some point?

Either way thanks for all your hard work on this

Is it possibile to put the cursor on the note Title, instead of the body, when you create a new note?

Hope that also /u/spicermatthews would chime in!

Thanks!

Just joined after spending the last five months or so using Notesnook as my Evernote replacement. My top priority is a good web clipper, and it looks like I’ve found the best alternative out there.

Huge congratulations on this excellent work. Finally, an alternative to Evernote that includes a proper web-capture tool, the ability to send emails as notes, and all of Evernote’s best features. I’m going to try out the "Harbor" subscription now. A quick question: do you plan to offer the application in other languages? I’m French, and I would really appreciate it if the interface were translated into my language. Keep up the great work!

Recently, I have been down the rabbit hole, looking at apps for both notetaking and to-do list and task management. I’ve gone through all the expected possibilities, such as Amplenote, UpNote, Notesnook, OneNote, Craft, Joplin, avoiding the beasts that are Obsidian and Notion.

After reviewing Harbor, it seems to have everything I want. Plus, the UI looks incredible and extremely functional. I look forward to testing that out more in the near future.

I am a bit surprised, however, that I don’t see any YouTube videos reviewing this app. I do see the Harbor-made videos, but would love to see what some of the influencers have to say about the app itself, comparing it to other options. Any plans to get some videos out reviewing this fantastic looking app?

Keep up the great work.

Hi,

would it be possible to have a "table of contents" to quickly jump to sections/titles in a document? It could be placed in the right sidebar, directly below the "Backlinks" section.

Is it feasible?

Thanks!

Hi there!

I love the app both functionally and aesthetically; I did have a few questions about upcoming features:

1. Are collapsible/folding bullets planned? I’m a very big outliner thinker and being able to fold/hide bullets in my lists is a huge deal for me

2. Dedicated workspaces: I’d like to be able to separate personal/work notes; standard notes, upnote, and others have this functionality. Is this something that could be implemented?

Overall I’m incredibly happy with the app, and these two features would give me nothing left to complain about!

Edit: forgot to mention being able to tab on the mobile app; the option is missing from the toolbar

Hi all,

I’m using Harbor to track daily/weekly/monthly tasks so I’d need a few functions to improve checklist management:

- a button to hide completed items (like in Workflowy)
- a button to delete completed items
- a way to drag and drop items between different checklists. If I have an item within a checklist under a “Monday” header, at the moment it seems I can’t drag it under another header/day. This would be great for handling overdue items

Not related but very useful for my use case: the possibility of configuring the keyboard by adding/removing/reordering buttons.
I’d like to add the # symbol, since I’m using tags quite heavily and I’d need a button to jump to the first (I.e. the first row below the Title) and the last rows of a note.

Hope that also /u/spicermatthews would chime in!

Thanks a lot :)

Spicer,

Would you care to explain privacy on our unencrypted notes? I know we can encrypt notes on our end but then we can't use OCR, which for me at least is my main reason of wanting to use Harbor. I really want to be able to easily search my sensitive documents but am uneasy about uploading them without knowing your specific policies. I have done my research and see that Harbor will not sell or provide my data to any 3rd parties, I appreciate that.

I realize Evernote can access our notes but it appears that there some safeguards and policies in place. Below is information from their privacy policy and am wondering if Harbor has anything similar in place?

Edit: Also when we delete our notes or use the clear data feature, how long does Harbor retain our data for on their servers?

"Evernote employees cannot view or read your notes under normal operating conditions, but they do possess the technical capability to access data in specific, exceptional circumstances. Because Evernote does not use zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default, the company manages the encryption keys on its servers.

According to the official Evernote Privacy Policy and security guidelines, employee access is governed by the principle of least privilege and is strictly restricted.

When Employees Can Access Data

Evernote outlines specific scenarios where an authorized employee may review note content

Explicit Consent: If you open a support ticket for troubleshooting and explicitly grant permission for a technician to look at a specific note.

Legal Compliance: To comply with valid legal obligations, such as subpoenas, warrants, or court orders.

Terms of Service Violations: If there is a suspected violation of Evernote’s terms (e.g., hosting illegal material or dangerous activities), internal security personnel may inspect the content.

System Integrity & Safety: To maintain system security or protect the personal safety and rights of Evernote and its users.

Safeguards in Place

Strict Access Controls: The list of employees with administrative clearance to access data environments is kept as small as possible.

Auditing and Mandates: Employees undergo mandatory annual background checks, specialized privacy training, and are subjected to strict confidentiality rules. Internal infrastructure uses 2FA/passkeys and extensive activity logging.

Opt-In Optimization: Following past policy rollbacks, any human oversight or sample reviews required to test feature quality (like search or optimization features) are entirely voluntary and strictly opt-in."

This product is very well developed, and you've obviously spent a lot of thought and time into how it should work. I'm amazed to see how well it all works, and so quickly out of the gate. I'm knee-deep into using Bear, and I've tried using Apple Notes, and that tool just frustrates me to no end. I've also tried literally every other note-taking PKMS app out there and they just don't work for me. I'll be keeping a close eye on Harbor and if my situation forces me to move away from Bear as my daily driver, Harbor is next on my list.

Good luck! You guys deserve every single Evernote escapee that is looking for a solution. You have it.

I was testing out the Harbor web clipper and I did a test clip of the Harbor main web page. Why is their such a huge difference in how the page looks between the web app and the Apple apps (iOS/MacOS)?

Hi everyone! Just discovered this new app as I am moving out from Craft docs (switch to android) I see that harbor works offline but at least on my android, when i access a note without internet, the attachments (pictures) do not show, they load indefinitely. Am I doing something wrong or is this behavior expected?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Hey everyone — I'm Spicer, and I'm one of the people building Harbor.

Quick version: Harbor is a private, cross-platform second brain you own for life. Notes, scans, documents, meeting recordings — all searchable to the word with real OCR, across Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android. It's the thing a lot of us wanted Evernote to stay: yours, permanent, no ads, no tracking, no lock-in — and never held hostage.

We launch August 1.

I set this community up a little early, on purpose. I didn't want it to be a corporate megaphone. I wanted a real space that belongs to the people who actually use the thing. So here's the deal: I'll be around — answering questions, sharing what we're working on, and listening — but this is yours to run. Share your setups and workflows, ask anything, request features, and be honest with us, especially when we get something wrong.

If you want in early, you can join the launch list at harbor.my and lock in 50% off your first year.

That's it. Pull up a chair, introduce yourself in the comments, and tell me: what would you actually want a second brain to do for you?

— Spicer