Programs like Evernote have huge limitations when using the app’s free plan, so finding a free, compliant alternative is possible thanks to Elephant.
The project started 6 years ago when the first commit was made on GitHub and since then it has not stopped updating and adding new content that the community is asking for, although its objective is to always maintain simplicity in both functionality and design, avoiding the functionality overload, to keep that timeless classic design that the developer has given you.
A free cross-platform application
The desktop application has very interesting functions to be a completely free application and is focused on all those people who want to keep their notes for themselves privately locally, although it also has the option of integrating it with Dropbox.
By not using any type of database to save the notes, they are easily saved in files and folders where they are saved in plain text. Although it supports a basic type of encryption with a password for our notes, its use is somewhat strange, since it does it directly to the clipboard, so the user is in charge and responsible for keeping the data safely copied somewhere (and remember the password) or you will lose them on the clipboard when rebooting the system or you will not be able to recover the information if you forget the password.
Remember the password of what you encrypt or integrate it with the cloud for that extra security in the event of a loss of data without the need to encrypt the information.
Based on simplicity but with enough functionality
It has a very classic interface and it will remain that way, so it will never be modernized and it will avoid disorienting users with radical changes to graphic interfaces, since its design is designed with the aim of staying classic and timeless.
In it you can create new notes easily and quickly as well as delete them and it has the ability to synchronize them if we have integrated our application into Dropbox.
It allows the use of Tags to be able to quickly find our notes, since it includes an integrated search engine to carry out the search.
Use notebooks or notebooks to organize different notes and to have them arranged so that it is easier to find and access them when necessary, apart from the search function that also works really well.
It has a functionality to be able to move our notes although we will have to do it from the menu, since it does not have implemented Drag & Drop functionality. It also counts the words although they could have been implemented directly in the graphical interface without it being one more menu option, but since you want to keep the interface as clean as possible, it is understood that this functionality is integrated into a menu.
It allows the use of various styles in the text to take notes highlighting the most important, so we will have some notes with great visual richness.
An “application” for mobile
It has a web app for the mobile phone that is responsible for making a connection to Dropbox so that we can access our files online if we have integrated it to have our files in the cloud and always available anywhere and anytime.
What do we like and what do we not like?
Every program has its pros and cons and we will explain to you after using it what we liked the most and what we miss compared to other free alternatives on the market.
We like
We love free software , it is a pretty good application that performs its functions without frills and offers us all the basic functionality we need at zero cost and we can use it on all desktop operating systems and on our phones with a web app.
Integrate Apache Tika to extract metadata and text from millions of supported files.
Great ability to customize fonts and a multitude of configuration options within the application.
Integrated HTML support is more than welcome functionality.
We do not like it
Mainly still in development, it is unfinished . At the moment integrations with other services than Dropbox would be missing, since they are famous for having lost files from their clients in the past, so an integration with a personal cloud with OwnCloud would be great.
It lacks support for multiple languages and at the moment it is only available in English, so if it is not your strong suit, it really is an application that will not convince you.
There are much more powerful and highly functional free alternatives and they do not require having to install Java to use them.
We don’t like how sub-windows like options don’t stay above modal in the main app.
Encryption is a bit basic and not very intuitive.
We miss the Drag & Drop functionality.
100% free download
It is downloaded directly from the website and is only 85 MB, which makes it a lightweight application that is compatible with Linux, Windows and MacOS but requires Java 8 or higher installed to be used, since it is cross-platform thanks Because it is written in Java and requires having it installed on the computer in order to run it.
The latest version is 67 and it was released a week ago where small fixes were made in the operation of the application.
