The first thing that a good long-term research app needs to do is easily capture the content you want to put into it. Our criteria for the best Evernote replacement seeks to capture not only the list of features required for such an app, but also seeks to capture the long-term nature of the subject. From our point of view, long-term research needs to last not just years, but decades. Long-term research is exactly that: long-term. With apps and services evolving, devolving, being introduced, and being shutdown, nailing down an app with a wide range of features that will be here in the long-term is difficult to do.

Long-term research is a tricky topic, especially when considering it from the ever-changing landscape of the digital world. My personal research database has many thousands of entries in it ranging across file types from web archives to Markdown to academic research PDFs to audio and video. Coming from a formal Psychology background, I love APA formatting, so I want the data I need to cite things properly. I write for a number of sites including The Sweet Setup and regularly go back to my research to find articles, PDFs, audio, and video to use as citations in my books and other posts. I even had a short stint writing my own web-based research catalog for the 60+ books I read in a year. I’ve used Evernote, Bear, DEVONthink, Zotero, Zim Wiki, and others over the years to try and get exactly what I wanted. I’m a bit of a research maniac and have been looking for the perfect research app for years. This is a category that Evernote once ruled, but we think our picks have several advantages over what Evernote offers today. Whether you’re researching a topic for school, writing a book, planning a big purchase, or collecting ideas for a remodel, we think Keep It and DEVONthink have you covered.

We’ve used all of that work and discussion to inform our recommendation for the best app for long-term research on iOS, and specifically, the iPad. Over the last number of weeks, we’ve looked at a bunch of great note-taking and research apps.

Evernote replacement app