The best Evernote alternatives, compared honestly

Most “best Evernote alternatives” articles are written by people who never opened the apps. You can tell, because they list features and never mention limits — and the limits are the entire story when you are moving a decade of notes somewhere new.

So this page is organised around one question: if you switch, what do you lose?

Every price and every cap below comes from the vendor’s own pricing page, help documentation or public issue tracker, linked at the bottom and re-checked on the date at the top of this page.

First, the thing you are leaving

Evernote today, checked on evernote.com:

The 1,000-note ceiling on Starter is what pushes people out. If you have used Evernote seriously for ten years you are well past it, which means the $99 plan does not exist for you and the real number is $249.99. We traced every price change back to 2016 separately, and what Bending Spoons did after buying it in more detail.

The short version

• Cheapest escape that still syncs everywhere: Joplin, free, open source, syncs through your own cloud storage.
• Best free tier outright: OneNote — unlimited notes and text-in-image search, which Evernote charges for.
• Best if you never want another subscription: UpNote, $39.99 once.
• Best if you are all-Apple and want zero setup: Apple Notes, already installed, and its search reads handwriting.
• Best for privacy absolutism: Standard Notes or Notesnook, both end-to-end encrypted and open source.
• Worst fit for a scan-heavy archive: Notion, whose free plan stops at 5 MB per file.

What each one costs, and where the free tier stops

The free tier is where the trap usually sits, so it gets its own column.

Three of those deserve calling out, because they are the ones people discover a week after switching.

UpNote’s free tier stops at 50 notes — the identical trap Evernote sprang in December 2023. Standard Notes’ free tier is plain text only, so rich formatting and folders both sit behind the $90/yr plan; arriving from Evernote with formatted notes and notebooks, you hit both walls on day one. Bear’s free tier has no sync, which makes it a single-device notepad until you pay.

And the one that cuts our way: UpNote is $39.99 once and yours forever. Harbor is a subscription. If never paying again is what matters most to you, buy UpNote — that is a real answer to a real complaint, and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this page worthless.

Can it actually read your scans?

This is the column that matters most for an Evernote archive and the one almost nobody publishes, because Evernote’s OCR is the feature people forget they rely on until it is gone. Searching for a word that only exists inside a photographed receipt is not a nice-to-have when you have ten years of them.

Google Keep needs its own sentence, because it is easy to overstate. Keep’s “Grab image text” pulls text out of an image and drops it into the note, and it handles handwriting well. But it is a manual action you run on one image at a time — not a background index. You cannot search across all your notes for a word that only exists inside a picture. That is a different feature from what Evernote gave you, and several roundups get this wrong.

“Not documented” is doing honest work in that table. It means the vendor does not say either way on their public pages, so we will not guess. Vendors reliably advertise features they have and almost never publish the ones they lack, so read a blank as “probably not, but we have not confirmed it.”

Getting your notes out, and what does not survive

Before comparing importers, one fact that is nobody’s fault but shapes every row: an ENEX file does not contain your notebook name. The name lives in the filename. Export notebook by notebook and your structure rebuilds itself; export everything in one go and it lands as a single undifferentiated pile.

Three things are not in Evernote’s export format at all, which means no app in this comparison can bring them across — not Joplin, not Obsidian, not Harbor:

• Notebook stacks — your top-level grouping flattens
• Tag hierarchy — parent and child tags arrive as a flat list
• Note-to-note links — they are evernote:/// URLs and survive only as dead text

Anyone promising otherwise has not tried it. Our complete export guide covers the mechanics, including the silent 100-note selection limit.

Against that, what the importers claim:

Obsidian’s row is the one to read twice. The import genuinely works and it preserves creation dates, which several apps do not. But keeping your notebook structure requires renaming files to a magic pattern, and keeping tag hierarchy requires reorganising your tags inside Evernote before you export. That is a real migration project, not a button.

Which platforms

If you are moving off Evernote because it worked everywhere, Apple Notes and Bear are a step down however good they are. Both are Apple-only.

The apps, one at a time

Microsoft OneNote — the strongest free tier here by a distance, and the most direct shot at Evernote: unlimited notebooks and pages, with text-in-image search included free, which is precisely what Evernote puts behind a paywall. Microsoft’s own documentation says OneNote finds words in “text, handwriting, pictures — even audio and video recordings”, though it also warns that newly added images can take 24 to 48 hours to become searchable, and that copying text out of a picture works in the desktop apps rather than OneNote for the web. The honest catches are 5 GB of OneDrive shared with everything else in your Microsoft account, a 2 GB ceiling per notebook, no end-to-end encryption, and the general gravity of a Microsoft account. If price is the reason you are leaving, look here first.

Joplin — free, open source, and the only app in this set where you can avoid a vendor entirely by syncing through your own Dropbox or WebDAV. Its Evernote importer is the best-documented of the lot, right down to admitting it drops Evernote’s OCR data. It has OCR of its own, free, though it is off until you enable it and its docs are candid that handwriting is not supported. The trade is polish: it is a functional app, not a beautiful one.

Obsidian — your notes become Markdown files on your disk, which is the strongest possible answer to “what if this company disappears.” Free for personal use, $4/month if you want their sync. The Evernote import works but demands preparation, and there is no native OCR. Best for people who want to own files and are willing to assemble their own setup.

Apple Notes — free, already installed, and its search reads handwriting and scanned documents, which is genuinely excellent and costs nothing. It is also Apple-only, has no native Evernote importer, and lives inside a 5 GB free iCloud allowance shared with your device backups. For an all-Apple household that mostly wants notes to work, it is a serious answer.

UpNote — $39.99 once, unlimited notes, on every major platform including Linux. Nothing else here offers that combination. The free tier stops at 50 notes and attachments are Premium, so treat it as a paid app with a trial. OCR is not documented, which matters if your archive is scans.

Notesnook — end-to-end encrypted by default, fully open source including the server, and unlimited notes even on the free plan. The free storage is 50 MB a month with a 10 MB file cap, so it suits text more than documents. Its OCR request was closed as not planned, which makes it a poor destination for a scan-heavy Evernote library and a strong one for private writing.

Standard Notes — the privacy purist’s option, end-to-end encrypted on every tier including free. Read the tiers carefully: the free plan is plain text only, and rich text, markdown and folders all live in the $90/yr Productivity plan. Coming from Evernote, that is not really a free option.

Bear — the best-looking app in this comparison, and the only one to win an Apple Design Award. Pro is $29.99/yr and includes OCR across photos and PDFs plus document scanning. The free tier has no sync at all, and it is Apple-only. Worth it if you live on Apple hardware and care how writing feels.

Notion — a genuinely powerful workspace, and a poor archive. The 5 MB free upload cap and 7-day page history are the wrong shape for a decade of scanned documents. If your Evernote is mostly written notes and project pages rather than files, it is a reasonable move.

Google Keep — fast, free, and fine for capture. It has no real notebooks (labels only), thin attachment support, weak export, no Evernote importer, and its image-text feature extracts rather than indexes. It is a sticky-note app, not a replacement for an archive.

Where Harbor fits, honestly

We make Harbor, so weigh this section accordingly.

Harbor is a private, cross-platform second brain: notes, documents, scans and recordings in one place, with OCR across all of it — including handwriting — on every plan rather than a paid tier. It runs natively on macOS, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android, with a CLI and an MCP server so you can connect your own AI instead of being sold one. Encryption is available per note. The Evernote import is one step and keeps notebooks, tags, attachments and your original created and updated dates.

One plan, $9.99 a month or $99 a year, everything included. And a written price promise: no increase for three years, then capped at 10% a year. No other app in this comparison publishes one, which matters when the reason you are reading this page is a price change somebody else made.

Where Harbor loses, plainly:

• UpNote is $39.99 once. We are a subscription. If that is your deciding factor, they win.
• OneNote, Joplin, Obsidian and Apple Notes are free. We are not.
• Obsidian, Joplin, Notesnook and Standard Notes are open source. We are not.
• Apple Notes is already on your phone. We are another app to install.
• We cannot recover your notebook stacks, tag hierarchy or note links either. Nobody can.

If you want to try it against your own library, the import page explains exactly what carries over, and we timed and screenshotted a full migration rather than asserting it works.

How this comparison was made, and its limits

Everything above comes from each vendor’s own public material — pricing pages, help documentation and, in Notesnook’s case, their public issue tracker. Every figure was re-checked on the date shown at the top of this page.

We have not run the same note library through all ten apps, and nowhere on this page do we claim to have. Where a vendor does not document something, the table says “not documented” instead of guessing. That is a real limit: vendors publish what they have and stay quiet about what they lack, so a blank is suggestive but not proof.

Prices and limits on this page change often, and a stale comparison is worse than none. If you find something out of date or wrong, tell us at hello@harbor.my and we will correct it and re-date the line at the top.

Sources. Evernote pricing from evernote.com/compare-plans · Obsidian pricing and Evernote import docs · Notesnook pricing and the OCR request closed as not planned · Standard Notes plans · Bear pricing · UpNote pricing · Notion pricing · Joplin plans, import and export docs and OCR docs · Apple Notes search and iCloud storage from Apple Support · OneNote text-in-picture search from Microsoft Support and Find OneNote notes, pages or tabs; storage limits from Microsoft’s support answers.