How angry are people at their notes apps? We counted.

In December 2023, about half of everything posted to r/Evernote was about the price or about leaving. Evernote had just cut its free plan from 100,000 notes to 50. Earlier that year it had raised Personal to $129.99 a year, its first price increase in almost seven years.

We make a notes app, Harbor, and that month is a big part of why it exists. So we wanted to know: is anyone else that angry now?

We counted. About 68,000 posts from 22 notes-app communities on Reddit. About 24,500 App Store and Google Play reviews of 21 apps. Around 2,200 posts on X and Bluesky. Most of it runs from May 2025 to October 2026, and how we did it is at the bottom.

A word about us first. Every app here is one we compete with, and we’ll say what we think at the end. We’ve tried to count fairly anyway, and where an app’s users are happy, we say so.

Last checked: October 29, 2026.

Nobody’s as angry as Evernote users were

To compare apps, we built a scale. Evernote at its 2023–24 worst is 100. Every other app gets a number for how angry its users are, how many of them there are, whether they’re actually leaving, and whether the press piled on.

Nothing comes close. The nearest is Notion, at roughly 25 to 35, about level with Evernote today.

Goodnotes had the biggest blow-up of the stretch. Its September 2025 relaunch brought a redesign, new plans and a $9.99-a-month AI add-on, and r/GoodNotes hit 950 posts the next month, about three and a half times normal. It’s cooled since.

Everyone else is under 25.

Fewer Evernote users, just as angry

There are far fewer of them talking. r/Evernote gets about 70 posts a month now, against 344 in December 2023. Part of that is moderators moving price and “I’m leaving” posts into megathreads. Part of it is that people left. The Wall Street Journal worked out from Bending Spoons’ IPO filing that Evernote’s users fell 48% between 2022 and 2025.

The ones still posting are furious.

77% of the Evernote App Store reviews we collected from the last six months gave it one or two stars, the worst of any major notes app we checked. On Google Play it’s 81%. And on the App Store it’s getting worse: about three stars a month in the year to May, about two over the summer, and 1.4 in September and October.

(Ignore the 4.4 stars on the App Store listing. Nearly every notes app shows 4.4 to 4.8, because apps ask happy users to rate them. Written reviews are where people say what they think.)

It’s mostly about money. Two-thirds of Evernote’s one- and two-star App Store reviews since May 2025 mention the price. On X and Bluesky, 74 of the 100 Evernote complaints we read did. Each person meets the new pricing at their own renewal, where a $129.99 plan becomes $249.99, or $99 with a 1,000-note cap. (Every Evernote price change is here.) So the anger doesn’t spike like it did in 2023. It just doesn’t stop.

The new complaint is AI

Price is still the biggest complaint about notes apps, and most of it is Evernote’s. The other one is newer, and it’s turning up at the apps that have pushed it hardest.

Here’s how often AI comes up in each app’s one- and two-star App Store reviews since May 2025:

Notion is the clearest case. AI is in 31% of its angry App Store reviews, second only to bugs, and on Google Play it’s the top complaint.

Some of that is AI showing up all over the app. Some is the bill. In May 2025, Notion’s Business plan came with unlimited AI. In August 2026 that got a usage cap. On November 2, existing workspaces move to credits. And people on old discounted plans, including some who bought Notion’s old AI add-on, are posting notices that from their next renewal, between December and February, they’ll pay the $24-a-month list price. One had been paying $11.99.

To be fair to Notion: if you use it alone on the free plan, none of the billing changes touch you, and you still get unlimited pages. Its users’ anger is real, but it’s a fraction of Evernote’s. About 5% of r/Notion posts now talk about leaving, up from about 3% in mid-2025. At Evernote’s peak, the same search found 16% to 31% on r/Evernote.

It isn’t only Notion:

• OneNote. The fastest-growing topic is Copilot. Posts about it and other AI make up 8% of r/OneNote in the last six months, nearly double the rate across the whole stretch.
• Goodnotes started selling unlimited AI as a $9.99-a-month pass on top of its plans.
• Evernote reviewers keep saying the price went up for AI they never asked for. One put it simply: “Not everything needs [AI]. Like a note taking app for example.”
• Mem’s Pro plan used to be $12 a month for unlimited notes. Now it’s $29 a month for 100 new notes a month.

There’s another AI story in the data, and it points somewhere else. On YouTube, the biggest “I quit Notion” and “I quit Obsidian” videos mostly aren’t about switching apps. Two-thirds or more of their views go to one idea: replace your notes system with Claude or ChatGPT working from a folder of files.

Plenty of people like their notes app

Most notes apps have happy users, and it’s worth saying so.

• Apple Notes. The most-upvoted post in its Reddit community in 18 months is about trying everything and always coming back to Apple Notes. Its complaints are real (lost notes, no version history, no Windows app), but they show up one person at a time.
• Obsidian. About 0.4% of r/ObsidianMD posts are about leaving. Posts about arriving outnumber them three and a half to one.
• Bear. More people post about arriving than leaving, and plenty of the arrivals came from Evernote.
• UpNote. A lot of Evernote leavers ended up there, and they mostly sound glad they did.

When people do leave, they mostly go to Obsidian. Across the Reddit posts we counted, people moving from Notion to Obsidian outnumbered every other move, with 80 mentions. OneNote to Obsidian was 19, and Evernote to Obsidian 17. On X and Bluesky, people leaving Evernote named Obsidian 37 times and Joplin 22. People leaving Notion named Obsidian 43 times, and nothing else more than three.

If you like plain files and don’t mind some setup, Obsidian’s a good pick. We’d tell you that even though we’re after the same people.

What we think

Here’s where we stop counting and start having an opinion.

More and more notes apps are turning into AI products with a meter on them. We understand why. AI costs money every time someone uses it, so somebody has to pay. But the people paying are often the ones who just wanted to write things down.

Harbor has no AI assistant built in, and there’s no AI line on the bill. (We do use AI for a few small jobs, like suggesting a note’s title. Here’s how that works.) If you want AI on your notes, connect the one you already pay for, ChatGPT or Claude or anything else, through our MCP server and API. That’s where those YouTube videos are pointing anyway. A lot of people want their own AI reading their notes, not another one sold to them inside the app.

Harbor is $99 a year, and we’ve put it in writing that the price won’t change for three years and won’t rise more than 10% a year after that. If you’re leaving Evernote, here’s how we compare to everywhere else, Obsidian included.

A notes app’s job is to keep your notes. We’d like to keep it that simple.

How we counted

• Reddit. Every post from May 2025 to October 2026 in 22 notes-app communities, about 68,000 posts, pulled from the Arctic Shift archive of Reddit. For the yardstick, every r/Evernote post since January 2023, 5,719 in all. We also searched two general app communities, r/macapps and part of r/androidapps, for people moving between apps, and read the comment threads on the biggest posts.
• App stores. The newest App Store reviews from the US, UK, Canada and Australia for 21 apps, and the newest Google Play reviews for 11 of them. About 24,500 reviews written since May 2025. Apple’s feed caps how many reviews it hands out, so these are the reviews we could collect, not every review written. Every app’s reviews were sorted with the same keyword lists, so a review that mentions AI counts as mentioning AI, whatever it says about it.
• X and Bluesky. About 2,200 posts since May 2025, each one read and labeled.
• Everything else. Hacker News, official forums, YouTube, and each company’s own pricing pages and release notes.
• The scale. We scored each app on how angry its users are, how many of them, whether they’re leaving, and whether the press piled on, with evidence for each score. Then we blended those into one number against Evernote’s 2023–24 peak. It leans toward how many people are angry over how loud they are. It’s a judgment built on counts, not a measurement, so trust the order more than the decimals.
• Limits. Keyword counts are crude. Everything is in English. Communities moderate differently: r/Evernote moves price posts into megathreads and r/ObsidianMD removes app promotion, which changes what we could see.
• The counts. Every number here comes from a count in the data, and we’ve kept them. If you want the counts behind anything, email hello@harbor.my.

Last checked: October 29, 2026. Prices and plans in this category change often. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us at hello@harbor.my and we’ll fix it and re-date this line.