ENEX to Markdown converter

Evernote gives you exactly one way out, and it’s a file ending in .enex. Open one and you’ll find your notes buried somewhere in a few hundred thousand lines of XML, with every photo and PDF you ever saved expanded into walls of base64 text.

The tool above turns that into Markdown. Drop the file in, get a ZIP back.

What you get

One .md file per note, named after the note. Inside each one:

• The note body, converted from Evernote’s markup to Markdown — headings, bold and italic, links, lists, checkboxes, tables, code blocks and quotes.
• YAML front matter with the title, the created and updated timestamps, the tags, the source URL, and the author if the note has one. Turn it off if you don’t want it.
• Attachments unpacked into an attachments/ folder, with each note linking to its own files. Images render inline; everything else becomes a link.

Checkboxes come out as - [ ] and - [x], so a task list stays a task list in anything that reads Markdown.

What it can’t carry

Every converter has a list like this. Most of them don’t publish it.

Notebook names. They aren’t in the file. Evernote records the notebook only as the filename of the export, so nothing inside an .enex says which notebook a note came from. If your notebooks matter, export them one at a time — then each file is named after its notebook and you can sort them out afterwards.

Note-to-note links. Evernote’s internal links point at a note id inside your account, using an evernote:// address that means nothing outside it. They’re flattened to plain text. Nobody can do better than that; the target simply isn’t in the export.

Encrypted text. It comes out locked, because that’s how Evernote exports it. Unlock those blocks in Evernote first and re-export.

Merged table cells. Markdown tables can’t express them. Rows with merged cells come through as plain lines rather than a quietly broken table.

Saved searches and note history. Neither is in an ENEX file. Tasks are a nearer miss: current Evernote does write a <task> block into the export, with the due date and status, but there’s no agreed way to put that in a Markdown file, so ours doesn’t try. We wrote up everything inside one if you want the full picture.

The text inside your scans. This is the one people find out about later, so it’s worth saying plainly. Evernote reads the words in your photos and PDFs and lets you search them. That searchable text is generated on Evernote’s servers and is not written into the export. Your PDF of a 2019 receipt converts perfectly — and then it’s just a PDF, findable only if you remember what you called it.

That last one isn’t a limitation of this tool. It’s a limitation of Markdown, which has nowhere to put it.

Why it runs in your browser

Search for an ENEX converter and most of what comes back asks you to upload the file.

Think about what’s actually in that file. Your bank statements. Your medical letters. A decade of half-finished thinking. Uploading it to a site you found ten seconds ago, so a stranger’s server can run a text transform you could run yourself, is a bad trade.

So this page has no server. The conversion happens in your tab, on your machine, in two JavaScript files that contain no network calls whatsoever. Load the page, turn off your wi-fi, convert the file. It works. That’s not a promise, it’s something you can check in about five seconds, and you should check it on any tool that makes this claim — including this one.

We also wrote the ZIP writer and the hashing by hand rather than pulling in libraries, for the same reason. Both are available on npm and both would have been faster to use. Neither was worth putting somebody else’s code in front of your notes.

If you’re moving to Harbor instead

Fair warning that we’re not neutral here: we make a notes app, and you’re on our site.

If Markdown is where you want to land — Obsidian, a git repo, a folder you’ll still be able to read in 2046 — use the tool above and go. It’s genuinely free and it isn’t crippled to push you somewhere else.

But if you’re converting to Markdown because you need to get out of Evernote and Markdown looked like the only exit, there’s a shorter path. Harbor imports the .enex directly — notebooks, tags, attachments and dates in one step — and the text inside your scans gets read again on the way in, so the receipts and letters stay searchable instead of becoming files you have to remember. We timed a real 1,000-note migration rather than estimating it.

And if you’re leaving over the pricing, it’s worth reading what everyone else costs before you commit to anything, ours included.

Getting the export out of Evernote first

You need the desktop app — the web version can’t do it, and the mobile apps can’t either. Select your notes, then File → Export Notes, and choose ENEX.

Evernote caps a selection-based export at 100 notes at a time. The limit applies to selected notes, not to notebooks, so exporting notebook by notebook sidesteps it entirely. Our complete export guide covers that and the command-line route, which is what we’d reach for with thousands of notes.

Do the export before you cancel anything. An expired account is a much harder problem than a boring afternoon of exporting.