Harbor vs Evernote

We make Harbor. This is our page about our own product, so read it the way you’d read any company comparing itself to the thing it wants you to leave. What we can do is show our work: every Evernote figure below came off Evernote’s own pricing and plan-comparison pages on the date at the top, and we’ve given Evernote its own section for the things it does that we don’t do at all.

If we only listed our wins, you’d have no reason to believe the wins.

Now the number that matters.

Both apps cost $99 a year. Evernote’s $99 stops at 1,000 notes. Ours doesn’t stop.

What each one costs

Evernote’s annual prices work out to $8.25 and $20.83 a month. Paying monthly instead costs $14.99 and $24.99 — a 45% premium on Starter, which is steep enough to be worth knowing before you click.

Here’s the comparison nobody makes, because it’s the one that stings:

To get past those ceilings at Evernote you move to Advanced, and the price goes to $249.99 a year. That’s the real shape of it: $99 versus $249.99 for the same “my notes don’t hit a wall” feeling.

A thousand notes sounds like a lot until you remember what Evernote was sold as for eighteen years — the place you put everything. Ten years of receipts, clipped articles and photographed paperwork goes past 1,000 without trying.

Where Evernote beats us

Three things, and none of them is close.

Evernote has a built-in AI and we have none. As of today its AI Assistant, Semantic Search, AI Transcribe, AI Edit and AI Cleanup are ticked on every plan, including Free. Harbor has no assistant, no chatbot, nothing reading your library. That’s a decision — you already pay for Claude or ChatGPT, and they’re better than anything we’d bolt on — but a decision is still an absence. If you want to ask your notes a question inside the notes app, Evernote does that today and we don’t. Here’s our full reasoning, and you’re allowed to disagree with it.

Evernote does teams and we don’t. Shared spaces, a centralized admin console, user activity logs, SSO, a Slack integration, per-seat plans from $10 a month. Harbor has no shared editing, no inviting someone into a notebook, no comments. You can publish a note as a public read-only link, and that’s the whole sharing story. Harbor is a personal tool on purpose. If you need a team workspace, we’re not it.

Evernote connects to your calendar. Evernote Calendar, plus Google and Microsoft calendar connections — one on Free, five on paid. Harbor has tasks and reminders, and no calendar integration at all.

One more, smaller but fair: Evernote publishes its free-plan limits to the number and we don’t yet. 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device, 1 GB. Ours is “a usage allowance” while we settle on the figures, and vague is worse than stingy. We’ll publish them.

And Evernote is eighteen years old. There’s a decade of forum answers, templates and third-party workflows out there for it, and roughly none for us.

Where we beat Evernote

Native apps, not one web app in a wrapper. Harbor’s Mac app is SwiftUI, Windows is native with x64 and ARM64 builds, Android is Kotlin, and iPhone and iPad share one universal app with widgets, Siri Shortcuts, document scanning, Apple Pencil and Face ID lock. There’s a full offline-first web app too, which is also how you run Harbor on Linux. Evernote ships one Electron app to the desktop.

Handwriting, and audio you can search. Both apps read text inside images and PDFs — see the next section, Evernote is genuinely good here. Harbor also OCRs handwriting, so a photographed journal page or a recipe in someone’s hand becomes searchable. Honest limit: neat print reads well, everyday cursive does respectably, a hurried scrawl is a coin flip. Harbor also records audio into a note and transcribes it when you press the button — speakers labeled, transcript searchable like typed text, no per-minute meter.

One plan, and a price promise in writing. No Starter-versus-Advanced decision tree, nothing moving behind a higher tier next year, and a written promise: no increase for three years, then capped at 10% a year. Evernote repriced in November 2025, which is why most people reading this page are reading it. The ten-year price history is here if you want the receipts, and the timeline of what Bending Spoons did after the acquisition if you want the reason.

An open API on the plan you’re already on. Harbor has a documented REST API with an OpenAPI spec, a real harbor CLI, and an MCP server so Claude or ChatGPT can work in your notes. All of it on the one $99 plan. Evernote has an MCP connector too — genuinely good, in beta, and worth saying so — but it’s not on Free, so the cheapest way to reach it is $99 a year on a plan capped at 1,000 notes. Evernote’s own developer site now lists its legacy API as Deprecated.

If you stop paying, you can still read your notes. A lapsed Harbor account goes read-only: every note readable, export and delete always available. Evernote drops you to 50 notes, 1 notebook and 1 device, and the rest sits behind the paywall.

Can either one read your scans?

We used to say OCR was the thing Evernote made you pay for. That stopped being true and we’re not going to keep saying it. Evernote’s Free plan includes image and document search, in their own words on their own pricing page, alongside offline mode and PDF annotations. Good. More apps should.

What’s left isn’t the feature, it’s the ceiling around it. Evernote Free will OCR 50 notes. Starter will OCR 1,000. If your archive is scanned paper, the cap is the constraint, not the search.

Moving your notes across

Harbor reads Evernote’s own .enex export, so the move works. What survives:

• Notebooks — each .enex file arrives as its own notebook, named after the file
• Tags, applied to the right notes
• Note content, including checklists and formatting
• Attachments — PDFs, images, scans, whatever’s in there
• Original created and updated dates
• Web clips, with their source URLs intact

Then Harbor runs OCR across the attachments in the background, which is the part that makes an old archive feel different: ten years of scans you could never search suddenly answer to a search box.

What doesn’t survive isn’t about Harbor — it’s about the file format, and no app can rescue it:

• Notebook stacks. There’s no stack field in ENEX at all. Your notebooks arrive ungrouped; drag them back once.
• Nested tags arrive flat. Harbor’s tags nest three deep, so you can re-parent them.
• Note-to-note links are evernote:/// URLs that only work inside Evernote. They survive as text and go nowhere.
• Note history. Evernote doesn’t put past versions in an export, so your version history starts from import day.
• Saved searches and reminders. Neither travels in ENEX.

The export step has its own traps — Evernote’s desktop-only export and the silent 100-note selection limit are the two that catch everyone. We wrote those up in the complete Evernote export guide, and the Harbor side is at Import Evernote into Harbor.

Encryption

Neither app encrypts your whole library by default, and anyone telling you otherwise about either one hasn’t checked.

Evernote has in-note encryption for selected text, on Mac and Windows only, and not on the Free plan. It’s a way to hide a password inside a note, not a way to hold a library.

Harbor has optional zero-knowledge encryption you can turn on per note or per notebook. We hold ciphertext and can’t read it. That’s the real trade, and it cuts both ways: an encrypted note can’t be OCR’d, can’t be transcribed, can’t be shared as a link, and can’t be searched by its contents. We wrote about why that trade is unavoidable rather than pretending we’d solved it.

If encryption-by-default is what you’re after, honestly, neither of us is your app.

Platforms

Both have a web clipper. Harbor’s covers Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari.

So which one

Stay on Evernote if you want the AI, or you’re not alone in there. The assistant, semantic search and transcription are on every plan now, including Free, and if you actually use them that’s worth real money. If you share notebooks with colleagues, need an admin console, or run your calendar out of your notes app, Evernote does those and Harbor doesn’t do any of them. That’s not a hedge, it’s just true.

Come to Harbor if your notes are yours and there are a lot of them. One plan at $99 a year with no note ceiling, no device ceiling, native apps on five platforms, OCR that reads handwriting, an open API and CLI on the plan you’re already on, and a price we’ve promised in writing not to move for three years. Against Evernote Starter at the same $99 you get past 1,000 notes; against Advanced you save $150 a year.

The honest test is the one we’d apply ourselves: open Evernote and look at how many notes you have. Under a thousand, with a colleague in there and a calendar you rely on — stay. Over a thousand, alone, with a decade of scans you’d like to be able to search — that’s the library we built this for.

Still shopping? The full alternatives roundup covers eight other apps, UpNote vs Evernote is the $39.99-once option, and the Evernote alternative page is the short version of everything here.

Sources

Every Evernote figure on this page was read on September 20, 2026:

• Plan limits and feature availability — evernote.com/compare-plans
• Prices, monthly and annual — evernote.com/pricing
• Legacy API status and the MCP connector — dev.evernote.com

Harbor’s own figures come from our pricing page and our help centre.

Prices change and features move — Evernote has moved several this year alone. If something here is out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it. The date at the top is the promise.