Joplin vs Evernote

A word about us before anything else. We make Harbor, a notes app. We’re a competitor to both apps on this page, and we’ve put Harbor in the tables on the same terms as everyone else so you can see where it loses. Every Joplin figure below comes from Joplin’s own site and documentation, read on the date at the top; the Evernote figures come from Evernote’s plan page, read on September 20.

Joplin costs nothing. Evernote costs $99 a year to keep 1,000 notes, or $249.99 a year to keep all of them.

That’s not a trick. Joplin is open source, the apps are free on every platform, and it’ll sync through the Dropbox or OneDrive you already pay for. What it asks for instead of money is a little of your time. Whether that’s a good trade depends on what kind of person you are with software, and this page is mostly about that.

What each one costs

Joplin Cloud is priced in euros and it’s the only thing Joplin sells. You don’t need it. What it adds is a sync service that just works, a web app, publishing a note to a public link, and — on Pro — sharing a notebook with someone and emailing notes in.

Read the storage caps if you do buy it. Basic allows 10 MB per note or attachment and 2 GB in total. That’s a lot of text and not many scanned PDFs. Pro raises it to 200 MB per file and 30 GB.

Evernote’s two paid plans work out to $8.25 and $20.83 a month. Evernote Free connects one device. Joplin free connects every device you own, forever. On price alone this isn’t a contest.

What “free” costs you instead

Here’s the honest version of Joplin, from someone who’d like you to buy something else.

You pick where your notes sync, and you set it up. That’s the point — Joplin was built so you’re never tied to one company, Evernote included — but it means a settings screen, an account with a storage provider, and a first sync that can run overnight on a big library. Evernote has none of that. You sign in.

The desktop app does the heavy lifting. OCR runs there, not on your phone. The AI features, semantic search and MCP server are desktop-only. Even the web clipper talks to the desktop app, so if Joplin isn’t open on your computer, clipping doesn’t work. If most of your notes start on a phone, that shape matters.

Your notes become Markdown. Joplin stores notes as Markdown, which is plain text you can open in anything for the rest of your life. We think that’s a real strength. It’s also why an Evernote note with colours, font sizes and careful formatting comes across looking plainer. There’s a rich-text editor for people who never want to see the Markdown, but the formatting underneath is simpler than Evernote’s.

None of this is a flaw. It’s a different deal: you give up some convenience and you get software nobody can reprice, sell, or shut off. A lot of people leaving Evernote are leaving for exactly that reason.

The import, in detail

Joplin reads ENEX, Evernote’s export format, and its import documentation is candid about what changes:

• Colours, font sizes and fonts are dropped from complex notes when they’re converted to Markdown. Plain text, bold, italics, lists, links and tables survive. If the formatting matters, Joplin can import the ENEX as HTML instead and keep it.
• Note-to-note links are guessed from titles. ENEX doesn’t record which note a link points to, so Joplin matches on the title. Two notes with the same name, or a link whose text doesn’t match its target, and the link keeps opening Evernote.
• Evernote’s scan text doesn’t come across. Joplin re-creates it with its own OCR once the import is done — for printed text, anyway.

The notebook problem is handled well. Export each Evernote notebook as its own ENEX file, import the folder, and Joplin makes one notebook per file. Nesting has to be redone by hand.

Getting the files out of Evernote is the hard part, not getting them into Joplin — the desktop app has a quiet 100-note selection limit, among other things. The complete Evernote export guide covers it. And if you want your notes as Markdown files without committing to any app yet, our free ENEX to Markdown converter does it in your browser, without uploading anything.

Can either one read your scans?

Joplin’s OCR is good and it’s genuinely private: it runs on your own computer, offline, and nothing is uploaded to read it. It’ll even turn a scanned PDF into one you can select and copy text from. Their docs are straight about the limits — reliable on printed text and screenshots, hit-and-miss on photos, and no handwriting.

Evernote reads handwriting, on every plan. If your archive is photographed whiteboards, handwritten recipes or a decade of meeting notebooks, that’s the row that decides it.

Privacy and encryption

Joplin can encrypt everything end to end. Every note, notebook, tag and attachment, on every app, so your sync provider — Dropbox, Joplin Cloud, anyone — holds data it can’t read. You turn it on yourself, on one device first, and the password can’t be recovered. That’s what real encryption looks like and they’re right to say it plainly.

Evernote has no end-to-end encryption. Its in-note encryption hides selected text inside a note, on Mac and Windows only, and not on the Free plan. Evernote is owned by Bending Spoons, and the timeline of what they’ve done with it is worth reading if you’re deciding where the next ten years of your notes live.

One trade to know about: encryption and search pull against each other. Joplin’s AI chat panel can’t use an encrypted note. We have the same trade in Harbor — an encrypted note can’t be OCR’d or searched by anything that isn’t holding your password — and we wrote about why encrypting everything isn’t always the right call.

Platforms

Joplin also has a terminal app, which nobody else here can say. Its web clipper covers Chrome and Firefox. Evernote’s is a standalone extension that doesn’t need anything else running.

AI, and getting your notes into it

This is where Joplin changed most recently, and most comparisons haven’t caught up.

Joplin 3.7, released this month, added three AI features, all switched off until you turn them on and all desktop-only:

• An AI chat panel beside the editor that summarizes, rewrites or answers questions about the note you’re in. It uses Joplin Cloud’s own model (beta, on Cloud plans), your OpenAI or Anthropic key, or a model running on your own machine through Ollama or LM Studio. A second switch blocks remote providers by default, so your notes don’t leave your network unless you say so.
• Semantic search that finds notes by meaning, not just matching words. It runs entirely on your computer — a small model downloads once and the index never syncs. Not supported on Intel Macs.
• A built-in MCP server, so Claude Desktop, Cursor or Zed can search and read your notes. Every tool starts switched off, and you turn on exactly the ones you want. We called that the most careful default of any notes app with MCP and we still think so.

Evernote includes its AI Assistant, semantic search, AI Transcribe and AI editing on every plan, Free included. Its MCP connection, for letting Claude or ChatGPT read your notes, needs Starter or Advanced.

So both apps have AI now. The difference is the posture: Evernote’s is on and in the cloud, Joplin’s is off and can stay on your own machine.

So which one

Pick Joplin if you’d rather own your notes than rent them. It’s free, it’s open source, it runs on Linux, it’ll encrypt everything end to end, it syncs through storage you already have, and as of this month it’s got an AI and an MCP server that don’t phone home unless you let them. For a technical user leaving Evernote on principle, it’s the obvious answer and we’d tell a friend the same.

Stay on Evernote if you want it to just work, or if your notes are handwriting. No sync to configure, a clipper and OCR that don’t depend on a desktop app being open, handwriting search on every plan, and teams and calendar features Joplin doesn’t have. You pay for that, and in 2026 you pay a lot more than you used to.

Where does Harbor land? We’re a subscription — $9.99 a month or $99 a year — so if free and open source is the point, Joplin wins and we won’t pretend otherwise. What we do is the no-setup half without Evernote’s ceilings: sign in and it syncs, OCR on every plan including handwriting, native apps on five platforms plus a web app, an MCP server and CLI on the one plan, and a written price promise — no increase for three years, then capped at 10% a year.

If that’s your kind of library, our one-step Evernote import is the place to start, and Harbor vs Evernote gives us the same treatment. Still weighing it up? UpNote vs Evernote is the $39.99-once option, and the full alternatives roundup covers the rest.

Sources

Joplin figures read on September 24, 2026; Evernote figures read on September 20, 2026:

• Joplin Cloud plans and storage limits — joplinapp.org/plans
• Joplin’s Evernote import and what it changes — Importing and exporting
• OCR, and the desktop-only and no-handwriting limits — Optical Character Recognition
• End-to-end encryption — Joplin E2EE
• AI chat, semantic search and the MCP server — AI chat, Semantic search, MCP server
• Joplin’s licence and releases — github.com/laurent22/joplin
• Evernote plans, limits and AI — evernote.com/compare-plans

Prices change and features move. If something here is out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it — the dates above are the promise.