Harbor ·Comparison
Notesnook vs Evernote
Every price and limit below re-checked on October 19, 2026
A word about us before anything else. We make Harbor, a notes app. We compete with both apps on this page, and we’ve put Harbor in the tables on the same terms so you can see where it loses. It loses to Notesnook on price and on encryption. Every Notesnook figure below comes from Notesnook’s own pricing, help and roadmap pages and its GitHub, and every Evernote figure from Evernote’s plan page, all read on the date at the top.
Notesnook’s free plan keeps unlimited notes on unlimited devices. Evernote’s keeps 50 notes on one device.
That gap sets the tone for most of this page. Notesnook is cheaper, more private and more generous, and if your notes are things you write, it’s a better deal than Evernote by a wide margin. The catch is one thing Evernote does that Notesnook doesn’t do at all.
The short answer: Notesnook if your notes are things you write and you’d rather nobody else could read them. Evernote if your notes are things you collect, like scans, PDFs, receipts and handwriting, and you need to find them again by what’s written on them. The rest of this page is why, and how to move across if you pick Notesnook.
What each one costs
| Free | Paid, per year | |
|---|---|---|
| Notesnook | Unlimited notes, unlimited devices, 50 MB uploads a month, 10 MB file cap | Essential $19.99 · Pro $69.99 · Believer $89.99 · 5-year prepay from $299.99 |
| Evernote | 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device | Starter $99 (1,000 notes, 3 devices) · Advanced $249.99 (unlimited) |
| Harbor | A usage allowance; go over it and the account goes read-only, never deleted, always exportable | $99, or $9.99 a month. One plan, everything in it |
Notesnook’s plans differ mostly by how much you can upload. Essential gives you 1 GB a month and 100 MB a file, Pro 10 GB and 1 GB, Believer 25 GB and 5 GB. Every Notesnook plan, Free included, runs on unlimited devices.
So compare like with like. If your Evernote library is mostly typed notes, Notesnook Essential at $19.99 does what Evernote Starter does at $99, without the 1,000-note ceiling. If it’s full of scans and PDFs, Pro is the fair match. $69.99 against $99, and Notesnook Pro still has no note limit while Evernote Starter stops at 1,000.
Stopping paying is kinder on Notesnook, too. Your account drops to Free, and in Notesnook’s words, “nothing is deleted and nothing is locked.” You keep reading, editing and exporting. What Evernote costs now, and how it got there, is its own story.
Can either one read your scans?
| Text in photos and scans | Text in PDFs | Handwriting | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evernote | Yes, every plan | Yes | Yes |
| Notesnook | No | No | No |
| Harbor | Yes, every plan | Yes | Yes |
This is the row that decides it for a lot of people leaving Evernote.
Evernote reads the text in everything you give it, on every plan, Free included. A photographed receipt, a scanned lease, a whiteboard, a recipe card in someone’s handwriting: you search for a word and Evernote finds the picture it’s in.
Notesnook stores the same files and doesn’t read them. Search covers what you typed. Users have asked for OCR on Notesnook’s GitHub since 2024. One request was closed as not planned, another is still open, and an Evernote switcher put it at the top of the list of things keeping them from moving. It isn’t on Notesnook’s public roadmap.
Encryption is part of this. Notesnook’s servers can’t read your notes, so they can’t read your scans either, and any OCR would have to run on your own devices. That’s a fair price for the privacy, but it’s still a price.
Privacy and encryption
Notesnook encrypts everything, by default, with no switch to forget. Every note is encrypted on your device with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2 before it syncs, so the company holds data it can’t read. The apps and sync server are open source under GPLv3, and Notesnook built Vericrypt so you can check the encryption on your own notes. You can run your own sync server too.
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. Everything else, including every attachment, is readable by Evernote. Evernote is owned by Bending Spoons, and the timeline of what they’ve done with it is worth reading before you decide where the next ten years of your notes live.
On privacy this isn’t close. Notesnook wins it outright.
We have the same trade in Harbor that Notesnook made a choice about. Harbor’s encryption is optional, per note or notebook, and an encrypted note can’t be OCR’d or searched by its contents. We wrote about why that trade is unavoidable instead of pretending we’d solved it.
Platforms
| Mac | Windows | iPhone/iPad | Android | Linux | Web | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notesnook | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes, plus F-Droid | Yes | Yes |
| Evernote | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | — | Yes |
| Harbor | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | CLI | Yes |
Notesnook is on more platforms than Evernote. It has Linux desktop apps (AppImage, Flatpak, Snap) and an Android build on F-Droid, and Evernote has neither. Notesnook’s own README says its desktop apps are Electron and its mobile apps are React Native. Evernote’s desktop apps are Electron too.
Both have a web clipper.
AI, and getting your notes into it
Evernote includes its AI Assistant and semantic search on every plan, Free included. Its MCP connection, which lets Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools read your notes, needs Starter or above.
Notesnook has no built-in AI and no MCP server. It turned down an outside MCP server in April 2026 and said it plans a CLI instead. Its Inbox API lets Zapier, IFTTT or a script drop notes into your account, which is useful, but it only goes one way.
That fits what Notesnook is. An assistant can’t search what nobody can read. If you want an AI working across your notes, Evernote can do it and Notesnook, by design, mostly can’t. We compared every notes app with an MCP server if that’s the deciding row for you.
Moving from Evernote to Notesnook
- Export from Evernote’s desktop app, one notebook at a time. Open Notebooks, click the three-dot menu on a notebook, choose Export Notebook, and save it as ENEX. The web app can’t export.
- Open the importer in Notesnook’s web or desktop app: Settings → Import & export → Notesnook Importer, then pick Evernote.
- Drop in your .enex files and start the import. It runs on your device, and the notes are encrypted before they sync.
- Check what came across. Per Notesnook’s guide, notebooks, tags, attachments, web clips and reminders all do. Tasks arrive without their details, and a link between notes survives only when its text matches the other note’s title exactly.
One more thing to check before you move a big library. An Evernote switcher reported on GitHub that the importer didn’t bring their checklists across. Notesnook’s guide doesn’t mention checklists either way, so import one notebook that has them and look before you move the rest.
The harder part is getting everything out of Evernote in the first place. The desktop app has a quiet 100-note selection limit, among other things. The complete Evernote export guide covers it.
So which one
Pick Notesnook if your notes are writing, and privacy matters to you. It’s encrypted by default, open source, free for unlimited notes on every device you own, $19.99 a year when you want more room, and it runs on Linux. Stop paying and you lose nothing. For a journal, a writer’s notebook or anything you’d never want a company to read, it’s the better app and we’d tell a friend the same.
Stay on Evernote if your notes are paper. If a lot of what you keep is scans, PDFs, receipts and handwriting, Evernote can find the words inside them and Notesnook can’t. Add built-in AI and an MCP connection, and Evernote is the stronger archive. You pay a lot for it, and in 2026 you pay a lot more than you used to.
Where does Harbor land? We’re $99 a year, a lot more than Notesnook Essential and $29 more than Notesnook Pro, and Notesnook is the more private app. We won’t pretend otherwise. What we do is Evernote’s half without Evernote’s ceilings: OCR on every plan including handwriting, no note limit, native apps on Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad, and Android, 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 keeps your notebooks and tags. Harbor vs Notesnook gives us the same treatment as this page, Notesnook vs Standard Notes compares the two best-known encrypted apps, and the full alternatives roundup covers the rest.
Sources
All figures read on October 19, 2026:
- Notesnook plans, limits, trial and the stop-paying policy — notesnook.com/pricing
- Notesnook’s Evernote importer and what it keeps — Import notes from Evernote
- Notesnook platforms, F-Droid and Linux packages — notesnook.com/downloads
- Notesnook’s shipped and planned features — notesnook.com/roadmap
- Electron and React Native, license — github.com/streetwriters/notesnook
- The OCR requests — issue #5798 (closed, not planned), issue #4543, issue #9339 · the MCP decision — pull request #9702
- Evernote plans, limits, AI and MCP — evernote.com/compare-plans
Notesnook ships several releases a month, and Evernote moves its plans around. If something here is out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it. The date at the top is when we checked.