UpNote 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 price and limit below comes from Evernote’s and UpNote’s own pages, checked on the date at the top.

Now the thing you came for.

UpNote costs $39.99 once. Evernote costs $99 a year to keep 1,000 notes, or $249.99 a year to keep all of them.

That’s the whole pitch, and it’s a good one. It’s also not the number that should decide this.

What each one costs

Evernote’s annual prices work out to $8.25 and $20.83 a month. UpNote’s lifetime licence pays for itself against Starter in about five months.

The free tiers stop at the same place — 50 notes — but they’re not the same offer. Evernote Free connects one device. One. Your phone or your laptop, and switching means disconnecting the other. UpNote syncs its 50 free notes everywhere, and works with no account at all if you’d rather keep everything on one machine.

That’s the most user-respecting decision on this page. More apps should copy it.

The import, in detail

UpNote reads ENEX, so your notes will move. Their documentation is unusually honest about what happens next, and these are their words, not ours:

• Notes with attachments over 20 MB fail to import. So do notes over 300,000 characters. Failed notes land in a debug log you have to go find (Settings → Feedback → Save Debug Log).
• Evernote’s internal note links aren’t converted. They stay clickable and keep opening Evernote — which is a strange thing to discover a year after you left.
• Text colours and highlight colours are removed by default. There’s a setting to keep them; it’s off because UpNote uses dynamic colours that work in dark mode.
• Bulk imports get throttled above 20,000 notes or 10 GB of attachments. Past that you import 50 notes at a time.

And the notebook problem, which isn’t UpNote’s fault: an ENEX file doesn’t contain your notebook name. The name lives in the filename. UpNote handles this better than most — export each notebook as its own ENEX, import them together, tick Use file name as notebook, and your structure rebuilds itself. Skip that and a decade of notes arrives as one pile.

Nesting has to be redone by hand afterwards either way. We wrote up the full export mechanics, including Evernote’s silent 100-note selection limit, in the complete Evernote export guide.

The 20 MB wall

Here’s the part that gets buried in every other comparison.

UpNote caps every attachment at 20 MB, and automatically reduces image resolution when you upload. Both are documented, and UpNote explains why in their own FAQ: it’s how a $39.99 lifetime licence stays viable. “To keep syncing fast and to manage server costs efficiently.”

That’s a fair trade, honestly explained. It’s also a wall.

If your Evernote is writing, notes and clipped articles, you will never touch it. If your Evernote is what Evernote was actually sold as — the place you put receipts, contracts, warranty PDFs, photographed paperwork — then you’re about to hand a shrinking machine ten years of scans, and the ones over 20 MB won’t arrive at all.

Ask yourself one question before you decide anything else on this page: what’s in there?

Can either one read your scans?

“Not documented” is doing real work there, so here’s exactly what we did. On September 10, 2026 we pulled every page of UpNote’s help centre — 131 of them — and searched the lot for OCR, text recognition, and searching inside images, PDFs or attachments. Nothing. What UpNote does have is Scan documents, which uses your phone camera to put a scan into a note, and Drawing & handwriting on iPhone and iPad. Neither one makes the result searchable.

Vendors advertise the features they have and stay quiet about the ones they don’t, so read a blank as “probably not, but we haven’t confirmed it.”

This is the one row where Evernote clearly beats UpNote, and it’s the feature most Evernote refugees forget they rely on until a search for a word inside a photographed receipt comes back empty.

Where your notes live

Neither app encrypts your library end to end, and both say so.

UpNote’s FAQ: E2EE is “Not at this time,” with a recommendation to use a password manager for passwords and card numbers. Notes sync through their servers (Firebase), or stay on your device if you never sign in. UpNote Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore company with a team in Vietnam.

Evernote offers in-note encryption on Mac and Windows only — selected text inside a note, not the note and not the library. Evernote is owned by Bending Spoons, which is worth reading the timeline on if you’re deciding where to spend the next decade.

Both apps let you lock the app or a note behind a passcode. That stops someone picking up your laptop. It isn’t encryption.

Platforms

UpNote is the only one of the three with a real Linux app. Evernote is the only one of the two with a browser version — UpNote has a web clipper for Chrome, Safari and Firefox, but no web app, so a locked-down work computer means no notes.

AI, and getting your notes into it

Evernote’s paid plans include an AI assistant, semantic search, transcription and an MCP connection — so Claude or ChatGPT can read your notes. It’s on Starter and Advanced, not Free.

UpNote has no AI features and no API beyond x-callback-url endpoints, which automate actions from other apps but won’t hand your library to an assistant.

Whether that’s a gap depends entirely on whether you want an AI in your notes at all. Plenty of people are leaving Evernote because of the AI, not despite it.

So which one

Buy UpNote if your notes are words. Writing, meeting notes, research, clipped articles, recipes. It’s $39.99 once, it syncs free, it runs on Linux, its import documentation is more honest than most companies’ marketing, and never paying again is a real answer to a real complaint. For that library it’s the better product and the better deal, and we’d tell a friend the same.

Stay on Evernote — or look wider — if your notes are documents. Scans, PDFs, photographed paper, anything over 20 MB. UpNote will shrink your images, reject your biggest files, and can’t search inside any of them. That’s not a small gap for an archive; it’s the reason you built the archive.

Where does Harbor land? We’re a subscription — $9.99 a month or $99 a year — so if never paying again is the whole point, UpNote wins and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. What we do have is the scan half: OCR on every plan including handwriting, no attachment cap that shrinks your images, native apps on five platforms plus a web app, and a written price promise — no increase for three years, then capped at 10% a year — because being repriced is what got most people reading this page in the first place.

If that sounds like your library, our one-step Evernote import is the place to start. If it doesn’t, buy UpNote. Genuinely.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of these, read on September 10, 2026:

• Evernote plans and limits — evernote.com/compare-plans
• UpNote pricing and features — getupnote.com
• UpNote’s Evernote import limits — help.getupnote.com, Import from Evernote
• The 20 MB attachment cap and image downscaling — UpNote help centre, Add content to your notes, and the Premium FAQ
• End-to-end encryption and the API — UpNote FAQ

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