Evernote alternatives for 2026, ranked by what your notebooks lose on the way out

The best Evernote alternative is the one that takes your ENEX export with the least loss and leaves the notes somewhere you will not have to export from again. For one person that is usually Obsidian, Joplin or Apple Notes. For a team leaving shared notebooks full of PDFs, the list gets much shorter, and most round-ups never get that far.

Every Evernote migration goes through the same door: a desktop app writing .enex files, which the next app then has to convert. So this list starts from Evernote's own help pages, read on 15 November 2026, then checks each alternative's own import documentation for what it keeps and what it drops. I work on Baalda, one of the six. It ranks first for teams and is the wrong pick for several kinds of Evernote user, which is said plainly below.

Why are people leaving Evernote in 2026?

Evernote has belonged to Bending Spoons since January 2023, which lists it on its own site as "Acquired January 2023". The reasons to look elsewhere since then are written down in Evernote's own help centre.

• The free plan is small. Evernote's limits page, updated 6 November 2026, sets Free at "up to 50 notes and 1 notebook" and Starter at "up to 1,000 notes and 20 notebooks". A separate page limits Free to one device at a time. Unlimited notes and notebooks start at the Advanced plan.
• Limits can change without notice. The same page says the Terms of Service give Evernote the right to modify the service, "as a result, we do not need to give users advance notice about account changes like the new device limit."
• Over the limit, you stop writing. If an account has more notes than the plan allows, "you won't be able to create new notes or notebooks" until it is back under. Existing notes stay readable, editable and exportable.
• AI runs on someone else's model. Evernote's AI FAQ says AI Assistant sends data to OpenAI, which "is processed solely to fulfill your request" and deleted after the response, and that all AI features are on by default. Some teams are fine with that. Others have a policy that says no.

None of this makes Evernote a bad app. Its OCR search over scans and images and its phone apps are still better than most of what follows. But a cap that can move, on notes you cannot easily take with you, is the reason the search exists.

What does leaving Evernote actually involve?

Evernote's export page is short and worth reading before you pick anything. Exporting "is only available using the Evernote desktop app. It is not possible to perform exports on Evernote Web." You get ENEX or HTML, and "Evernote currently supports exporting up to 100 notes at a time, or entire notebooks." An ENEX file can be split at a size you choose between 300 MB and 2 GB, and exporting does not need a paid plan.

In practice that means one ENEX file per notebook, made on a Mac or Windows machine, then fed to the new app's importer. ENEX is Evernote's XML, with each note's body stored as HTML. Every app below converts it into something else, and each conversion loses something different.

The six alternatives, side by side

Prices are each vendor's own list price on 15 November 2026. "Not claimed" means the vendor's pages I read do not say, not that the app definitely cannot. Joplin prices in euros. Standard Notes showed a Black Friday banner offering 50% off annual plans when I checked, so the card price may not be what you pay this month. Evernote's own prices are left out because its plans page did not show them outside the checkout.

1. Baalda, for a team that shared notebooks

Most Evernote round-ups are written for one person. Baalda is for the other case: a team whose shared notebooks held meeting notes, client files and a lot of PDFs, and who want those to land somewhere everyone can still write in at once.

Every note in a Baalda vault is a plain .md file in a folder on each member's disk, and a CRDT merges edits so several people can type in the same note at the same moment. Attachments are files too. A PDF, a Word document or a spreadsheet syncs into the vault beside the notes, the desktop app extracts its text, and that text is searchable. Access is set per folder and per file, so the client notebook that only two people saw in Evernote can stay that way.

That matters most for the part of Evernote that people forget is half the archive: the attachments. An assistant connected over MCP can call search_notes, get a hit inside a PDF, then call read_attachment_text to read the extracted text, and every one of those calls is resolved against the permissions of the person whose token it is. It can then write a summary back with create_note or change an existing note with edit_note. Evernote has its own MCP server now, and its help page lists two capabilities, read and create, "available to all paid Evernote users". Editing what is already there is the part it leaves out.

As of 15 November 2026 the managed backend is free for 2 people and 1 synced vault, with MCP included. Team is $10 per seat a month or $110 per seat a year, minimum 3 seats. The core is Apache-2.0 and the backend is free to self-host with no limits.

Where it does not help, and for some Evernote users this is the whole decision:

• There is no ENEX importer. The honest route is Obsidian's free Importer, which writes markdown files, then opening that folder as a Baalda vault.
• There is no OCR. Text is extracted from PDFs, Word files and spreadsheets that already contain text. A scanned receipt, a photo of a whiteboard or handwriting stays an image with nothing to search. If you lean on Evernote finding words inside photos, keep Evernote for those.
• No web clipper, no email-in, no phone app. Baalda is a desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux, with iOS planned. If you capture mostly on your phone, this is the wrong pick today.

Choose it if: your team shared notebooks, keeps documents in them, and wants an assistant that can read and write the same files with the same access rules.

Skip it if: you are one person, you capture on your phone, or your archive is mostly scans.

2. Obsidian, for one person who wants files

Obsidian is the best single-person answer on this list. Its Evernote import guide uses the official Importer plugin and says it "converts your Evernote data to durable Markdown files you can use with Obsidian and many other apps." That last phrase is why it sits this high: once the notes are markdown files, you never need an importer again, including if you later move to Baalda.

The guide is clear about one loss: "Evernote export does not keep the tag hierarchy." Notebook stacks only come back if the ENEX files are named Stack@@@Notebook before import. Obsidian is free for personal and commercial use, and Sync is $4 per user a month billed yearly or $5 monthly.

For a team it stops short. Obsidian's own shared vault page, checked for our Obsidian Sync alternatives post, gives every collaborator the owner's permissions and says Obsidian does not support live editing on the same file.

Choose it if: you are leaving alone and want plain files.

Skip it if: two people need to be in one note, or one notebook needs to stay private from part of the team.

3. Joplin, for the closest open-source Evernote

Joplin is the app that looks most like Evernote, with notebooks and tags rather than folders of files. Its import guide says it "can import complete Evernote notebooks, as well as notes, tags, resources (attached files) and note metadata". Evernote's HTML is converted to markdown, and if that loses too much you can "import of ENEX files as HTML" instead. What does not come across is OCR data and, on complex notes, "colours, font sizes and font faces".

The apps are AGPL-3.0. Notes are markdown, but they live inside Joplin's own database rather than as files in a folder, a difference our markdown app comparison explains. Joplin Cloud starts at €2.40 a month billed yearly, and its plans page says it lets you "collaborate on notebooks with your friends, family or colleagues". If you want to host sync yourself for a company, read the licence first: Joplin Server ships under its own "Personal Use License", which says it may not be used "for commercial purposes".

Choose it if: you want Evernote's notebooks-and-tags shape in an open-source app.

Skip it if: you want the notes as files, or need to self-host for a business without buying Joplin's business edition.

4. Standard Notes, for encryption first

Standard Notes encrypts everything end to end and its backend "is zero-knowledge". It is AGPL-3.0, and its help centre says "Self-hosting both the app and server is possible and relatively simple." The Evernote import is built in, with two documented limits: "the import tool is only able to process notes that are no larger than 3MB", and web clips with embedded images can fail. Paid plans are $90 and $120 a year.

Encryption is also where this post's own encrypted note taking app piece goes further, including what changes once notes are shared.

Choose it if: privacy is the reason you are leaving.

Skip it if: your notebooks are full of large PDFs and clipped pages.

5. Apple Notes, for the least effort on a Mac

Apple's import guide lists "Evernote XML Export (ENEX)" among the formats Notes on the Mac can import, and "If you have macOS 13 or later, you can also import tags from Evernote (ENEX) files." It now exports to PDF or Markdown as well. For someone with a few hundred notes and only Apple devices, it is the shortest move there is.

It is also the narrowest. Apple's page limits import to upgraded iCloud notes or notes stored on the Mac, it is an Apple app first, and Apple does not document what the importer drops.

Choose it if: you are on Apple devices only and want to be done this afternoon.

Skip it if: the people you work with are not all on Apple devices.

6. Trilium, for a self-hosted personal archive

Trilium Notes, now maintained as TriliumNext, is AGPL-3.0, runs on your own server or in Docker, and lists Evernote import among its features. Its README describes notes arranged "into arbitrarily deep tree", with a single note able to sit in several places at once, and it describes itself as a hierarchical note-taking app. It keeps notes in its own database, so plan on Trilium being the destination rather than a stop on the way.

Choose it if: you self-host and want one large personal knowledge base.

Skip it if: you need shared editing for a team, which its documentation does not claim.

How should a team test one before moving everything?

Pick the notebook with the most attachments, not the most notes, and export only that. Import it into the candidate and check four things: that the PDFs opened, that a search finds a word inside one, that the tags you rely on survived, and that the person who should not see it cannot. Then have two people edit the same note at once. Most of the apps above will fail one of those, and it is better to find out with one notebook than with forty.

If you are moving a team's notes into files, our guide to structuring a shared vault covers where the old notebooks should go once they are folders.