Notion vs Evernote: Why We Dropped Evernote After 3 Years (2026)
We had 2,400+ notes in Evernote. Three years of meeting notes, research clips, project documentation, travel itineraries, and enough tagged articles to fill a library. We were paying $14.99/month for Evernote Personal and felt reasonably happy about it.
Then we moved the whole team to Notion.
This isn’t a hit piece on Evernote — we genuinely liked it for a long time. But the note-taking landscape shifted, our team grew, and what worked for three years stopped working. Here’s the full story of why we switched, what the migration actually looked like, and whether we’d do it again.
Our Background (So You Can Judge If This Applies to You)
We’re a small editorial and product review team — seven people at the time of the switch, ten now. We research dozens of SaaS tools every month. We clip articles, tag competitor analysis, maintain comparison databases, and write collaborative drafts.
For three years, Evernote was our shared brain. Every team member had it installed. We had a carefully maintained tag taxonomy (87 tags, organized hierarchically). We used Saved Searches like power shortcuts. The web clipper ran in everyone’s browser.
We’re not casual note-takers. We live in these apps. So when we say the switch was painful, believe it.
Why We Even Considered Leaving
The short version: Evernote’s 2024 pricing restructuring.
The long version is more nuanced. Evernote had been slowly losing its edge for a while. The Android app felt sluggish. Search results would occasionally fail to load. The editor — fundamentally unchanged for years — still struggled with basic formatting like tables and code blocks. We’d been limping along, but we were limping.
Then came the pricing change. Evernote slashed the free tier to 50 notes and 1 notebook. Fifty notes. We had team members who weren’t on the paid plan yet, and suddenly they couldn’t even access shared notebooks properly on their free accounts. The Personal plan we were on jumped in price, and the feature gap between Personal and Professional didn’t justify the cost difference for a small team.
We started evaluating alternatives seriously. Notion won. But it wasn’t a clean victory.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | Evernote | Notion | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Note editing | Solid rich text, limited formatting | Block-based, highly flexible | Notion |
| Web clipper | Best-in-class, multiple clip modes | Functional but basic | Evernote |
| Search | Fast, reliable, tag-based | Decent, database filters | Evernote |
| Databases/Tables | Basic tables only | Full relational databases | Notion |
| Team collaboration | Shared notebooks, limited real-time | Real-time multiplayer editing | Notion |
| Templates | Limited official library | Massive community + custom | Notion |
| Mobile experience | Fast, reliable | Slow, sometimes unusable | Evernote |
| Offline access | Reliable offline notes | Unreliable, often broken | Evernote |
| Tagging system | Deep hierarchical tags | Basic, no hierarchy | Evernote |
| Pricing (team of 10) | ~$150/mo on Professional | ~$100/mo on Team plan | Notion |
| AI features | AI search & cleanup (bolted-on) | Notion AI, integrated | Notion |
| Integrations | decent API, IFTTT, Zapier | Robust API, Slack, GitHub, more | Tie |
| Import/export | ENEX format, limited | Markdown, CSV, multiple formats | Notion |
What Worked With Evernote
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Evernote did several things exceptionally well for our team.
The web clipper was (and still is) the best in the business. We research tools for a living. The ability to clip a full article, a simplified reader version, a bookmark, or a screenshot — with automatic tagging and notebook assignment — was core to our workflow. Notion’s clipper exists, but it’s a pale imitation. We still miss Evernote’s clipper daily.
Tagging was second to none. Our 87-tag hierarchy was a thing of beauty. Nested tags meant “SaaS > Project-Management > Kanban” was a single, drillable path. Saved Searches let us create dynamic views like “all articles tagged competitive-analysis AND published-last-month.” Notion’s tags are flat and lifeless by comparison.
Search was fast and trustworthy. Type a few characters, get results instantly. Even with 2,400+ notes, Evernote’s search never let us down. The OCR-based image search was genuinely useful — we could find text inside screenshots and whiteboard photos.
Offline was rock-solid. Every note we’d ever opened was available offline. On planes, in tunnels, at conferences with terrible Wi-Fi — Evernote just worked. This matters more than people realize until they don’t have it.
What Didn’t Work With Evernote
The editor felt stuck in 2018. Want to create a content calendar? Too bad, here’s a basic table with no filtering. Want to embed a Figma mockup? Here’s a weird workaround. Want a Kanban board? Not happening. The editor was fine for plain text and basic formatting, but anything beyond that required jumping to another tool.
Collaboration was limited. Shared notebooks worked, but real-time collaboration was inconsistent. We’d see sync conflicts more often than we’d like. There was no way to comment on specific text or assign tasks within a note. For a team of seven trying to co-write comparison articles, it was increasingly painful.
AI features felt bolted on. Evernote added AI-powered search and note cleanup, but it never felt native. The AI couldn’t synthesize across notes, couldn’t help with writing, and the “AI cleanup” feature regularly mangled our carefully formatted articles. We turned it off after two weeks.
The stagnation was real. Between 2022 and 2025, Evernote’s meaningful feature releases were sparse. The app got a facelift. Pricing changed (twice). But the core experience — the editor, the collaboration, the organizational tools — barely evolved. When your biggest update in a year is a pricing change, your users notice.
What Works With Notion
Databases changed everything for us. This is the single biggest reason we switched. Our content pipeline — ideas, research, drafts, reviews, published — lives in a Notion database with custom views. Kanban for status. Calendar for deadlines. Table for editing. Gallery for published pieces. One database, five views. In Evernote, this was impossible.
Real-time collaboration is seamless. Multiple team members can edit the same page simultaneously. We can see each other’s cursors. We can leave inline comments. We can @mention people. It works like a modern document editor, because it is one. This alone saved us from juggling Google Docs alongside Evernote.
Block-based editing is addictive. Every paragraph, heading, image, embed, code block, callout, and toggle is its own block. You can rearrange, duplicate, convert, and nest them. Writing a comparison article (like this one) in Notion is a fundamentally better experience than in Evernote’s legacy editor.
Templates gave us a running start. We found templates for editorial calendars, product comparison frameworks, and meeting notes that we adapted in hours instead of building from scratch. Our custom templates now encode years of institutional knowledge about how we structure reviews.
Notion AI is actually useful. Unlike Evernote’s AI, Notion’s is integrated into the editor where you work. We use it to summarize research, draft outlines, and translate notes. It’s not perfect — it hallucinates specs occasionally — but it saves us genuine time. We covered this in more depth in our Obsidian vs Notion comparison.
What Doesn’t Work With Notion
Let’s not pretend Notion is perfect. It isn’t.
The mobile app is slow. Painfully slow. Opening a database on Android can take 5-8 seconds. Switching between pages involves a noticeable lag. When you’re used to Evernote’s snappy mobile experience, Notion’s sluggishness is jarring. We’ve trained our team to use the desktop app whenever possible and keep mobile interactions to quick lookups.
Offline mode is essentially broken. This is our biggest gripe with Notion, and it’s the one area where we genuinely regret switching. Notion claims offline support, but in practice, it’s unreliable. Pages fail to load. Edits don’t sync. You get cryptic error messages.
The failure story: In October 2025, three of our team members were on a flight to a conference. They had a shared Notion page open with our booth schedule, demo scripts, and talking points. Notion had supposedly cached the page. Except it hadn’t. When they opened their laptops at 35,000 feet, they got a blank screen with a loading spinner. No content. No cached version. Just a spinning wheel and a cellular data requirement they couldn’t meet.
One of them had screenshots in their phone’s camera roll from a Slack message the day before. That’s how they ran the booth.
We now maintain critical travel documents in Apple Notes as a backup. Yes, we use three note apps now. No, we’re not proud of it.
Databases have a learning curve. Notion’s flexibility is its strength, but it’s also a trap. We spent weeks reorganizing and rethinking our information architecture. Two team members went down rabbit holes building elaborate databases nobody else understood. We eventually had to establish “Notion governance” rules — which feels absurd for a note-taking app, but here we are.
The Migration: 2,400 Notes and a Lot of Coffee
Here’s what the actual migration looked like, in case you’re considering the same move.
Week 1: Export and import. Evernote exports to ENEX format. Notion can import ENEX files. In theory, this is one button. In practice, about 200 notes failed to import correctly — corrupted images, lost formatting, broken attachments. We had to manually re-import those.
Week 2-3: Reorganization. This was the hardest part. Evernote’s tag-based organization doesn’t map cleanly to Notion’s database-and-page model. Tags became properties. Notebooks became databases. Saved Searches became filtered views. But the logic was fundamentally different, and reshaping 2,400 notes into a new paradigm took serious effort.
Week 4: Template creation. We built templates for our recurring note types — tool reviews, meeting notes, research briefs, comparison articles. This is where Notion started to shine, but it was upfront work that felt tedious in the moment.
Week 5: Team training. Notion works differently than Evernote. Blocks, databases, relations, rollups — these concepts don’t exist in Evernote. We ran three training sessions and created an internal “How We Use Notion” guide.
Total time investment: ~120 person-hours across the team. At our blended rate, that’s roughly $6,000 in opportunity cost.
Honest Pricing Comparison
Let’s talk real money. Here’s what we were paying and what we pay now.
Evernote (what we paid for 3 years):
- Personal plan: $14.99/month per user (we had 7 users on paid plans)
- Total monthly: ~$105/month
- Total over 3 years: ~$3,780
- After the 2024 restructuring, comparable plan would have been Professional at $18.99/user
- New monthly cost would have been: ~$133/month for 7 users
Notion (current, 10 users):
- Team plan: $10/user/month (annual billing)
- Total monthly: $100/month
- Notion AI: $10/user/month (5 users on it)
- Total with AI: ~$150/month for 10 users
Notion costs us about 12% more per month than we’d be paying on Evernote now, but we’re supporting 43% more users and getting dramatically more functionality. The per-user value proposition is much better. If you’re comparing for your own team, we have a deeper pricing breakdown in our Notion vs ClickUp article.
Honest Take: Evernote
Evernote is still the best app for capturing and retrieving individual notes, especially web clips. If your workflow is primarily “save things and find them later” — research, receipts, recipes, reading lists — Evernote does this better than anything else. The web clipper alone is worth the price of admission.
But Evernote stopped innovating on collaboration, organization, and creative workflows years ago. For a solo user who just needs a powerful filing cabinet, it’s fine. For a team trying to build a shared knowledge base and content pipeline, it’s increasingly inadequate.
Score: 7/10 for individuals, 5/10 for teams
Honest Take: Notion
Notion is the better tool for what we do now. Databases, real-time collaboration, flexible page layouts, and integrated AI make it a dramatically more powerful workspace for a growing team. We get more done in Notion than we ever did in Evernote.
But the mobile experience is bad, offline support is a lie, and the learning curve is steep. We traded capture-and-retrieve simplicity for workspace flexibility, and we lost some things we genuinely valued.
Score: 8/10 for teams, 7/10 for individuals
The Verdict
For teams and power users who need databases, collaboration, and flexible workflows: Notion wins decisively.
For solo users who primarily clip and collect: Evernote still has the edge.
If we could somehow graft Evernote’s web clipper and offline reliability onto Notion’s workspace, we’d have the perfect app. We can’t, so we chose the workspace that grows with our team over the filing cabinet that doesn’t.
We’d make the switch again. But we’d do it faster next time, and we’d keep those Apple Notes backups from day one.
And once your note-taking tool is sorted, how you manage projects with it is the next decision. We also compared Obsidian vs Notion for those considering the local-first approach, and our Zapier vs Make guide covers automating the connections between your notes and the rest of your stack.
FAQ
Is it worth switching from Evernote to Notion in 2026?
It depends on your workflow. If you primarily clip and save web content for personal use, Evernote is still excellent at that. If you work on a team, need databases, collaborative editing, or flexible content structures, Notion is worth the switch. The migration is painful — expect 2-5 weeks depending on your note count — but the long-term payoff is real.
Can you import Evernote notes into Notion?
Yes, but it’s not seamless. Notion supports ENEX imports from Evernote, but expect ~10% of notes to have formatting issues, missing images, or broken attachments. Budget time for manual cleanup, and don’t delete your Evernote account until you’ve verified everything imported correctly. We recommend exporting in batches of 200-300 notes rather than all at once.
What about Evernote’s 50-note free tier limit?
This was the final straw for us. Fifty notes and one notebook is so restrictive that it’s essentially a trial, not a free tier. If any of your team members use the free plan — even just to access shared content — this limit makes Evernote impractical for team use. Notion’s free tier is far more generous for collaboration.
How does Notion’s offline mode actually work?
Poorly. Notion claims to cache recently viewed pages for offline access, but in our experience, it’s unreliable. Pages that should be cached sometimes aren’t, and the app often requires an internet connection to load content even if you’ve viewed it before. If offline access is critical to your workflow — frequent travel, unreliable internet — keep a backup system. We use Apple Notes for essential offline documents. This is Notion’s biggest weakness and, after two years, it hasn’t meaningfully improved.