Is Day One better than Evernote for journaling?

Yes. Day One gives you daily prompts, templates, reminders, streaks and On This Day, and encrypts entries end to end on every plan. Evernote has a Daily Journaling template, but you build the habit yourself and every entry counts toward its note cap.

Yes. Day One Basic costs nothing and takes unlimited entries and journals, with one photo per entry, on one device plus the web. Silver costs US$49.99 a year and puts the journal on all your devices.

Yes, for a small collection. The free plan holds 50 notes in one notebook on a single device, and Evernote Web counts as that device. Starter is US$99 a year for 1,000 notes on three devices.

Can I import my Evernote notes into Day One?

No. Day One's import guide says Evernote has no export it can read. Start fresh, copy the entries you care about by hand, or use the plain text import in Day One's Mac app, which needs a date stamp on every entry.

Yes. New journals are encrypted end to end with a key that stays on your device, so Day One can't read your entries. Lose the key and a synced journal can't be decrypted, so keep a copy somewhere safe.

Does Day One work on Windows?

Yes. Day One has a Windows app in the Microsoft Store. For now it's free for everyone and doesn't count against your device limit.

Evernote vs Day One (2026): journal or notes, what it costs

The short answer

Evernote vs Day One comes down to what you're writing. Day One is a journal: you write about your day, it keeps every entry private and in date order, and a year later it shows you what you wrote on this date. Evernote is a filing cabinet for things you'll need again, like a scanned warranty, a saved recipe or a PDF from your child's school. Day One's free plan takes unlimited entries. Evernote's free plan holds 50 notes on one device, and past that you pay US$99 a year.

Find your row:

If you want to	Pick	Why
Write a few lines every day	Day One	Prompts, reminders and streaks
Keep a diary for free	Day One	Unlimited entries, encrypted
Reread this day a year ago	Day One	On This Day
Save web pages and PDFs	Evernote	The clipper keeps the whole page
Find a word on a scanned letter	Evernote	Search reads scans and handwriting
Share a list with someone with no account	Evernote	A link opens it in a browser

How we compared them

We read Day One's and Evernote's own plans pages and help guides on 30 October 2026, and every fact and price below comes from them. We haven't used both apps for months, so you won't see star ratings or test scores, and every price is the US list price. Evernote's plans page showed other amounts when we opened it from Singapore, and Day One bills through the app store you subscribe in, so check the price where you live before you pay.

Both apps faced the same questions: the cost of a year, the devices you can use, who can read your words, what goes in, how it comes back out, and what you keep if you leave.

Day One: best for a private journal

Day One helps you write about your life. Each entry gets a date and, if you like, your location, and you read them back as a timeline, a calendar, a map or a wall of photos.

Day One's plans page lists three tiers. Basic is free, with unlimited entries and journals but one photo per entry; the daily prompt, templates, search, streaks and On This Day all come with it. Silver costs US$49.99 a year. It puts your journal on every device you own, takes up to 30 photos or videos per entry, and adds audio recordings with transcription, drawings and PDFs. Gold costs US$74.99 a year for Daily Chat, a guided reflection, plus AI summaries and title suggestions. Both paid plans start with a free month inside the app.

The apps run on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android and Apple Watch, and in any browser. Windows gets its own app from the Microsoft Store, and Day One's Windows guide says it's free for everyone for a limited time and doesn't count against your device limit.

Pick it if you want to write a little every day and keep it to yourself. Skip it if most of what you keep is other people's paper, such as bills and manuals. PDFs need Silver, there's no clipper that saves a whole web page, and the free plan takes one photo per entry. Keeping only a gratitude list? A smaller gratitude journal app fits that job better.

Evernote: best for paper, web pages and search

Evernote keeps your notes on its servers and syncs them to apps for iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and the web. You file notes in notebooks, tag them and add tasks with dates and reminders.

What it does best is take in stuff other people made and hand it back when you ask. The Web Clipper saves articles, full pages and PDFs from every major browser, and you can mark up a screenshot before you save it. Point the phone app's document scanner at a receipt or a handwritten recipe and it becomes a note.

Evernote's plans page caps Free at 50 notes in one notebook, on one connected device. Starter costs US$99 a year or US$14.99 a month. For that you get 1,000 notes, 20 notebooks and three devices. Need more? Advanced costs US$249.99 a year or US$24.99 a month, and the note and device caps go away. Try either free for 7 days; cancel before the trial ends and Evernote won't charge your card.

Pick it if you collect more than you write, and you'd rather search than sort. Skip it if all you want is a diary. One entry a night fills the free plan in 50 days and Starter's cap in under three years. Weighing Evernote against a quick free notes app instead? Read Evernote vs Google Keep.

Side by side

	Day One	Evernote
Free plan	Unlimited entries, 1 device and the web	50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device
Paid, one person	US$49.99 or US$74.99 a year	US$99 or US$249.99 a year
Apps	iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android, Watch, Windows, web	iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, web
Encryption	End to end, on every plan	Selected text only, with a passphrase
Web pages	Title, address and the text you select	The whole page, a PDF or a screenshot
Help to write	Prompts, templates, reminders, streaks	A Daily Journaling template
Looking back	On This Day, calendar, map	Search, filters, saved searches
Writing together	Shared journals, up to 30 people	Email invites or a public link
Leaving	PDF, JSON, text and CSV	ENEX or HTML, desktop app only

Look hardest at the device row. Day One Basic gives you one device plus the browser. Evernote Free stops at one device, and even Evernote Web counts as one. Sign in on a second one and it asks you to unsync the first or upgrade.

What a year costs

One person, one year, US list prices, billed yearly:

Plan	A year	What you get
Day One Basic	US$0	Unlimited entries, 1 device and the web
Evernote Free	US$0	50 notes, 1 device
Day One Silver	US$49.99	Every device, 30 photos per entry
Day One Gold	US$74.99	Silver plus the AI reflection tools
Evernote Starter	US$99	1,000 notes, 3 devices
Evernote Advanced	US$249.99	No cap on notes or devices

Pay Evernote monthly and Starter comes to US$179.88 a year, Advanced US$299.88. Day One's plans page lists yearly prices only.

The cheapest setup that does both jobs well is Day One Basic for the diary and Evernote Starter for the paperwork, at US$99 a year. Basic covers your phone plus the browser on your laptop. Add an iPad or the Mac app and you need Silver, which brings the pair to US$148.99.

Stopping costs you less than you'd fear. Cancel a Day One plan and its plans page says you drop back to Basic with your journal intact. Go over an Evernote cap and every note still opens, edits and exports, but you can't add a new one until you're back under it. Notes in the trash count toward that cap, so empty it.

Keeping a journal in each

Day One does the habit work for you. A new prompt waits each day, and the prompt library has more when it doesn't fit. Templates give an entry a set shape, say three headings for a morning page. Reminders come at a fixed time or at a random moment inside a window you pick, and a custom one opens a new entry with its template loaded. Set them on each device, because they don't sync.

Streaks count the days in a row you've written. Miss one and Day One's streaks guide lets you win it back by writing an entry for that day.

Reading it back is why most people keep a diary at all. On This Day shows what you wrote on today's date in earlier years, with a daily notification if you want one. It runs on iPhone, Mac and Android, not yet on the web or Windows.

Evernote can hold a diary, and its templates gallery has a Daily Journaling template to start from. The rest you build yourself, and every entry is one more note against your cap.

Writing at all is the real test, so build the habit small: one line, at the same time, every night.

The hard part of any journal is sitting down to write. In ActivityTracker, the Mind and mornings routine pack sets One page in the journal for 7:15 each morning, and if the time comes and it isn't done, the assistant nudges you.

See how routines work

Getting things in: pages, paper and your voice

Evernote is built to swallow other people's material. The clipper keeps an article without the ads, or the whole page as a screenshot you can highlight and annotate.

Day One captures your own day. Its browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari start an entry with the page's title and address, plus any text you highlighted. The Chrome and Firefox ones file it in a Bookmarks journal. That's a bookmark with your thoughts attached, not a copy of the page.

Paper goes the other way in Day One. Scan Text on iPhone reads a printed or handwritten page through the camera and types the words into your entry, ready to edit. It suits the pages of an old paper diary. Scanning a document to PDF, or attaching one, needs Silver or Gold.

Voice is a Silver and Gold feature in Day One. A recording with transcription runs up to 10 minutes and needs a connection, while a plain recording runs up to three hours. If you later drop back to Basic, recordings you already made still play.

Finding things again

Evernote's search reads text inside PDFs, Office files, images and scanned documents, and picks out words in handwriting and photos of whiteboards. You can filter by keyword, date or place, and save the searches you run often. Its plans page lists image and document search on the free plan as well.

Day One's search reads the words in your entries. The web app has the most filters, from place and weather to the template you used. On a Mac, Spotlight can't see inside Day One because entries sit in an encrypted database, so search from inside the app.

Take a new boiler. You scan the warranty letter into Evernote, and next winter a search for the serial number brings it back. In Day One you write that it went in on a cold Tuesday and the cat hid all day.

Who can read what you write

Day One encrypts your journal before it leaves your device. Day One's encryption FAQ says the key stays with you, with an optional backup to iCloud, so neither Day One's servers nor its staff can read a word or see a photo. Every new journal gets this by default. The catch is the key itself: lose it and a synced journal can't be decrypted. Exports and text backups aren't encrypted, so store those files with care.

Evernote keeps notes on its own servers. You can encrypt selected text in a note with a passphrase, but not a whole note or notebook. Evernote doesn't store the passphrase anywhere, so write it down.

Offline, Evernote's Mac and Windows apps keep every synced note on your computer. Phones keep titles and a short excerpt unless you set notes up for offline use.

Day One's shared journals are free on every plan and hold up to 30 people, you included. Only the owner sends invites, and each invite link expires after 14 days. Your private journals stay apart from it. It suits a new baby: both parents post photos, and the grandparents comment from their own phones.

Evernote shares one note at a time. Evernote's sharing help lets you invite people by email to view or edit, or let anyone with the link do the same in a light editor with no account. That fits a house-move checklist your sister adds to from her browser.

Moving between Evernote and Day One

If you're leaving Evernote

Day One's import guide is blunt. Evernote offers no export Day One can read, so there is no import. A journal you kept in Evernote has three ways across:

Start fresh. Begin the Day One habit and leave the old entries where they are.
Copy the entries that matter by hand.
On a Mac, use the plain text import. Each entry needs a date stamp in your computer's date format, pictures stay behind, and no other Day One app runs it.

Keep a copy before you delete a thing. Evernote exports a whole notebook, or up to 100 notes at a time, as ENEX or HTML, on the free plan too, but only from the Mac or Windows app. Choose multi-page HTML and each note gets its own file, with an index page that opens in any browser.

If you're leaving Day One

Day One's export guide lists PDF, JSON, plain text and CSV, and which you get depends on the app. A PDF from iPhone, Mac or Android keeps your formatting with the photos in place. JSON works everywhere and is the copy to keep if you think you'll come back. Evernote's search reads text inside PDFs, so a year of Day One saved as one PDF turns into a searchable note there. Want your notes as plain files you own instead? Obsidian vs Evernote covers that route.

Try both for two weeks

A fortnight of real use beats any table:

Day 1: install both on your phone. On Evernote Free, that phone is your one device.
Every evening: write three lines about the day in Day One, with the Daily Reminder set for 9:30pm.
Whenever paper or a useful page arrives, scan or clip it into Evernote.
Day 7: search Evernote for a word on one of your scans, and reread last Tuesday in Day One.
Day 14: count your Evernote notes and multiply by 26 for a year, then hold that against the caps of 50 and 1,000.
Keep whichever app you opened before the reminder did.

A weekly reflection template gives the day 7 and day 14 look back a shape.

Made-up example: Hana has paid for Evernote Starter since 2021. She has 820 notes: 560 diary entries in a Journal notebook, and 260 household papers, from her flat's lease to her cat's vaccination cards.

At three diary entries a week, the 180 notes left under Starter's cap fill in a little over a year, and Advanced costs US$249.99 a year.

In November she moves the diary to Day One Basic on her iPhone, with a Daily Reminder at 9:30pm and the browser on her laptop for longer entries.

She exports the Journal notebook from the Mac app as an ENEX file and as multi-page HTML, then deletes those 560 notes and empties the trash, because trashed notes still count toward the cap.

Evernote now holds 260 notes, with room for 740 more at US$99 a year. Her diary costs nothing, and the old entries open in any browser from the HTML export.