Is Google Keep better than Evernote?

For quick notes and lists you share, yes: Keep is free and a new note is one tap away. For scans and web clips you'll search for years, Evernote is better, because it finds words inside PDFs and photos and reads handwriting too.

Yes. Keep is free with a Google account, and there's no paid plan for your notes. Its Gemini extras, such as talking a note in for Gemini to write up, need a Google AI Pro or Ultra plan.

Yes, with tight limits. Evernote Free holds 50 notes and one notebook on one connected device, and Evernote Web counts as a device. Starter costs US$99 a year for 1,000 notes on three devices.

Can I move my Evernote notes to Google Keep?

Not in one step. Keep has no import, so export your notes as HTML from Evernote's desktop app and copy what you need into Keep. For a big archive, Keep is the wrong destination.

Does Google Keep still have location reminders?

No. Since Keep's reminders moved to Google Tasks in the second half of 2025, you can't create location reminders, and the alert comes from the Tasks or Calendar app.

What do people use Google Keep for?

Short notes they'll act on soon, like a shopping list or a photo of a receipt. Families also share one list in Keep so everyone edits the same note.

Evernote vs Google Keep (2026): free limits and the pick

The short answer

Evernote vs Google Keep comes down to how long your notes need to last. If most of them matter for a few days, like a shopping list or a gate code, pick Google Keep. It's free and a new note is one tap away. Share a list and it updates on everyone's phone while you type. If a note has to turn up in three years, a scanned letter or the paperwork for a house, pick Evernote, whose search reads the words inside PDFs and photos, even handwriting. The catch is Evernote Free: 50 notes on one device. A real archive there costs US$99 a year or more.

Find your row:

If you	Pick	Why
Share a grocery list at home	Keep	Everyone edits one note, live
Jot things down all day	Keep	One tap, no notebook to choose
Want it free for good	Keep	No paid plan for notes
Scan receipts and letters	Evernote	Search reads words in scans
Save articles and PDFs	Evernote	The clipper saves whole pages
File notes into folders	Evernote	Notebooks in stacks, plus tags

How we compared them

Everything here comes from Google's help pages and Evernote's own site and help centre, plus the two apps' store listings, all read on 30 October 2026. We built this from their documentation, not from months of daily use, so you won't find star ratings. Prices are the US ones on Evernote's plans page. Open that page from where you live before you pay.

We put the same six questions to both apps:

What does a year cost, and where does free stop?
How fast can you get a thought down?
Can you find it again in a year, by a word in a photo?
Will it remind you, and from which app?
Can someone else edit it with you?
If you leave, what comes with you?

Google Keep: best for quick notes and shared lists

Keep shows your notes as cards on one board. On Android, Create offers five kinds of note: text, list, image, drawing, audio. You can format text there too, from bold up to three heading sizes. Keep has phone apps for Android and iPhone, tiles for Wear OS watches, and a web version at keep.google.com. Google's Keep page says changes sync across your devices in real time, and you can edit offline; the changes sync once you're connected again.

The App Store lists Keep as free. Its Gemini extras aren't. Google's Gemini help for Keep puts "Help me create a list" and AI titles behind a Google AI Pro or Ultra plan or a Pixel phone. Talking a note in for Gemini to write up needs Google AI Pro or Ultra on an Android device, per Keep's voice notes help.

Pick it if you live in your Google account and most notes are lists and photos you act on this week. Skip it if you want folders inside folders or long documents, since Keep puts every note on the same board, sorted only by labels and pins.

Evernote: best for paper, web pages and search

Evernote treats each note as a document. It sits in a notebook, notebooks group into stacks, and tags cut across both. A note can hold tables and attachments as well as tasks with dates, and Evernote's own calendar connects to Google or Microsoft calendars. Evernote's plans page lists apps for every main platform: iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, web.

Capture is the reason people pay. The Web Clipper saves whole pages and PDFs, and lets you mark up a screenshot before it lands in a notebook. Evernote says it works in all major browsers. The phone app's document scanner turns paper into notes, from a warranty card to a page of handwriting. On paid plans, Evernote's search finds the text inside PDFs and scans, and it reads handwriting and photos of whiteboards too.

Pick it if your notes start as paper or web pages and you'd rather search than scroll. Skip it if you want hundreds of quick notes for free: at two a day, the 50-note cap on Free fills before the month is out.

Side by side

	Google Keep	Evernote
Free plan	Full app	50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device
Paid, one person	None for notes	US$99 or US$249.99 a year
Apps	Android, iPhone, iPad, Wear OS, web	iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, web
Sorting	50 labels, colours, pins	Notebooks in stacks, tags
Search reaches	Typed text, words in photos	Handwriting, words in PDFs and scans
Saving web pages	A link or a selection	The whole page or a PDF
Reminders	Saved in Google Tasks	Tasks with dates and reminders
Sharing	Edit together, live	Invite, or a public link
Leaving	Google Takeout	ENEX or HTML, desktop only

Read the first two rows together. Keep costs nothing at any size, while Evernote costs nothing until note 51 or a second device.

What each one costs

Keep has no plan to buy for your notes. Google's storage help says each Google account comes with up to 15 GB, shared by Gmail, Drive and Photos. The same page says the rules for going over quota, which stop new uploads to Drive and new photo backups, don't apply to Keep. A full inbox won't stop you adding notes.

Evernote prices by how much you keep:

Plan	Per year	Notes	Devices
Free	US$0	50	1
Starter	US$99	1,000	3
Advanced	US$249.99	No limit	No limit

Free also caps you at one notebook and 20 tags inside 1 GB of storage. Starter allows 20 notebooks and 100 tags in 5 GB. Evernote's device help counts Evernote Web as a device, so on Free your phone and your laptop's browser can't both stay signed in.

Going over a limit deletes nothing. Evernote's limits article says every note stays readable and editable, and you can still share or export it. You just can't add new notes until you're back under the cap, and notes in the trash still count toward it. Paid plans open with a 7-day free trial, and eligible college students get 40% off a year of Advanced.

Getting a thought down fast

Keep is built for the five seconds after a thought arrives. Open it, type, close it: the note is saved. On Android, the setting "Create text notes by default" makes one tap open a blank text note. Keep's Play Store listing adds home screen widgets plus tiles for a Wear OS watch, so a note can start from your wrist.

Evernote asks a little more of you. A new note lands in your default notebook, and a tidy library means moving and tagging it later. That filing is what lets you find it in a year. Where Evernote is quicker is paper: point your phone at a letter and you have a searchable note, while Keep stores the photo as an image note.

Saving from the web splits the same way. Keep's Chrome extension help says it saves a page's link to a note, or text or an image you've selected. Since 5 December 2022, notes made in the extension don't save on their own, so finish them at keep.google.com. Evernote's clipper keeps the whole article and drops the ads around it.

Finding a note a year later

Keep's search box narrows your notes by type, such as reminders or recordings, or by label and colour. Keep's search help adds a trick for Android: type a word printed in a photo, such as a receipt, and Keep finds the note, in English only. For sorting you get up to 50 labels plus colours and pins, per Keep's organizing help. Labels filter rather than file, so 400 notes still share one board.

Evernote search goes deeper. You can filter by date or by the place a note was written, and save the searches you run every week. Its AI-powered search lets you ask for a note in plain words, the way you'd ask a friend. The bigger gap is what each app reads. Evernote reads the words in scans and PDFs and in handwriting, while Keep reads typed text plus printed words in photos on Android.

Picture a fridge warranty. In Evernote you scan the card once, and in three years a search for the model number brings it back. In Keep you'd photograph it, label it Appliances and hope the label holds up.

Reminders, and where they ring

Keep's reminders now live in Google Tasks. Google's migration page says that from the second half of 2025, new Keep reminders are saved as tasks, which show up in Calendar and Tasks as well as in Keep. That changes three things:

The alert comes from Google Tasks or Google Calendar now, not Keep. Install one of them on your phone and allow its notifications, because without it you get no notification at all.
You can't create location reminders any more, so nothing pings as you walk into the supermarket.
Renaming the note leaves the reminder's old title in place, and you fix it in Tasks or Calendar.

Keep's reminder help says you're notified at the time you set and again 24 hours later. A reminder can repeat. Since one note carries one reminder, every line of a checklist shares its date. Weighing Keep against a proper to-do app instead? Todoist vs Google Tasks shows how Tasks handles dates.

Evernote keeps its reminders at home. Its plans page lists tasks with dates and reminders that you can assign to someone else, plus reminders on notes. The calendar connects one outside calendar on Free and five on paid plans. So a job with a date and a page of notes behind it, renewing a passport say, stays in one app.

Like Keep's speed but tired of copying list lines into a to-do app? In ActivityTracker you talk a note in and get text back, and Turn into tasks makes a task from every unticked line of a note's checklist.

See how notes work

Keep is the easier pick for a household. Keep's sharing help lets you add a collaborator by name or email, or a whole Google Group, and they can edit everything in the note, from the list to the audio. Your labels and colours stay yours, and so does your reminder. Set up a family group on Google and one tap shares a note with all of them.

Two warnings from Google. Anyone in the family group can delete a note shared with it, and deleting a shared note you own deletes it for everyone. When the holiday's over, archive the packing list instead.

Evernote gives you more ways in. Its sharing help gives each invited person view or edit rights, or full access that lets them invite others. A note can also be opened to anyone with the link, who views or edits it in a light editor with no Evernote account, and the same help page confirms you can share a whole notebook as well as a single note. That suits a packing list for grandparents who'll never install an app.

Offline, and on which devices

On a computer Keep is a browser tab: there's no Mac or Windows app. Keep's requirements page lists recent versions of Chrome and Firefox, plus Edge on Windows and Safari on a Mac. The iPhone app needs iOS 18 or later.

Evernote has desktop apps, and offline that matters. Evernote's offline help says the Mac and Windows apps keep every synced note in a local database, as long as you're signed in before the connection drops. Phones get less. Evernote keeps titles and tags plus a short excerpt, and the full note only if you made it on that phone, opened it recently or marked it for offline use. On Free you get one device anyway, so choose the one you'll need offline.

Moving between Evernote and Google Keep

Neither app has a one-click import from the other.

From Keep to Evernote:

Download your notes with Google Takeout. Keep's export help says the download holds each note's text and attachments, from voice recordings to drawings, plus its colour, its labels and who you shared it with.
Unzip the archive on a Mac or Windows computer.
In Evernote's desktop app, open Settings, then Import, and drop in the note files. Evernote's import help turns files in five formats, .html and .md among them, into editable notes. It works on a computer, not a phone.
Import ten notes first and check that the pictures and lists came through.

From Evernote to Keep, there's no import on Keep's side at all. Evernote's export help exports from the Mac or Windows app as ENEX or HTML, up to 100 notes at a time or a whole notebook, on Free as well as paid plans. Open the HTML in a browser and copy the notes you still need into Keep, one by one. If that's hundreds of notes, Keep is the wrong destination. A big archive of scans belongs in an app built for one, and Obsidian vs Evernote covers moving it somewhere free instead.

Use both, or test both for a week

Plenty of people keep both: Keep for the list on the fridge, Evernote for the filing cabinet. One rule stops that turning into a mess. Anything you'll act on this week goes in Keep, and anything you'll need to look up or prove later goes in Evernote.

If you're choosing one, a week of real notes beats any table:

Monday: put the same four things in each app. A typed thought, a shopping list, a photo of a paper letter, a reminder for Thursday.
Tuesday: search each app for a word that appears only in the letter.
Wednesday: share the shopping list with someone at home, and both add an item from your own phones.
Thursday: see which app's reminder actually reached your phone.
Friday: turn off the wifi on your laptop and edit a note in each.
Sunday: count your notes. Multiply by 52 for your year, and set that against Evernote's caps of 50 and 1,000.

A weekly reflection template gives that Sunday look back a shape.

Made-up example: Dan and his partner Mia are redoing their kitchen. Mia shares a Keep note called Kitchen with Dan. It holds the hardware store list and the plumber's number, with a photo of the wall they're tiling.

Dan adds "silicone, white" from the shop aisle, and it's on Mia's phone before he reaches the till. They tick items off together and archive the note when the kitchen's done.

The paperwork goes in Evernote. Dan scans the oven's warranty card and the builders' quotes, clips the tile maker's care page, and scans the tile receipt when the boxes arrive. That's 14 notes in one notebook, well under Free's cap of 50.

Two years later a tile cracks. Dan searches Evernote for the tile's name, and the receipt and the care page come up together, found from the words printed on the scan.