Is Notion better than Evernote?

For most people, yes, because Notion Free has no page limit for one person and its databases sort and filter your notes. Evernote is better for scanning paper and clipping the web, since its search reads the words inside photos and PDFs.

Is Evernote still free?

Yes, but Evernote Free stops at 50 notes, one notebook and one connected device, and notes in the trash count. Past the cap you can still view, edit, share and export your notes, but you can't create new ones.

Can I import Evernote into Notion?

Yes. Notion's importer, under Settings, Import, Third party imports, brings notebooks in as pages and notes as database items. Notion calls it reliable up to 5,000 notes, and pictures inside notes can need fixing afterwards.

Is Notion cheaper than Evernote?

Yes, for one person. Notion Free has no page limit for an individual and Plus is US$120 a year. Evernote Advanced, its plan with unlimited notes, is US$249.99 a year, and Starter at US$99 stops at 1,000 notes.

Is Notion or Evernote better for students?

Notion, because students and educators get its Plus plan free, limited to one member. Evernote gives eligible college students a discount on a year of Advanced, and it suits anyone who photographs handouts and whiteboards.

Notion vs Evernote (2026): free limits, prices and the pick

The short answer

For most people starting fresh in 2026, Notion is the better pick. Its free plan sets no page limit for one person, while Evernote Free stops at 50 notes, one notebook and one device. Pick Evernote instead if you mostly scan paper and clip the web, because its search reads the words inside photos and PDFs.

Evernote is a drawer you throw things into, a typed line or a photo of a receipt, and search does the finding later. Notion hands you blank pages and tables to shape yourself, and the time you put into that structure is what pays you back.

Find your row:

If you	Pick	Why
Scan receipts, letters and cards	Evernote	Search reads words in scans
Clip recipes and articles	Evernote	Its clipper keeps pages, PDFs and screenshots
Want more than 50 free notes	Notion	No page limit for one person
Track a project or habit as a table	Notion	Databases you sort and filter
Use a phone and a laptop for free	Notion	Evernote Free allows one device
Study or teach	Notion	Plus is free for students and teachers

How we compared them

We read every fact below on Evernote's and Notion's own pricing and help pages on 30 October 2026. We didn't run a months-long trial of either app, and there are no star ratings here. Prices are US list prices before tax, as of October 2026. Evernote shows different prices in different countries, so open its plans page from where you live before you pay.

Both apps got the same six questions:

What does one person pay, and where does the free plan stop?
How fast does a thought, a photo or a web page go in?
Can you find a note again by a word buried inside it?
Can you shape notes into lists you sort and filter?
What still opens on a plane, or in a basement with no signal?
If you leave, what comes with you?

Evernote: best for catching things fast and finding them later

Evernote files notes into notebooks and labels them with tags, so you open it, type or snap a photo and get on with your day. The Web Clipper saves web pages, articles and PDFs, takes screenshots you can mark up, and Evernote says it works in all major browsers. On a phone, the document scanner turns receipts, manuals, ID cards, business cards and handwritten pages into notes.

Search is the reason people stay. Evernote's search page says it finds text in PDFs, Office documents, images and scanned documents, and words in handwritten notes, photos of whiteboards and sticky notes. You can filter by date or by the place a note was written, and save the searches you repeat.

Notes can carry tasks with dates and reminders, Evernote has its own calendar, and there are apps for iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and the web.

The catch is the free plan. Evernote Free holds 50 notes and one notebook on one connected device, and deleted notes still count toward the 50 until you empty the trash. At the cap you can still view, edit, share and export what you have, but you can't create a new note until you delete some or pay.

Pick it if your life runs on paper and links, and you'd rather search than sort. Skip it if you want a free app for everyday notes: at one note a day, the cap fills in under two months.

Notion: best for building your own system

A Notion page is built from blocks: a paragraph, a checkbox, a heading, a picture. What sets it apart is the database. Notion's database guide says every item in a database is its own page, and properties such as a date or a status label each one. A reading list becomes one row per book, a status column, a rating column and a page behind each row for your thoughts. Filter it to "not started" and next month's reading is sorted.

Notion's pricing page describes Free as the plan "for individuals to organize personal projects and life". It lists pages and blocks as limited only once two or more members share a workspace, so one person can write for years without paying. Uploads top out at 5 MB per file on Free, and page history goes back seven days. Plus costs US$10 a member a month billed yearly, or US$12 month to month. Students and educators get Plus free, limited to one member.

Notion runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android and in a browser. Its Web Clipper is a browser extension for Chrome and Safari.

Pick it if your notes are really lists you want to sort, or plans you share with other people. Skip it if you want to open an app and write with zero setup, because a blank Notion page asks you to decide what it's for.

Side by side

	Evernote	Notion
Free plan	50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device	No page limit alone, 5 MB files
Paid, one person	US$99 or US$249.99 a year	US$120 a year on Plus
Layout	Notebooks and tags	Pages and databases
Search	Words in photos and scans	Titles rank above page text
Web clipper	All major browsers	Chrome and Safari
Offline	All notes on Mac and Windows	Pages you mark, per device
Templates	A free gallery	30,000+ in the marketplace
AI	Ticked on every plan	A trial on Free and Plus
Export	ENEX or HTML, desktop app	PDF, HTML, Markdown, CSV

On Evernote Free, your phone and your laptop can't both stay connected. The device article allows one device at a time on Free and three on Starter, and Evernote Web counts as one. Open your notes on a work laptop and on your phone, and Free is already full. Notion's pricing page lists no device limit on any plan.

Evernote's template help points to a gallery of free templates, from a meeting agenda to a weekly planner, and Notion's template marketplace lists over 30,000 built by its community.

What a year costs

Here's what one person pays over 12 months on yearly billing:

Plan	A year	What you get
Evernote Free	US$0	50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device
Evernote Starter	US$99	1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, 3 devices
Evernote Advanced	US$249.99	Unlimited notes and devices
Notion Free	US$0	No page limit, 5 MB files
Notion Plus	US$120	5 GB files, 30 days of history
Notion Business	US$240	Notion AI, 90 days of history

Unlimited notes cost you nothing on Notion Free and US$249.99 a year on Evernote Advanced, so for one person Notion is cheaper at every step. If you write three notes a week, Evernote Starter's 1,000-note cap lasts over six years, and it costs US$99 a year with 5 GB of storage.

Paying month to month costs more on both. Evernote's plans page says yearly billing saves up to 40%, and Notion's pricing page says up to 20%. Before you hand over a card:

Evernote's paid plans start with a 7-day free trial, and Evernote won't charge your card if you cancel before it ends.
Eligible college students get 40% off a year of Evernote Advanced through UNiDAYS, if they don't already pay for Evernote.
Notion refunds the full amount if you downgrade within three days of a monthly sign-up, or within 30 days of a yearly one.
For a household or a small team, Evernote's Flexible plan starts at US$10 a seat a month. Notion Business is US$20 a seat a month billed yearly and includes Notion AI.

Cancelling Evernote doesn't delete anything. Its cancellation article says you drop to Free at the end of the billing cycle and can still view, edit, export and delete every note. With more than 50 notes or more than one notebook, you just can't add new ones.

Capture and search

Picture a drawer of paper at home: a boiler warranty, the lease, two school letters, a recipe torn out of a magazine. In Evernote you photograph each one into a note and stop thinking about it. Months later you search "warranty" and the boiler page turns up, because Evernote reads the words in the scan. The plans page lists image and document search among the tools on Free, so this works before you pay.

Notion takes the same photo as an image, or the scan as a PDF, within the 5 MB limit on Free. Notion's search help describes filters such as title and date, and says page titles are more likely to show up than page contents. It says nothing about reading the words inside a photo. In Notion, then, you'd title the page "Boiler warranty, ends 2029" and find it by that.

Web pages go the other way. Evernote's clipper keeps a clean copy of an article, or a screenshot of the part you want, and you tag it as you save. Notion's clipper asks which page or database the web page goes into, so a recipe lands straight in your Recipes table as a new row, ready to sort by cooking time.

Most notes start on the move. In ActivityTracker you can talk a note in and get text back, add the words from a photo with Scan text from photo, and find any of it from one search box.

See how notes work

Notebooks or databases

Picture a house move planned in each app.

In Evernote you'd keep one note per room with a checklist of boxes, tag each note "move" and put a dated reminder on the one that says book the van. Free gives you one notebook, so tags keep the move apart from everything else.

In Notion you'd make a Boxes database with columns for the room and the status. A filtered view shows the kitchen boxes not yet packed, and the same table sorted by room becomes your unloading list. It takes an evening to set up and pays off on moving day.

Neither app is a to-do list first. Evernote's reminders and Notion's date columns both work, but whichever you choose, keep jobs with a due date on one list you trust. If your reminders matter more than your notes, our best reminder app guide covers the apps built only for that.

Offline and sharing

Evernote's desktop apps keep every synced note in a local database, so on a Mac or Windows computer everything opens with no connection. Evernote's offline help adds one condition: sign in before you go offline. On a phone the app keeps far less, just titles, tags and a short snippet, plus the full note when you made it on that phone, opened it recently or marked it for offline use. Evernote's mobile offline guide shows how to mark single notes or whole notebooks, and the plans page ticks offline notes on Free.

Notion's offline guide says every user can view, edit and create pages offline in the desktop and mobile apps. You turn on Available offline page by page, on each device. A database downloads its first 50 rows by itself, and further rows have to be downloaded one at a time.

For sharing, Notion's Share button invites people to one page alone, and Notion's sharing help says someone outside your workspace joins as a guest by email. Evernote shares notes with anyone, even people who don't use it.

AI in each

Evernote's plans page ticks three AI tools on every plan, Free included. AI Assistant searches, organises and adds to your notes from a chat. Semantic Search finds related notes. AI Transcribe records meetings and writes the summary and transcript. AI Cleanup, which tidies a messy note, works only on mobile. Connecting Evernote to outside AI tools such as Claude or ChatGPT starts at Starter.

Notion's AI help says Notion AI comes with the Business and Enterprise plans, and Free and Plus users get a limited number of responses to try it. Business, at US$20 a seat a month billed yearly, adds Notion Agent, which writes pages and fills in databases, and AI Meeting Notes.

Evernote's AI Transcribe and Notion's AI Meeting Notes both turn a meeting into text, and the apps in our best AI note taking app guide do that one job on their own.

Moving from Evernote to Notion

Notion has a built-in Evernote importer. Notion's import help gives the steps:

In Notion, open Settings, then Import, then Third party imports, and choose Evernote. Typing /evernote on a page does the same.
Sign in to Evernote and let it connect to Notion.
Tick the notebooks you want and pick where each one goes, such as your private space or an existing database.
Choose Import, and each notebook becomes a page in the sidebar with its notes inside as items in a list database.

Notion calls the import reliable up to 5,000 notes and says bigger ones can fail, and an Evernote Teams account won't import at all. There's no progress bar either. Pictures inside notes can arrive broken and created and edited dates can come in wrong, which is why you should open a dozen notes and check them before you delete anything in Evernote.

Back up first anyway. Evernote's export help says exports run only from the Mac and Windows apps, not Evernote Web, as ENEX or HTML files. You can export up to 100 notes at a time or a whole notebook, and Free users can export too.

Going back is rougher. Notion's export help covers pages as PDF or Markdown and databases as CSV, and the database structure stays behind when you attach those files to Evernote notes.

Try both for one week

Your own notes settle this faster than a feature table:

Day one: put the same four things in both apps. Use a typed note, a photo of a paper letter, a web article and a to-do list with dates on it.
Day two: search both apps for a word that appears only inside the photo.
Day three: turn the to-do list into a Notion database and sort it by date. In Evernote, put a reminder on the note.
Day four: open both on your phone and your laptop, and see what Evernote Free does with the second device.
Day five: switch on airplane mode and write one new note in each.
Day seven: count the notes you made. Multiply by 52 and hold that number next to Evernote's 50 and 1,000.

Keep the app you opened without thinking, and use a weekly reflection template on Sunday to see which one you trusted.

Made-up example: On the first day of his kitchen renovation, Tomas photographs a receipt for floor tiles into Evernote Free.

Over the next weeks every receipt and each builder's quote goes into his one notebook, tagged "kitchen", along with two clipped articles on tiling. When the oven needs a repair in May, he searches "serial" and the warranty photo comes up first.

By week five he has 47 notes and the 50-note cap is close. He doesn't want to delete receipts, so he looks at Starter at US$99 a year.

Instead, he moves the quotes to Notion Free. A Quotes database holds one row per builder, with columns for price, start date and status, and a page behind each row for his call notes. Every Monday he filters it to "waiting for reply".

Receipts stay in Evernote, plans live in Notion, and he has paid US$0 so far.