How to leave Evernote in 2026 (and where to take your notes)

30 September 2026 · By the Gethrs team

Full disclosure: this article is written by the people building Gethrs, one of the alternatives covered below. We tried to write it the way we'd want to read it: real steps, real limits, and honest reasons to pick a different app.

If you've used Evernote for years, you probably have two problems at once. The first is the price, which has gone up several times recently. The second is that your notes, sometimes thousands of them, are all in there, and moving them feels like a huge job. It isn't, if you do it in order. This guide takes you from export to final check without losing anything along the way.

Why so many people are leaving

Since December 4, 2023, the free plan has been limited to 50 notes and a single notebook. People with more notes could still view and export them, but not create new ones.

On the paid plans, the part that surprises people most is the note count. As of late August 2026, according to Evernote's own plan pages, the $99-a-year plan stops at 1,000 notes. Past that, the only option is Advanced at $249.99 a year. Anyone who has used Evernote for a decade is easily past 1,000 notes, and often only finds out at renewal time.

Evernote's pricing has changed many times since Bending Spoons acquired it, so always check the official plans page before deciding.

That said, Evernote is still a solid product for plenty of people. If you use it every day, it works for you, and the price is fine for you, there's no reason to switch just because others are.

Before you start: five checks

Check your renewal date. Give yourself at least two weeks to export, import and verify.
Count your notes. You'll need the number to estimate the work and to confirm at the end that everything arrived.
Find your encrypted notes. Text encrypted with Evernote's feature stays encrypted in the export file. Decrypt it first if you want it readable elsewhere.
Spot your largest notebooks. Notebooks with thousands of notes or heavy attachments are the most likely to fail on export.
Install the desktop app. Exporting to .enex only works from the Mac and Windows apps, not from the web or your phone.

Step 1: export your notes as .enex

The .enex format is Evernote's export file. It holds text, tags, dates and attachments, and it's what almost every other app can import.

Open the Evernote app for Mac or Windows.
In the sidebar, right-click a notebook and choose Export Notebook. In recent versions you can also select several notebooks and export them together: you'll get one .enex file per notebook.
Choose the ENEX format (not HTML, which is meant for reading and loses some structure).
Keep the attributes you care about checked: tags, created date, updated date, author.
For a large notebook, set the maximum size of each file: Evernote lets you split the export into files between 300 MB and 2 GB.
Save the files in a dedicated folder, for example "Evernote export 2026".

Note that if you select individual notes instead of whole notebooks, Evernote exports at most 100 at a time. For a complete archive, always work notebook by notebook.

If the export fails. With notebooks of several thousand notes, the export sometimes stops with an error. The simplest fix is to split the notebook: create two or three temporary notebooks, move notes by year or topic, and export the pieces one at a time.

Step 2: check your export

Before importing anything, make sure you really have everything:

One .enex file per notebook, with the right name.
Plausible file sizes: a notebook full of PDFs that weighs a few kilobytes is suspicious.
A backup copy of the folder, on an external drive or in the cloud. These files are your archive: keep them even after the move.

Step 3: choose where to take your notes

There's no single best alternative. It depends on what you actually used in Evernote. Here are the most common options, with their strengths and limits.

App	Good for people who	Import from Evernote	Watch out for
Obsidian	Want Markdown files on their own computer and like customising	Official Importer plugin reads .enex files	Syncing across devices is a paid service or a manual setup; searching text in images and PDFs isn't built in
Joplin	Want a free, open-source app that can run locally	Built-in .enex import	Plainer interface; you set up sync with a service of your choice
Apple Notes	Only use Apple devices and want simplicity	Imports .enex files directly on Mac	Apple ecosystem only; simpler organisation than Evernote
Notesnook	Put privacy first (end-to-end encryption)	Dedicated Evernote importer	Some features are paid-plan only
UpNote	Want a fast, Evernote-like app with a lifetime licence	.enex import	Fewer advanced features; check the current licence price
Notion	Want a wiki or database more than a notebook	Evernote import	A different way of working: notes become pages, and offline use is limited
Gethrs	Want notebooks, tasks and search inside PDFs and photos like Evernote, without AI	.enex import from Settings → Import	It's in beta and browser-only, with no native apps to install

Three questions that help you choose:

Did you rely on searching text inside photos and scanned PDFs? If so, it's the feature most often missing from free alternatives. Check it first.
Do you want files on your computer or in the cloud? Obsidian and Joplin favour local files; the others store notes online.
Which devices do you write on? If you use Windows and an iPhone, Apple Notes is out; if you want a native phone app, make sure there is one.

Step 4: import and verify

Don't import everything and forget about it. Do a test run first:

Import a single notebook, ideally a varied one: text, tables, images, PDFs.
Open twenty notes at random and check that attachments, tags and original dates are there.
Search for a word you know is inside a PDF or photo, to see whether search finds it.
If all is well, import the rest and compare the total note count with the number you wrote down at the start.

What usually doesn't come over perfectly

Even with the best app, a few things may need touching up:

Links between notes. Evernote's internal note links often stop working in the new app.
Encrypted text. It stays encrypted, as mentioned above.
Pages saved with the Web Clipper. The content arrives, but the layout may change.
Unusual formatting. Complex tables, colours and fonts may get simplified.

Step 5: close Evernote without rushing

Keep your Evernote account until you've used the new app for at least a week or two.
Turn off auto-renewal before the due date, so you don't get charged for another year.
Keep your .enex files. They're your complete archive, and you can re-import them into any app, even years from now.

In short

Leaving Evernote takes an afternoon of orderly work, not a week of panic. Export notebook by notebook to .enex from the desktop app, back up the files, test the import on one notebook before moving everything, and pick an app based on what you actually used, not on the longest feature list.

If the feature you need most is finding text inside PDFs and photos, and you want an app that feels like Evernote did a few years ago, without AI assistants, you can try the free Gethrs beta at gethrs.app. If another app in the table suits you better, that's great too: what matters is that your notes are yours again.