Summary. Evernote is a note application that collects notes, PDFs, photos, web clippings and audio recordings in one place and makes all of it searchable. A great deal has changed since the first version of this guide: Evernote was acquired by the Italian software company Bending Spoons for 199.7 million dollars, completed in January 2023; the old Basic, Plus and Premium plans were retired; and the free plan was capped at 50 notes, 1 notebook and 1 device. In return, the app gained an AI assistant built in close collaboration with OpenAI, semantic search, and features that transcribe and summarise meetings. This guide covers what Evernote looks like today, its plans and prices, our own annual-cost comparison against the alternatives, and the question that actually matters when choosing: when does note-taking genuinely pay off? The research is clear on this. Capturing a note has a modest effect on its own; the real gain arrives when you go back and rework what you captured.
Why this guide changed
The earlier version of this page described Evernote through its Basic, Plus, Premium and Business plans, quoted prices for tiers that no longer exist, and discussed features such as Work Chat. None of those plans are sold any more: Evernote’s current plan comparison page lists only Free, Starter, Advanced, Flexible and Enterprise. We removed the outdated prices, the first-person walkthrough and the stale feature list, and replaced them with information that can be verified from Evernote’s own pages and from Bending Spoons’ filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
What is Evernote?
Evernote is a cloud-based note and knowledge-management application that runs on desktop, mobile and in the browser. Its core structure is unchanged:
- Notes and notebooks: every note lives in one notebook. Notebooks can be grouped into stacks, which are visible only to you and cannot be shared.
- Tags: a note can carry several tags, so the same note can be found from different contexts.
- Web Clipper: a browser extension for Chrome, Safari and Firefox saves a page, or part of one, straight into Evernote.
- Search inside documents and images: Evernote searches text inside PDFs, Office files, images and scanned documents.
- Tasks and calendar: tasks with recurring dates can be created inside notes, and Google and Outlook calendars can be connected.
- Templates: meeting notes, project plans and similar structures are available as starting points.
The biggest difference in 2026 is the AI layer. Evernote introduced version 11 on 19 January 2026, announcing it as the first significant release since v10 arrived in 2020 and saying more than 250 new features and improvements had shipped since 2023. Version 11 brought three AI features: AI Assistant (a chat assistant that works across your own notes, which Evernote says was developed in close collaboration with OpenAI), Semantic Search (search by meaning, even when you cannot recall the exact wording) and AI Meeting Notes (recording in-person, online or hybrid meetings and generating a transcript with speaker recognition, plus a summary). The product pages also list AI Transcribe, AI Rewrite, AI Text To Speech, AI Diagrams and AI Detector.
Who owns Evernote, and why it matters
Evernote announced on 16 November 2022 that it would be sold to Bending Spoons; the acquisition closed on 3 January 2023. Bending Spoons’ June 2026 listing prospectus, the Form 424B4 filed with the SEC, contains details worth knowing before you commit an archive to any tool:
- Total acquisition consideration of 199.7 million dollars.
- More than 200 million people had created an Evernote account before the acquisition; the prospectus puts average customer tenure at acquisition at 7.2 years.
- Evernote contributed 95.0 million dollars of revenue and 11.3 million dollars of income before tax to Bending Spoons’ 2023 consolidated accounts.
- Full-time equivalent team members dedicated to Evernote fell from 341 at acquisition to 60 by the end of 2024, which the prospectus gives as a reduction of 82 percent. That is an end-2024 snapshot: the prospectus also states that after the Harvest acquisition in July 2025 roughly half of the team previously dedicated to Evernote was redeployed. Evernote had announced in July 2023 that it was moving the bulk of its operations to Europe.
- New user registrations had fallen 23 percent in 2021, 23 percent in 2022 and 20 percent in 2023; they then grew 29 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2025.
- The company estimates that AI features contributed more than 2 million additional registrations and 50,000 incremental subscription conversions. The prospectus says “subscription conversions”, which counts events rather than a total number of paying subscribers.
What this means for you as a user: Evernote survives as a smaller team running a product that is growing again, and its new owner has shown no hesitation about rebuilding prices and plans. Narrowing the free plan is the most visible consequence. If you would rather not tie your knowledge archive to one company’s pricing decisions, make regular exports a habit.
Evernote plans and prices (September 2026)
The information below was read from Evernote’s plan comparison page. Evernote prices by country, so the amounts you see will depend on where you are; the figures here are the United States list prices.
Table 1. Evernote personal plans (United States list prices)
| Plan | Core limits | Annual | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Up to 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device | Free | Free |
| Starter | Up to 1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, 3 devices; AI features | $99 | $14.99 |
| Advanced | Unlimited notes, notebooks and devices; AI features | $249.99 | $24.99 |
Flexible and Enterprise plans are available for teams. The free plan still includes tasks, calendar, Web Clipper and in-document search, but the 50-note ceiling makes it effectively impossible to use Evernote as a real archive. Because Evernote Web counts as a device, the free plan gives you no sync between phone and computer.
How the alternatives compare: what does the first paid tier cost per year?
It is worth looking at tools that do the same job before committing. The table below uses the United States prices published on each tool’s own official pages, and we calculated the annual cost ourselves so the tiers are comparable. Prices differ by country.
Table 2. Note apps: free-tier limit and annual cost of the first paid tier (official pages, September 2026; annual cost calculated by CEOtudent)
| App | Free tier limit | First paid tier | Annual cost, billed annually | Annual cost, billed monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Evernote | 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device | Starter | $99 | $179.88 |
| Notion | Free plan available; AI only as a trial | Plus | $120 | No monthly-billing price published |
| Obsidian | The app itself is free and unlimited | Sync (optional sync) | $48 | $60 |
| Microsoft OneNote | All supported versions free; some premium features via Microsoft 365 | Microsoft 365 Personal | $99.99 | $119.88 |
| Apple Notes | Free; 5 GB of free iCloud storage | iCloud+ 50 GB | No annual price published | $11.88 |
| Google Keep | Free | No separate paid tier | $0 | $0 |
Annual cost when billed monthly is the monthly price published on the official page multiplied by twelve. Notion’s pricing page shows a single price (ten dollars per member per month) with no separate monthly-billing figure, so we left that cell empty. Obsidian Sync is $4 per month billed annually and $5 billed monthly. Microsoft 365 Personal is $99.99 a year or $9.99 a month. iCloud+ 50 GB is $0.99 a month, with no annual price given on the page.
Three conclusions follow. First, Evernote is no longer a “start free, decide later” tool: 50 notes is enough to try it, not to use it. Second, Evernote’s annual price now sits in the same band as a general-purpose office suite: Starter is $99 and Microsoft 365 Personal is $99.99, and the latter includes Word, Excel and a terabyte of cloud storage. That forces the question of whether Evernote is genuinely better at search and in-document scanning. Third, the price gap is really a question of where your data lives: Obsidian keeps notes on your own device as plain Markdown files and charges only for sync, while Evernote sells search, in-document scanning and the AI layer as a cloud service.
Which tool for which job?
Choosing a note app comes down to one question: what do you want to do with the notes? The framework below maps jobs to tools based on features verified on each product’s official pages.
Table 3. Choosing a note tool by job (CEOtudent editorial framework)
| The job you want done | What it requires | Is Evernote a fit? | Strong alternative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast capture: ideas, lists, reminders | Opens instantly, available on phone and desktop | Yes, but the free plan is limited to one device | Apple Notes, Google Keep |
| Document and clipping archive: PDFs, invoices, articles, screenshots | Web clipping, text search inside documents and images | A core strength; requires a paid plan | OneNote |
| Meeting notes and recordings | Recording, transcription, summary | Fits, via AI Meeting Notes and AI Transcribe | Your meeting tool’s own transcription |
| Team wiki and project database | Shared pages, database views | Limited | Notion |
| Long-term thinking and a personal knowledge base | Linked notes, ownership of the files | Usable, but data sits in the cloud in a closed format | Obsidian |
| Course or lecture notes for learning | Reviewing notes on a schedule | The tool is secondary; the review habit decides the outcome | Any of them |
We covered how AI-recorded and AI-summarised meetings are changing team norms separately in our piece on AI meeting notes.
Does note-taking actually work? What the research says
Whichever app you pick, the value of your notes depends on what you do with them. Research in educational psychology is fairly consistent on this point.
Table 4. Selected research on note-taking
| Source | Scope | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Kobayashi, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2005 | Meta-analysis of 57 note-taking versus no-note-taking comparisons | Examines why the benefit of note-taking stays limited; the author attributes the limit to the mechanical demands of note-taking, the type of learning outcome measured and publication characteristics, rather than to students taking incomplete notes |
| Kobayashi, Educational Psychology, 2006 | Meta-analysis of 33 studies | The combined effect of taking notes and reviewing them is, in the author’s word, substantial |
| Mueller and Oppenheimer, Psychological Science, 2014 (corrigendum issued 2018) | 3 studies | Laptop note-takers scored lower than longhand note-takers on conceptual questions; laptop users tended to transcribe verbatim. The 2018 corrigendum reported that standardised scores in the data files had been computed before participant exclusions and never recalculated |
| Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson, Educational Psychology Review, 2019 | Direct replication and extension | No consistent difference between groups, and that held for a group who took no notes at all. Differences shrank further once students studied their notes. The authors’ conclusion: it is premature to declare a superior method |
| Urry and colleagues, Psychological Science, 2021 | Preregistered direct replication (142 students) plus a mini meta-analysis of 8 studies | Laptop users took more notes and more verbatim notes, but did not perform better on the test. Pooled across eight studies the quiz-performance difference is g = 0.04 (95% CI -0.13 to 0.20), indistinguishable from zero, while the difference in note quantity (g = -0.91) and verbatim overlap (g = -0.78) is large |
| Flanigan and colleagues, Educational Psychology Review, 2024 | 24 studies, 3,005 participants; 49 effect sizes in the achievement analysis | The overall achievement effect of handwriting is g = 0.248. The real distinction is review: where studies included a formal review period the effect is g = 0.421 (9 effect sizes), against 0.208 where they did not (34 effect sizes), a significant subgroup difference (p = 0.019). A separate analysis finds typed notes contain more words and ideas (g = 0.919), which is a note-quantity effect, not an achievement effect |
Three practical conclusions follow:
- Capturing is not learning; the gain is in going back. In the 2024 meta-analysis the overall effect of handwriting is g = 0.248, but in studies that included a formal review period it rises to g = 0.421, and the difference is statistically significant. One caveat belongs with it: only 9 of 49 effect sizes involved a review period, so that subgroup is small. The direction is clear enough to give you the right question when judging a note tool: does this make capturing easier, or does it make returning easier? Evernote’s search power is valuable precisely to the extent that it serves the second.
- Easy capture can turn into shallow processing. Keyboards and clipping tools let you save more; but content transcribed verbatim has not been processed the way content you summarised in your own words has. An AI summary can widen that distance by another step: reading a summary is not the same cognitive work as writing one.
- The handwriting-versus-typing debate did not end the way it is usually told. One 2014 study echoed widely; it received a corrigendum in 2018, and preregistered replications found no difference in test performance. Pooling eight studies separates two things cleanly: the behavioural difference is real and large (typing produces more notes and more verbatim transcription), while the learning difference is indistinguishable from zero. Typing is not what hurts you; transcribing verbatim is. Optimise the habit of rewriting notes in your own words, not the tool.
Finally, to show why leaning on a single meta-analysis is risky here, the five meta-analytic estimates of handwriting’s overall achievement effect are worth seeing side by side. These figures come from the 2024 meta-analysis’s own comparison table.
Table 5. The achievement effect of handwritten notes across five meta-analyses
| Meta-analysis | Effect size (Hedges’ g) | 95% confidence interval |
|---|---|---|
| Allen and colleagues, 2020 | 0.250 | 0.127 to 0.371 |
| Flanigan and colleagues, 2024 | 0.248 | 0.181 to 0.315 |
| Lau, 2022 | 0.144 | 0.023 to 0.265 |
| Urry and colleagues, 2021 | 0.040 | -0.13 to 0.20 |
| Voyer and colleagues, 2022 | 0.008 | -0.16 to 0.18 |
Two of the five confidence intervals include zero, meaning those analyses cannot distinguish handwriting’s contribution from nothing at all. In the other three the effect is positive but small. You do not need to wait for this debate to settle before choosing a tool: whichever estimate you take, the effect is small, while the effect of a review habit is larger and more consistent.
This is the CEOtudent lens, “lead like a CEO, learn like a student”, applied to note-taking. The CEO side does not leave information scattered; it collects it in one archive and can retrieve it on demand. The student side goes back to that archive, rewrites the note in their own words, and notices what they did not understand. We explained why that second part matters more in the AI era in our piece on writing as thinking.
How to use Evernote: a practical 2026 setup
- Pick the plan first. If you intend to use Evernote as a real archive, the free plan will not do; Starter offers 1,000 notes and 3 devices. If you only want to try it, start free and decide before you hit 50 notes.
- Few notebooks, many tags. Use notebooks for broad areas (work, learning, personal, archive) and let tags carry the detail. A note lives in one notebook but can carry several tags, and tags do most of the work in search.
- Install Web Clipper. Save the article, invoice or recipe with one click. Add a one-sentence “why I saved this” note as you clip; six months later that sentence will be worth more than the clipping.
- Scan documents and move on. Because text inside PDFs, photos and handwritten notes is searchable, photographing paper into Evernote is a faster archive than filing it.
- Put tasks inside the note. Define the actions from a meeting as tasks in that same note and connect them to your calendar, so you do not lose the context.
- Use AI for retrieval and summary, not for thinking. Semantic search and the assistant are strong at finding what you once wrote. But if you want to understand a topic, write the summary yourself first, then compare it with the assistant’s.
- Run a weekly review. Set aside 20 minutes a week: tag new notes, delete what you do not need, and summarise the important ones in your own words. This is the step where the research says the real gain sits.
- Export regularly. Export your archive at intervals so a copy stays in your own hands.
Who is Evernote for, and who is it not for?
A good fit: people working with many documents, PDFs and web clippings who want to find them by searching their text, who want meetings recorded and transcribed, and who are ready to pay an annual subscription for it.
Less of a fit: people who want to use the tool free (the 50-note cap), people who care about notes sitting on their own device in an open format (Obsidian suits better), and teams who want a shared wiki and database (Notion suits better).
Frequently asked questions
Is Evernote free?
There is a free plan, but as of 2026 it is capped at 50 notes, 1 notebook and 1 device. Evernote Web counts as a device. Regular use requires Starter ($99 a year in the United States) or Advanced.
Is Evernote still a reliable choice?
Evernote has belonged to Bending Spoons since January 2023, and according to the company’s SEC prospectus new user registrations grew 29 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2025. The product is actively developed; but the full-time equivalent team dedicated to Evernote went from 341 to 60 by the end of 2024, and the plans were restructured. Exporting your notes regularly is a sensible precaution.
Does Evernote have AI features?
Yes. Version 11 in 2026 brought AI Assistant, semantic search and AI-powered meeting notes; AI Transcribe works in more than 50 languages. The plan comparison page lists AI features among the core features of the Starter and Advanced plans.
Evernote or Notion?
Evernote is stronger for a document and clipping archive, in-document search and meeting capture. Notion suits a team wiki, project databases and collaborative pages better. Billed annually, the first paid tiers are $99 for Evernote Starter and $120 for Notion Plus.
Is handwriting better than typing?
Less settled than it is usually presented. A widely echoed 2014 study favoured longhand; it received a corrigendum in 2018, and preregistered replications found no consistent difference in test performance. Pooled across eight studies the difference is g = 0.04, indistinguishable from zero. What does replicate consistently is that people typing take more notes and transcribe more verbatim. The problem is not the keyboard but verbatim transcription; writing the note in your own words and reviewing it is what makes the difference.
Sources
Evernote. Compare plans, read on 21 September 2026.
Evernote. Introducing Evernote v11: Get to know our smartest update yet (blog), 19 January 2026.
Evernote. Bending Spoons to Acquire Renowned Productivity App Evernote (blog), 16 November 2022; A New Phase in the History of Evernote (blog), 3 January 2023; Moving the Evernote center of operations to Europe (blog), 8 July 2023; Update: Evernote Free accounts will have fifty notes and one notebook (blog), 29 November 2023.
Bending Spoons S.p.A. Prospectus (Form 424B4), United States Securities and Exchange Commission, prospectus dated 30 June 2026, filed 1 July 2026.
Notion, Obsidian, Microsoft (Microsoft 365 product comparison page) and Apple (iCloud) official pricing pages, read on 21 September 2026.
Kobayashi, K. What limits the encoding effect of note-taking? A meta-analytic examination. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2005.
Kobayashi, K. Combined effects of note-taking/-reviewing on learning and the enhancement through interventions: a meta-analytic review. Educational Psychology, 2006.
Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 2014, volume 25, issue 6, pages 1159 to 1168.
Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. Corrigendum: The pen is mightier than the keyboard. Psychological Science, 2018, volume 29, issue 9, pages 1565 to 1568.
Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., and Rawson, K. A. How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? A replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014). Educational Psychology Review, 2019, volume 31, issue 3, pages 753 to 780.
Urry, H. L., and colleagues. Don’t ditch the laptop just yet: a direct replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) study 1 plus mini meta-analyses across similar studies. Psychological Science, 2021, volume 32, issue 3, pages 326 to 339.
Flanigan, A. E., Wheeler, J., Colliot, T., Lu, J., and Kiewra, K. A. Typed versus handwritten lecture notes and college student achievement: a meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 2024, volume 36, article 78. (The five-meta-analysis comparison in Table 5 is taken from this paper’s own comparison table.)
Annual costs in Table 2 were calculated by us from the monthly or annual price on each tool’s official page. Table 3 is a CEOtudent editorial framework.
This content was compiled with the support of AI following in-depth research, then written and prepared for publication by the CEOtudent editorial team.
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