Evernote vs Joplin: $249 a year or free (2026)

Evernote exports to ENEX or HTML. Joplin's ENEX importer is the best-supported route out of Evernote that exists, which is why it is the standard recommendation on forums full of people doing this. Notebooks become notebooks, tags survive, and attachments land as Joplin resources rather than as broken links, which is more than most converters manage.

Budget time anyway. Ten years of clippings include tables, embedded PDFs, handwritten scans, and web pages saved as ENML, and some of that arrives approximately. Run the import on a subset first and read a hundred notes before you cancel your subscription. The one thing that does not come across is OCR: Evernote's document search finds text inside your scans, and Joplin does not do that work at all.

Evernote under Bending Spoons is roughly $99 a year for Starter and $249.99 for Advanced, with free restricted to about 50 notes in a single notebook. That restriction produced a large public backlash, and the layoffs after the acquisition damaged trust further. Ten years on Starter is close to a thousand dollars for notes you wrote yourself.

Joplin is free on every platform with no feature held back. Joplin Cloud is optional at about €2.40 a month for Basic, €4.79 for Pro, and €6.69 for Teams, and you can decline all of it and sync through Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV, or S3 instead. End-to-end encryption is available over any of those backends. There is no tier that stops you writing note 51.

This is Evernote's half of the page. Its web clipper remains excellent and its OCR finds text inside scanned pages and photographs, which is a genuinely hard problem that Joplin does not attempt. Task and calendar integration tie notes to a day, and the desktop and mobile apps are mature after many years of work.

Joplin's clipper is also very good, and that comparison is closer than the price one. Its interface, though, is widely described as dated next to modern rivals, and it is a volunteer-paced project rather than a funded product. Sync conflicts need manual resolution when two devices edit the same note, which is real friction rather than a footnote. Backlinks and any graph come from third-party plugins, not the core app.

Evernote notes are ENML in Evernote's cloud, and export gives you ENEX or HTML. Neither is markdown, so any future move is a conversion project, and every year you stay makes the project larger.

Joplin's notes are markdown, stored in an SQLite database rather than as files on disk. That is a real limitation and Obsidian switchers write about it on Joplin's own forum. It is also a much shallower hole than ENML: the export is markdown, the code is AGPL-3.0 so nobody can revoke your reader, and the database schema is documented. Both apps keep your notes inside a container. Only one of them lets you read the source of the container.

Evernote runs on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web. Joplin runs on all of those except the web, and adds Linux and a terminal client. Both are Electron. Evernote has years of persistent sync performance complaints behind it; Joplin has manual conflict resolution and a slower release cadence.

The asymmetry that matters is who is steering. Evernote's direction is set by Bending Spoons and the last few years of pricing tell you what that means. Joplin's direction is set by a maintainer and a community, so it moves slowly and it cannot be sold out from under you.

Evernote's 2026 tiers are about $99 a year for Starter and $249.99 for Advanced, with free capped near 50 notes and one notebook. Joplin is free, and free stays free if you sync through Dropbox, Nextcloud, or WebDAV storage you already have; Joplin Cloud is €2.40 to €6.69 a month if you want the vendor to run it. Over five years that is roughly $495 to $1,250 on Evernote against zero to €287 on Joplin. Valutorio is a paid Mac App Store app with no sync fee. On money this page has one answer and it is not Evernote.