Obsidian vs Evernote: The exit and what it costs (2026)

Your two export formats out of Evernote are ENEX and HTML. Obsidian imports neither, because Obsidian has no importer at all: it opens a folder of markdown files and that is the whole interface to your data. So the route runs Evernote to ENEX, ENEX through a converter such as yarle or Joplin as a waypoint, then the resulting .md folder becomes your vault.

What survives well is note text, basic formatting, notebook structure as folders, and tags. What needs attention is attachments, since ENEX embeds them and a markdown folder wants them as files beside the notes. What needs more attention is tables, nested lists, and web clips saved as ENML, all of which arrive approximately.

What does not survive at all is the OCR layer. Evernote reads text inside your photographs and scans and makes it searchable; that index belongs to Evernote and is not in the export. Convert a hundred notes first, search for words you know are inside images, and confirm you can live without the answers before you cancel anything.

Evernote's 2026 tiers under Bending Spoons are roughly $99 a year for Starter and $249.99 for Advanced, with the free plan restricted to about 50 notes in one notebook. That cap produced a public backlash, and the post-acquisition layoffs damaged trust separately from the pricing.

Obsidian has been free for personal and commercial use since February 2025. A $50 per user per year commercial licence exists if you want to fund the project, and nothing about the app depends on buying it. The only real recurring cost is Obsidian Sync at $4-5 a month, or nothing if you sync with iCloud, Syncthing, or the community git plugin.

Five years of Evernote Starter is about $495 and Advanced about $1,250. Five years of Obsidian is $0 to $300 depending on whether you buy Sync. This is the section that decides the page for most readers.

There are no wikilinks in Evernote, no backlinks pane, and no graph. Organisation is notebooks, tags, and search, which is a good filing cabinet and a poor thinking tool. Twenty years of Evernote never added the ability to ask which notes reference this one, because that was never what the product was for.

Obsidian is built around exactly that question. Type two brackets and pick a note; the link is bidirectional from that moment. The target's backlinks pane shows the source, the graph gains an edge, and unlinked mentions appear as suggestions you can convert. Past a thousand notes this is the difference between an archive you search and a body of work you navigate.

It also changes what you write. People who move from notebooks to a linked vault tend to write shorter, more specific notes, because a note that links out does not have to contain everything.

Evernote's web clipper is excellent and remains the reason a lot of unhappy subscribers keep paying. Its OCR finds text inside scanned pages and photographs. Tasks and calendar integration tie a note to a day, and the apps on all five platforms are mature after many years of work.

Obsidian has no clipper of its own, no OCR, and no task system in core. Community plugins fill some of that in, with the usual caveats that quality varies, mobile compatibility is a documented problem, and a plugin's maintenance is outside the project's control. If most of your notes arrive from a browser rather than a keyboard, Obsidian is the wrong shape for your habit and a clipper plugin will not fix it.

Evernote keeps notes as ENML in Evernote's cloud. There is nothing on your disk that corresponds to a note you wrote, and every year you stay makes the eventual conversion larger. That is the structural fact behind the pricing anger: people discovered the cost of leaving at the same moment they discovered the cost of staying.

Point Obsidian at a directory and that directory is the vault. Each note is a single .md file carrying whatever filename you typed. Spotlight indexes it, ripgrep searches it, Pandoc converts it, and none of that needs Obsidian to be running. Uninstall Obsidian and every file stays put. This property does not depend on Dynalist Inc. staying in business or keeping its prices, which is exactly why it matters to anyone who just lived through Evernote's changes.

Evernote's 2026 tiers are roughly $99 a year for Starter and $249.99 for Advanced, with free capped near 50 notes in one notebook. Obsidian is free for personal and commercial use since February 2025, with a $50 per user per year commercial licence that is entirely optional and Sync at $4-5 a month if you want it. Over five years that is $495 to $1,250 on Evernote against $0 to $300 on Obsidian. Valutorio asks for a Mac App Store payment and, if you want sync between Macs, a further optional subscription; on price alone it does not beat a free Obsidian synced through iCloud. The honest counterweight is that Evernote's clipper and OCR are real capabilities, and if you use them weekly the bill is buying something neither alternative offers.