Fifty notes is what is left of the free Evernote

24 puts Evernote in our bottom band, Barely free, which reads as free in name with payment expected before you finish anything real. Nothing else in note-taking scores lower, and the nearest tool above it is Confluence at 52, more than double.

Generosity at 10 is the number doing it. Fifty notes on one device in a category where most tools hand you the entire application for nothing is the tightest free plan we score here by a wide margin.

Feature depth at 22 is not a comment on the product. Evernote's search inside scanned images and PDFs is still better than anything free in this category, and its clipper is still the most reliable one. None of that helps at 50 notes on a single device, and this pillar measures the free tier rather than the software.

Freedom at 25 has one genuinely good component inside it, which is the exit. ENEX export carries attachments, tags and metadata, and Joplin, Obsidian, Anytype and Notion all read it.

Sentiment sits at 50: we hold G2 4.4, Trustpilot 3.7 and Capterra 4.4 (checked 24 July 2026), and the Capterra profile is the Evernote Business listing, so those numbers describe paying customers rather than anyone living on 50 notes.

The free plan's caps, in the order you meet them (as of July 2026):

• 50 notes. An afternoon of meeting notes and a shopping list gets you a meaningful way through this.
• 1 notebook. No structure beyond tags, and there are only 20 of those.
• 1 synced device. The one that hurts most in practice. Capture on your phone and read on your laptop is the basic promise of a note app, and it is not on the free plan.
• 5 spaces, 20 tags, 200 attachments, 1 GB of storage.

There is no expiry date on any of that, which is what makes it a trial with no clock rather than a free tier. Nothing forces a decision, you simply cannot do the job.

The other limitation is one of history rather than the plan card, and it is fair to name because it affects whether you want to build on Evernote at all. Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in 2023 and has since retired the older Personal and Professional tiers and reshaped the plans, and repeated price increases and plan reshuffles have worn out long-time users. The desktop app has also had a decade of performance complaints that are not fully resolved.

One number we hold with less confidence than the rest, stated so you can weigh it: Evernote's own price map keys the $249.99 per year tier as Business or Teams while its comparison table calls it Advanced. That is the softest label in our Evernote data.

Starter is $99 per year or $14.99 per month, and it is the plan that makes Evernote usable: it lifts the note and notebook caps and adds multi-device sync. That is the honest description of the first paid step. You are not buying more of something, you are buying the ability to use the app on more than one machine.

Advanced is $249.99 per year or $24.99 per month and is the only self-serve tier with unlimited notes. Enterprise is custom-priced with account and content administration. Paid plans offer a 7-day trial.

Set $99 a year against the rest of this category and the comparison is stark rather than close. Obsidian, Logseq, Joplin, SiYuan and Standard Notes all give you unlimited notes on unlimited devices for nothing, and Joplin reproduces Evernote's own notebooks, tags and clipper workflow specifically.

The feature people pay for, when they do, is not note count. It is search inside scanned documents and photos, which nothing free in this category matches. If your archive is photographed receipts and scanned paper, that capability is the argument for Advanced and it is a real one.

No, and our answer is taster. Fifty notes in one notebook on one synced device is a demonstration of a note app, not a way to keep notes, and the absence of an expiry date does not change that.

Who can genuinely use the free plan: somebody evaluating the clipper and the OCR before deciding whether to pay, and nobody else we can think of. Who cannot: anyone who wants notes on both their phone and their laptop, which is the single most common reason people use a note app at all.

That said, Evernote is not a bad product, it is an expensive one whose free tier no longer serves anybody. If your notes are mostly scanned documents you need to search, paying for Advanced is a defensible decision, because no free tool here matches search inside images and PDFs.

Everyone else should export an ENEX file from the desktop app, which keeps attachments, tags and metadata, and land somewhere else. Joplin's free plan is the closest reproduction of the workflow you already know, at no cost, and it has the best-tested ENEX import in this category. Free Evernote alternatives ranks the rest, and best free note-taking and docs tools covers the category.