Should You Switch From Evernote to Obsidian?

Updated June 21, 2026 · Data as of April 20, 2026

Should You Switch from Evernote to Obsidian? A 2026 Guide

Open Evernote today, and try to add a 51st note. You can't. The free plan locks the door at 50. So is it time to jump to Obsidian? In the next eight minutes, you'll know if switching saves you money — or wastes a weekend. If you keep more than 50 notes and don't need team collaboration, switching saves about $34 a year. You also get full ownership of your files. Plan on one to two weeks of friction while you rebuild tags, sync, and search workflows.

Key Takeaways:
- Evernote's free plan is effectively unusable for anyone keeping more than 50 notes.
- Obsidian costs nothing to use locally and offers deeper linking, but the setup curve is steeper.
- Your decision hinges on note volume, technical comfort, and whether you need team features.
- Business users should look elsewhere — Evernote's Teams plan runs $20.83/user/month, and Obsidian doesn't support multi-user editing.

Data as of April 2026.

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The Breaking Point: How Evernote's Free Plan Became a Barrier

For ten years, Evernote was the default digital notebook. Then in late 2022, an Italian software company called Bending Spoons bought it. Bending Spoons is known for acquiring mature apps and aggressively monetizing them. They did it to Meetup (Bending Spoons, January 2023). They did it to WeTransfer (Bending Spoons, November 2023). You can guess what came next.

One year after the deal, the squeeze hit. In December 2023, Evernote capped free accounts at 50 notes and 1 notebook, with a 25 MB size limit on each note, as TechCrunch reported at the time.

For occasional users, the cap might feel manageable. For anyone building a real knowledge base, 50 notes barely cover a month. A single long-form draft with embedded images can blow through it on its own.

In August 2024, Evernote tightened the screws again. Free accounts were restricted to 1 device at a time, per Evernote's own announcement. You can no longer sync your phone and laptop without paying. That one change pushes anyone serious into the Personal plan just for basic cross-device use.

That's the trap Evernote built. Now let's talk about what it costs to stay — or to leave.

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Cost Comparison: Obsidian's Free Model vs Evernote's Pricing Hikes

Here's the money math, in plain numbers. Evernote Personal: $129.99 a year. Obsidian by itself: zero. Add their sync service and you're at $96 a year (billed annually at $8/month, per obsidian.md/pricing). That's roughly a $34 swing — straight back into your pocket.

Plugins tell a similar story. Evernote ships a limited set of official integrations — verify the current count at evernote.com/integrations before stating a number. Obsidian has over two thousand community plugins. That's not a small gap. That's a different category of tool.

Recommended reading: Limited

If you're on Evernote Personal at $129.99/year, switching to a free local-only Obsidian setup wipes the entire subscription, per Evernote's pricing page. Add Obsidian Sync at $5/month or $60/year billed annually, per obsidian.md/pricing, and you're still saving roughly $70/year while getting Markdown files you actually own.

So that's the cost story. What about the features? Saving $70 doesn't matter if you hate using the tool every day.

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Feature Face-Off: Capture Speed vs Knowledge Graph

Evernote and Obsidian solve note-taking from opposite ends.

Evernote is built for speed. You clip a webpage, snap a receipt, dictate a thought. Within seconds, it's tagged and searchable in your inbox. The mobile app is polished. OCR — optical character recognition, the feature that lets you search text inside photos — works out of the box. If your job is "capture now, find later," Evernote still does that better than almost anything.

Obsidian is built for synthesis. Your notes connect through bidirectional links. The graph view shows how your ideas relate. The plugin ecosystem lets you reshape the editor into whatever workflow you need. It's slower to capture into, and it demands setup before it pays back. But once your notes are linked, it works as a thinking tool — not just a storage bin.

Pick based on the job you do most. Spend more time capturing than connecting? Evernote wins. Spend more time linking ideas than collecting them? Obsidian wins. If you keep 1,200 cross-referenced research notes, you'll get more value from Obsidian's graph view. If your day is snapping receipts and contracts on the go, you'll get more from Evernote's mobile capture.

Speed of capture or depth of connection — that's the real choice. Now let's look at what happens to your notes long-term.

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Data Ownership & Reliability: Why Local Storage Matters

Evernote stores everything in its proprietary cloud. Convenient for syncing. Painful for portability. Exporting requires Evernote's proprietary export format, called .enex, and the conversion can drop formatting, attachments, and metadata, as easel AI documents in its migration guide.

Obsidian stores your notes as plain-text Markdown files in a folder on your disk. Open them in any text editor. Back them up with any tool. Move to another app any time you want.

Setup costs more effort upfront — you configure sync yourself, and plugins don't install themselves. But your data is yours, in a format that will outlive any single piece of software.

OK, you're sold on owning your files. Here's how you actually move them.

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How to Switch: A Migration Guide from Evernote to Obsidian

This is the weekend workflow that gets you from Evernote to a working Obsidian vault.

1. Export Your Notes

In Evernote, select your notebooks and use File → Export Notes to download .enex files. Install Obsidian and create a new vault — that's just a folder on your disk where the converted notes will live.

2. Import to Obsidian

Use the official Importer plugin from the Obsidian team. You'll find it under Community Plugins inside the app. It converts .enex files into Markdown, preserving attachments, tags, and most formatting. Third-party scripts like easel's converter are useful for edge cases.

3. Set Up Sync

For official sync, enable Obsidian Sync at $8/month billed annually ($96/year), per obsidian.md/pricing. For free alternatives, drop your vault into iCloud, Dropbox, or Syncthing. Many users get reliable sync this way without paying a cent.

4. Customize Your Workflow

Browse the community plugin directory at obsidian.md/plugins to rebuild your Evernote features. The Text Extractor community plugin (by mnaoumov) handles OCR on images and PDFs. Data view gives you database-style queries across your notes. Obsidian also ships a built-in Bases view for working with notes in tabular form.

That covers the move. But should you even bother? Let's talk about who shouldn't.

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When to Stay with Evernote

Obsidian isn't the right tool for everyone. A few cases still favor Evernote.

• Heavy mobile capture. If most of your notes start as phone photos or quick clips, Evernote's mobile app is faster and more polished.
• Built-in OCR. Evernote's image-search just works. Obsidian needs a plugin and some setup on your end.
• Light personal use. If you keep fewer than 50 notes total and don't need cross-device sync, the free plan still covers you.
• Small-team sharing. Neither tool is great for collaboration, but Evernote's shared notebooks edge out Obsidian's read-only publish feature for casual team use, per Evernote's plan comparison.

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How We Evaluated

We compared Evernote and Obsidian using each company's published pricing pages, official documentation, and verified user feedback from G2 and the r/Obsidian MD and r/Evernote subreddits. Pricing reflects what's posted on each site as of April 2026. Plugin and feature claims were verified against obsidian.md and evernote.com directly. Full methodology lives at (/how-we-evaluate/).

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Final Verdict

If you keep more than 50 notes and don't need real-time team editing, the math favors Obsidian. You save roughly $70 a year. You own your files. You get a tool built for thinking, not storage. If your workflow is mostly mobile capture, image search, or shared notebooks for a small team, stay on Evernote.

Here's your weekend plan. Tonight: export your Evernote notebooks. Tomorrow: install Obsidian and the official Importer plugin. Sunday: rebuild your three most-used tags. By Monday morning, you'll know if this fits how you actually think. Worst case? You lose a weekend — not a year of subscription fees. If this saves you a subscription, follow for more software-cost teardowns — we do one a week. Next up: the Notion versus Obsidian fight, and the answer might surprise you. Drop a comment with the app you'd kill next.

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Sources

• evernote.com: compare plans
• Evernote: Free Plan Changes August 2024
• TechCrunch: Evernote Free Plan Limits
• obsidian.md: pricing
• obsidian.md: plugins
• easel: Evernote to Obsidian Migration Guide

Found an error? At Canopy Press, accuracy comes first. If you spot a claim that needs checking, let us know at [email protected] — we'll verify and correct it immediately.

Found an error? At Canopy Press, accuracy comes first. If you spot a claim that needs checking, let us know at [email protected] — we'll verify and correct it immediately.

Sources

• Obsidian Official Pricing Page
• Evernote Compare Plans
• Evernote Help: Understanding Free Plan Limits (50 Notes / 1 Notebook)
• Evernote Blog: Free limit changes August 2024
• Evernote Help: Discontinuing Personal & Professional / Introducing Starter & Advanced
• TechCrunch: Evernote will restrict free users to 50 notes
• Engadget: Evernote officially limits free users to 50 notes
• Evernote Blog: Our most productive year yet — 160+ improvements in 2025
• Evernote Help: AI Features Overview
• Obsidian Help: Introduction to Bases