The Best Free Alternatives to Evernote
Evernote has been around long enough that people have years of their life inside it. The question when you leave is not which app is best, but which app makes your existing notes useful rather than stranded.
Illustration generated by Nexulab. Inline photo by Anastasia Shuraeva via Pexels
- Joplin is the closest structural match to Evernote, with notebooks, tags and a web clipper, and it stores notes as Markdown files you control — the same principle that makes [Obsidian a better fit](/tools/best-free-alternatives-to-notion) for people who think in links rather than containers.
- Obsidian is a better tool for thinking and linking, but it is a different model — notes as a web rather than notes as a filing cabinet.
- The Evernote web clipper is genuinely hard to replicate, and for some people it is the reason to stay or the reason to find a specific replacement.
- Migrating out of Evernote is tedious because of volume, not complexity. Export by notebook, clean as you go, and expect it to take a weekend rather than an afternoon.
- If all you keep in Evernote is clipped articles and quick lists, you can leave in an afternoon and lose nothing.
The best free alternatives to Evernote exist because Evernote created the category and then made it easy to leave. It was the first tool that convinced people to put everything — notes, articles, receipts, research, scraps of thought — into one application. Many of those people have been doing it for more than a decade, and the amount of their life sitting in proprietary format is large enough to feel uncomfortable.
That discomfort, combined with a free tier that has steadily narrowed, is what drives the search for alternatives. The practical question is not which tool has the most features. It is which tool makes your existing notes useful rather than stranded.
Joplin: the closest structural match
Joplin is the answer if what you want is Evernote without the subscription. It builds on the same organizing principles — notebooks, tags, a web clipper browser extension, and sync between devices — and it stores your notes as Markdown files in a folder you control.
That file format matters. A Markdown file is readable by any text editor, searchable by any file system, and migratable to any tool that understands plain text. If Joplin disappeared tomorrow, your notes would survive as readable text in a folder. The same is not true of Evernote’s proprietary format.
Joplin also supports end-to-end encryption for synchronization, which Evernote does not offer. You can sync through a variety of backends — its own cloud service, Nextcloud, WebDAV, or any directory you can sync yourself — and the notes are encrypted before they leave your machine.
The Joplin web clipper is a browser extension that saves simplified or full-page content to your notebooks. It is the closest free equivalent to Evernote’s clipper, and while it is slightly less polished, it handles the common case of saving an article for later reading perfectly well.
What it suits: people who use Evernote as a filing cabinet and want the same workflow without paying for it.
Obsidian: better for thinking, different model
Obsidian is frequently recommended as an Evernote alternative, and it deserves the recommendation for a subset of Evernote users. It keeps everything as Markdown files in a local folder, builds links between notes, and creates a graph of how your notes connect. The plugin ecosystem covers tasks, calendars, kanban boards and more.
The difference is philosophical. Evernote and Joplin treat notes as documents in a hierarchy — notebooks containing notes, tagged and sorted. Obsidian treats notes as a web — each note can link to any other, backlinks show what references the current note, and the value accumulates as connections rather than as volume.
If Evernote is a shoebox where you put things to find later, Obsidian is a garden where things grow by being connected. Both are valid; they just suit different kinds of thinking, and both models coexist in the broader landscape of free alternatives to Notion — the same principles apply when migrating from any proprietary notes platform.
What it suits: people who use Evernote to think, write and develop ideas over time, rather than as a storage bin for clipped content.
Logseq: the daily-notes approach
Logseq is another Markdown-based tool, and its distinction is that it is organized around daily notes and outlines rather than documents. Every day starts with a fresh page, and you build structure by indenting bullets and linking between them.
This makes sense for people who think in outlines, keep a daily journal, or want their notes to feel like a conversation with themselves over time. It is less natural for people who work in documents and notebooks.
Logseq is open source, stores everything as plain files, and supports bidirectional linking similar to Obsidian. The two tools overlap in philosophy but differ in workflow: Obsidian is a document editor with linking, and Logseq is an outliner with linking.
What it suits: people who think in bullets and daily logs rather than long-form documents.
AppFlowy and Anytype: the newer contenders
AppFlowy and Anytype are both open-source tools that have gained attention as Evernote alternatives, though for different reasons.
AppFlowy is closer in spirit to Notion — it organizes content in pages made of blocks, with databases and views. If you left Evernote because you outgrew simple note-taking and want databases and boards in the same tool, AppFlowy is the direction to explore. (If Notion itself is what you are moving away from, we have a separate guide to the best free alternatives to Notion.)
Anytype is a local-first application that stores your data encrypted on your device and syncs it peer-to-peer. The interface uses objects and relations rather than notebooks, which is a conceptual shift from Evernote’s model. It is newer than the other tools on this list and the user experience is still maturing, but the architecture — local storage, encryption by default, no company server — is the most ambitious.
Both are worth watching, and neither is yet the safe choice for someone with thousands of notes and a decade of accumulated content. They are the future rather than the present of this category.
The comparison: which job, which tool
| Job | Best free tool | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Drop-in Evernote replacement | Joplin | Notebooks, tags, web clipper, same mental model |
| Thinking and writing | Obsidian | Links between notes, graph view, deep plugin ecosystem |
| Daily journaling and outlines | Logseq | Built around daily notes and bullet-based outlining |
| Databases and structured content | AppFlowy | Blocks, databases, boards, closer to Notion than Evernote |
| Web clipping | Joplin | Browser extension with full-text capture, closest to Evernote’s clipper |
| Encryption and privacy | Joplin or Anytype | Both encrypt locally before syncing; Evernote does not |
| Long-term file ownership | All five | Every tool on this list stores notes as files you can read outside the application |
The table exposes the real pattern: the free alternatives are strongest where they do not try to copy Evernote’s exact feature set, and weakest where Evernote has spent fifteen years polishing one specific thing — notably the web clipper.
How to migrate without losing anything
The practical part of leaving Evernote is less about choosing the right tool and more about managing an export that may contain thousands of notes accumulated over years.
Evernote exports to ENEX format, an XML-based file that contains notes, tags, attachments and basic formatting. Joplin imports ENEX files directly, and the process handles text, images and basic formatting reasonably well. Obsidian requires an intermediate conversion — there are community tools that transform ENEX to Markdown, and the quality of the result depends on the complexity of the original notes.
The safest approach is to export one notebook first, import it into your chosen tool, and inspect what survived and what did not. Tables, handwritten notes and some attachment types are the most likely to break. Adjust your export settings or your expectations before exporting the rest.
Most people who migrate report that the process is tedious rather than difficult. It takes a weekend, not an afternoon, and the bottleneck is volume rather than tooling.
The honest bottom line
Free alternatives to Evernote do not match it feature-for-feature, and they do not need to. If you use Evernote as a filing cabinet — notebooks, tags, saved articles, the occasional search — Joplin replaces it completely and stores your notes in a format you own.
If Evernote is where you think, Obsidian or Logseq may fit you better than Evernote ever did, because they are built for thinking rather than for storage.
The harder cases are the web clipper, which Evernote genuinely does better than anyone, and collaborative notebooks shared with other people, which no free alternative handles smoothly. If those are your core use cases, the free alternatives will feel like a compromise.
For everyone else, the trade is straightforward: a weekend of migration in exchange for notes you actually own.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free alternative to Evernote?
Joplin, if what you want is Evernote without the subscription. It has notebooks, tags, a web clipper browser extension, and end-to-end encryption for sync. The notes are Markdown files, so they remain readable outside the application. It is the most direct replacement — you can move from Evernote to Joplin without changing how you organize information.
Is Obsidian a good replacement for Evernote?
It depends on what you use Evernote for. Obsidian is better at linking notes together, building a knowledge base that accumulates value over time, and keeping everything as plain files you own. It is weaker at clipping web pages and treating notes as a filing cabinet. If Evernote is a shoebox of things you want to find later, Joplin is the closer match. If Evernote is where you think, Obsidian may suit you better.
Can I move my notes out of Evernote?
Yes, and the hard part is volume, not format. Evernote exports to its own ENEX format, which Joplin can import directly. The process works reasonably well for text notes, images and basic formatting. Complex tables, handwritten notes and some attachments do not always survive cleanly. Export one notebook first, inspect what comes out, and adjust before exporting everything.
Does any free tool match the Evernote web clipper?
Joplin comes closest — it has a browser extension that saves simplified or full-page content, and it preserves a reasonable amount of formatting. It is not quite as polished as Evernote's clipper, which has been refined over many years. If web clipping is most of what you do in Evernote, test Joplin's clipper on the kinds of pages you typically save before committing to the switch.
Why are people leaving Evernote?
Three reasons. The free tier is increasingly restrictive — the current limits on devices and uploads make it harder to use without paying. The company has changed ownership and direction more than once, which makes people nervous about content they have accumulated over a decade or more. And the alternatives have genuinely caught up: five years ago nothing free matched Evernote's feature set, and now several tools do the core job well.
