Evernote Cost
- Evernote Premium costs $7.99 per month. Generally speaking, that isn’t unreasonable for a SaaS productivity tool. However, that applies only if we look at Evernote Premium in a vacuum. When you start comparing Evernote Premium to competing products on the market, it gets harder and harder to justify paying even $7.99 per month.
- I think another consideration in Evernote's pricing is the pricing of similar services; Dropbox, Amazon storage (S3 of something like that? I don't use it), and other 'cloud storage' services. Dropbox gives you 2GB for free, but charges at least $10/month for more. Evernote's $5/month looks pretty good by comparison.
Freemium products are a great way to try out a new tool or app before committing to a subscription. Productivity tool Evernote, which first launched in 2004, is one of countless apps that come in a freemium version.
But then Evernote is setting their pricing way below what the market could bear. The premium plan is $7.99/month, but the median willingness to pay (for customers who aren't even in the highest category of organizational acumen) is $10.72. That's almost $3.00/month/customer lost by Evernote.
Evernote Premium, which the company introduced in 2011, was supposed to be a significant improvement on Evernote’s freemium version. It offered more features and more utility—for a price. Evernote has made several tweaks to its products and pricing over the years.
But is Evernote Premium worth it today?
That’s what we’ll be exploring in this post. We’ll look at exactly what an Evernote Premium subscription offers and what the key differences are between the free and Premium plans. We’ll also examine which types of users might benefit from an Evernote Premium subscription. Finally, we’ll be looking at Evernote Premium’s pricing and whether it’s still worth the cost.
What Does Evernote Premium Include?
In terms of functionality, Evernote Premium offers users almost everything that Evernote Business—Evernote’s costliest monthly plan—offers, with a few exceptions.
Evernote Premium can, of course, do everything that Evernote’s free version can do. But it’s not quite as fully featured as Evernote Business. Let’s take a look at the differences between Evernote’s freemium product and Evernote Premium, as well as the limitations of the Premium plan. Since all of Evernote’s plans include note-taking functionality, we’ve left that category out.
AI-Suggested Content
Over the years, Evernote has incorporated a range of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning features to make the product “smarter” and more intuitive to use. Unfortunately, none of Evernote’s AI-suggested functionality is available in the freemium product.
However, for Premium users, Evernote’s AI features, known as Evernote Context, can be a real time-saver. For example, Evernote can make personalized recommendations for related notes when creating new ones. This can help you avoid making duplicate notes and can make it easier to find relevant notes by their tags.
Evernote Premium’s AI functionality can also make content recommendations. Simply start typing a note and Evernote Premium can provide tailored suggestions for related content from leading publishers and news outlets from around the web, including Inc. Magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
Clipping and Capturing
One of Evernote’s handiest features is its Web Clipper. This tool allows you to “clip” and save practically anything you find online: articles, social media posts, ebooks, PDFs, images, videos, and more.
Evernote’s freemium version and its Premium plan offer identical clipping and capturing functionality. Both plans allow users to attach documents, files, PDFs, and receipts to notes, and both can clip full pages, text, and images from the web.
Evernote Premium allows users to forward emails directly to their Evernote account. Freemium users cannot do this. Evernote Premium also allows users to create contacts from scanned business cards, while Evernote’s free product does not. Finally, Evernote Premium users can annotate PDFs, whereas Evernote’s freemium version cannot.
Integrations
Evernote’s original core value proposition was to help users “remember everything.” As such, Evernote’s integrations play an important role in making the product more useful.
Evernote freemium users may be disappointed to learn that the free product doesn’t offer any external integrations whatsoever. This might not be the biggest deal if you just need a simple note-taking app. But if you’re hoping to make Evernote a central part of your daily workflow, you’ll need to upgrade to Evernote Premium.
Evernote Premium, on the other hand, integrates with many of the most widely used productivity tools on the market. Evernote Premium users can link to Google Drive files within notes and Notebooks and can also connect an Evernote account to a Microsoft Outlook account. Evernote Premium also integrates seamlessly with Slack and Microsoft Teams. It doesn’t, however, offer integration with popular CRM Salesforce; you’ll need an Evernote Business subscription if you need Salesforce connectivity.
Organization
There’s little point in taking notes if you can’t organize them in a way that makes sense and makes it easy to find them later.
When it comes to keeping your stuff organized, all three Evernote plans are fairly similar. All three plans allow you to search notes; create new Notebooks and tags; organize notes by date, tag, or title; and search for text within images. For most users, this will probably be enough.
Unfortunately, Evernote’s freemium product does not allow you to search for text strings in PDFs and Microsoft Office documents. Unlike the Premium plan, the free product doesn’t allow you to access a revision history for your notes, either.
Sharing
Evernote’s free version allows you to share Notebooks with one or more people. You can also control who can access which notes by adjusting permissions controls in the freemium version, too. There probably aren’t too many use cases that rely on advanced permissions controls, but it’s handy that the freemium product offers them.
Evernote Premium doesn’t offer a great deal more than the freemium product. One notable exception is that Evernote Premium gives you the option to turn notes into a presentation with just one click, a feature lacking from the free product.
Team Administration & Collaboration
One of Evernote’s biggest challenges of the past several years has been how to make Evernote useful for individual users and teams. Despite introducing Evernote Spaces, Evernote’s Slack-like collaborative workspace tool, it hasn’t really figured this out yet.
Unfortunately, neither Evernote’s freemium product nor Evernote Premium offers any team administration or collaboration tools at all. While this may serve as an incentive to upgrade to Evernote Business, it’s frustrating that Evernote doesn’t offer any collaboration tools to Premium subscribers.
Evernote Premium Pricing
Now that we’ve covered exactly what Evernote Premium can do, it’s time to talk pricing.
Evernote Premium costs $7.99 per month. Generally speaking, that isn’t unreasonable for a SaaS productivity tool. However, that applies only if we look at Evernote Premium in a vacuum. When you start comparing Evernote Premium to competing products on the market, it gets harder and harder to justify paying even $7.99 per month.
As we noted in our overview of Evernote competitors, many of the tools vying to replace Evernote can do everything Evernote can do, and at a fraction of the cost or even completely free.
Bear, a minimal note-taking app, offers a freemium version that can do almost everything Evernote can do. Similarly, workspace tool Notion can perform a lot of the same tasks as Evernote Premium, without having to pay for a subscription. Comparing Notion to Evernote might not be an apples-to-apples comparison, as we noted in our breakdown of the two tools, but it’s still very difficult to recommend Evernote over Notion, especially when it comes to price.
There’s nothing “wrong” with Evernote Premium’s pricing. It’s just very hard to justify paying $7.99 per month when there are so many tools that do the same things much more inexpensively.
Should You Choose Evernote Premium?
Evernote Premium is a capable tool that offers plenty of helpful features. However, whether Evernote Premium is right for you depends on your needs and budget.
In terms of pure functionality, most of Evernote Premium’s features are nice-to-haves rather than essentials. Its AI-suggested content recommendations, for example, are handy but are far from mission critical for most users. The fact that Evernote Premium doesn’t offer any team management or collaboration tools may be a deal-breaker for some users.
For simple note-taking and organization, Evernote’s freemium product will probably be perfectly fine for most users. Even then, an alternative like Bear may be a better fit. This is what makes Evernote’s Premium product so frustrating. It’s hard enough to justify paying for Evernote Premium as an individual, and the fact that Premium offers absolutely no collaborative features makes it even harder. Evernote Premium isn’t really worth it for individuals, and it doesn’t even work for teams.
Perhaps the only thing more difficult than justifying Evernote Premium’s price is figuring out who it’s supposed to be for.
Evernote Premium: Too Much for Too Little
If you’re a hardcore Evernote user, you probably don’t need to be sold on Evernote Premium. You’re either using it already or happily making notes in Evernote’s freemium product. Likewise, if you’ve been using Evernote’s free product for some time, upgrading to take advantage of Premium’s additional features might make sense for you.
That said, it’s a real shame how Evernote has lost its way in recent years. What used to be the undisputed king of note-taking apps has gradually been undercut and overshadowed by the many competing products that offer much more for far less.
It’s entirely possible that Evernote will reexamine the pricing and features included in Evernote Premium in the future. Until then, however, we’d recommend looking elsewhere.
Most note-taking apps do the same things. Save and organize digital notes. Search saved notes, clippings, and files. Sync across multiple devices.
Evernote and Microsoft OneNote both do all these things and more. Both tools let you save typed or handwritten notes, organize your notes into individual notebooks, and clip images, paragraphs of text, and even entire web pages as clippings for later viewing.
What’s interesting about both Evernote and OneNote is that, unlike email, document apps, or even instant messaging tools, note-taking apps aren’t often a core part of most work environments. You don’t necessarily need Evernote or OneNote the way you literally need email. They might not be essential, but they are useful.
But which of these tools is better?
Below, we’ve examined Evernote and OneNote in depth to see which note-taking tool reigns supreme. We looked at several individual categories, and we’ve made our recommendation toward the end of the post.
On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be much difference between Evernote and OneNote. Look a little closer, though, and the differences start to become more obvious. Let’s look at how the two apps compare in terms of:
- Organization
- Storage
- Search
- Pricing
- Overall user satisfaction
Organization: Winner = Draw
Both Evernote and OneNote rely on the notebook convention to describe how the two tools manage file organization.
Evernote organizes items into Notebook Stacks > Notebooks > Notes. OneNote uses a similar convention of Notebooks > Sections > Pages.
In addition to their central notebook conventions, both Evernote and OneNote also feature tag systems. Evernote’s tags function similarly to tags in WordPress. You can add a tag to any note and search by tags to find thematically relevant notes.
OneNote’s tags work very differently. They’re a lot more interactive and can be used for lots of different things. For example, you can add Reminder tags to a note to be reminded at specific dates and times. OneNote comes with more than 20 preset tags, from To-Do items and Client Requests to Music to Listen to and Book to Read. There’s even a Password tag.
Unlike Evernote, which limits tag placement to the Notes level, OneNote tags can be applied to any organizational element. Any Notebooks, Sections, or Pages in OneNote can have tags applied to them. You can add multiple tags to multiple elements on a page. For example, you could add a Contact tag to an image of a business card you uploaded after a meeting, a Reminder tag to follow up with that person at a specific date and time, and a Client Request tag to the action items you need to prepare for that meeting.
One of the biggest problems with Evernote is that the program itself can become sluggish once you reach a certain number of notebooks. Another major issue is that quick notes aren’t categorized by default, meaning that if you use Evernote to make lots of quick little notes, your file system in Evernote can quickly become a mess of Untitled Notes. For a tool that’s supposed to help us make sense of the information in our lives, this can be frustratingly counterintuitive.
I wouldn’t say tags in Evernote are “better” than tags in OneNote or vice-versa. It all depends on which system feels right to you and aligns with what you want from the tool.
Storage: Winner = OneNote
If you intend to use Evernote or OneNote simply to record your thoughts, storage isn’t that important. Individual text notes are tiny in terms of file size. So you don’t need to worry as much about running out of space.
If you intend to save a lot of documents and files, though, storage becomes a lot more important.
In terms of storage, Evernote is quite permissive but does have some hard restrictions:
- Evernote freemium accounts can have a maximum of 100,000 notes with a file-size restriction of 25MB per note. Premium subscribers can upload or capture notes up to 100MB in size.
- Evernote limits users to a maximum of 250 notebooks synced across a user’s account.
- Evernote restricts users to a maximum of 10,000 tags.
- Evernote allows users to save up to 100 searches.
- Evernote freemium accounts are limited to just 60MB of uploaded data per month, premium users to 10GB, and business users to 20GB.
Evernote’s maximum number of notes, notebooks, and tags is fairly generous. But the 60MB upload limit is very harsh. Even casual users are likely to run up against this restriction pretty quickly, especially when working with larger files such as high-resolution images.
Evernote retired its Plus tier in April 2018, which had a 1GB upload restriction. This forces users to choose between the limitations of the Free plan or 10GB of storage in the Premium plan. There’s no longer any middle ground between these two extremes––a 5GB limit would have been a solid compromise for many users.
OneNote handles storage completely differently:
- OneNote’s storage limits are connected directly to a user’s Microsoft OneDrive account; there are no restrictions on how many individual notes a OneNote user can save.
- OneNote Basic accounts offer individual uploaded file size restrictions of 25MB. Both Premium and Business subscribers are limited to uploads of up to 200MB per file––twice the size of Evernote’s maximum file size.
- OneNote’s free mobile version restricts users to 500 synced notes before prompting users to upgrade.
- Although the maximum file size you can upload to OneDrive is 15GB, the maximum file size you can upload to OneNote is 2GB.
The biggest problem with Evernote in terms of storage is the lack of a middle option. It’s either 60MB a month or 10GB a month. This makes sense for Evernote––Evernote’s harsh upload limits on its Basic plan are a powerful motivation to upgrade––but it doesn’t make sense for users.
OneNote’s reliance on OneDrive for storage is a blessing and a curse. It helps keep OneNote largely free and offers generous storage and upload limits. But it also forces prospective OneNote users to sign up for a OneDrive account. This isn’t ideal if users prefer a different cloud storage provider or don’t want to migrate from Google Drive or Dropbox to OneDrive.
Evernote Plus Vs Evernote Premium
If you plan on using either of these tools for simple note-taking, storage won’t be as important. If you need to save larger files or upload a lot of data, OneNote is the clear winner.
Search: Winner = Evernote
Note-taking apps help us record our thoughts. They’re somewhere for our random observations to live. If we can’t find our notes quickly and easily, then there’s not much point in saving anything. This makes search critically important.
When it comes to finding things, Evernote’s search functionality is solid. You can search by keyword or strings, as well as other search criteria such as where and when a note was created, media or attachment filetypes (such as PDFs, images, or audio files), and the people associated with or tagged in a note. Evernote also boasts a wide range of search modifiers that Google power users will find familiar.
OneNote’s search functionality isn’t quite as robust as Evernote’s search. OneNote’s search functionality can feel faster than Evernote’s (especially if you have a lot of notes stored) but offers fewer search operands. You won’t see OneNote’s Notebook search option unless those Notebooks are stored in OneDrive. And you can’t search across all notebooks using OneNote’s web version.
Pricing: Winner = OneNote
With Evernote’s Plus tier no longer available, Evernote has three levels of pricing:
- Basic (free)
- Premium ($7.99 per month)
- Business ($14.99 per user, per month)
Evernote’s Basic plan will probably be fine for casual users. For even moderate use, however, it’s not really viable due to Evernote’s upload restrictions. It’s worth remembering that this only really applies if you’re going to be saving lots of files and documents.
Evernote’s Premium plan lacks the restrictions of the Basic plan and offers a decent monthly upload limit. But at almost $96 for the year, it’s far from cheap––especially when OneNote offers so much for free.
Evernote’s Business plan is the most robust of Evernote’s plans. Although cost isn’t likely to be as important a factor for larger companies or enterprise teams, it’s still a considerable expense, especially as the number of users increases.
OneNote, on the other hand, is free. It isn’t even available as a premium version. All you have to decide is how much OneDrive storage you’ll need if any.
Microsoft’s basic plan, which offers 50GB of OneDrive storage, costs just $1.99 per month or $23.88 annually. For $6.99 per month, or $69.99 per year, you get 1,000GB of storage and access to Office 365 Personal edition.
Even if you don’t need Office or 1,000GB of storage, it’s still cheaper than Evernote’s Premium plan.
Overall User Satisfaction: Winner = Draw
Evernote Plans
Evernote and OneNote score comparably in terms of overall user satisfaction.
According to G2, a website that ranks software products by user reviews and Net Promoter Score (NPS), both Evernote and OneNote perform strongly. Evernote was named a Leader product by G2 in spring 2019 and received an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars across 1,352 user reviews.
OneNote was ranked as one of the Top 100 Software Products of 2019 by G2 and also received an overall rating of 4.4 stars out of 5 across 1,110 user reviews.
Technically, OneNote edges out Evernote––but only just. Evernote received slightly more one-, two-, and three-star reviews than OneNote did, and OneNote received slightly fewer reviews in general. Although this means OneNote beats Evernote narrowly in terms of user satisfaction, it’s too close to be conclusive, so we’re going to call it a draw.
Our Recommendation for Evernote vs. OneNote
Now that we’ve examined each tool in a little more depth, it’s time to declare a winner.
Taking everything into consideration, we have to recommend OneNote.
Evernote Cost
OneNote gives you everything Evernote can do for a fraction of the price. If you want to do more with your notes, such as add to-do lists and reminders, OneNote can do that, too. If you just want to take simple text-based notes and find them quickly, Evernote might be a better bet.
Evernote is a highly capable tool with a broad range of use cases. However, as a product, Evernote has lost its way in recent years. And it’s very hard to justify the cost when OneNote offers virtually identical functionality at a fraction of the price.
But it’s not just about cost. There’s more to it than that.
Aside from its dependence on OneDrive, OneNote is the clear winner for business users. It looks and feels like other Microsoft products. Some might see this as a negative, but it actually reduces the learning curve.
OneNote is also far superior for combining multiple types of information on the same page. For example, you can create a to-do list, add an image or table, and jot down some notes all on the same page. OneNote’s drag-and-drop interface, tabbed tagging system, and familiar toolbars make OneNote feel like Office might if Microsoft had acquired Notion.
Evernote looks and feels very sleek, but its performance and stability issues are problematic. Evernote has done an admirable job of doubling down on product quality, but some of these bugs have been around for years. For a premium product with a price tag to match, these frustrations are hard to justify.
In terms of writing and editing tools, Evernote has never positioned itself as a document tool. That said, its writing and document-editing tools are sorely limited. Creating quick notes feels anything but and highlights how poor Evernote’s default organizational structure can be. It doesn’t support markdown or HTML either.
Similarly, Evernote is a powerful tool but does a poor job of onboarding new users. Evernote’s tag system is much more flexible and useful than its default notebooks schema. It’s baffling why Evernote would almost completely overlook this aspect of its organizational structure in its learning resources and tutorials.
Of course, Evernote does do a few things better than OneNote.
One aspect of Evernote that really shines compared to OneNote is Evernote’s Web Clipper. This handy tool is available as a separate browser extension and allows users to quickly clip and save almost anything they find online. You can clip entire web pages as they appear, as simplified versions without images and special formatting, and even save web pages as PDF documents. OneNote’s clipper is fine, but it does struggle to preserve line breaks and other formatting rules. Evernote’s Web Clipper also offers “smart” recommendations on where clipped items should be saved based on analysis of their contents. This feature is a little rudimentary and isn’t always accurate, but it’s a nice feature.
Both Evernote and OneNote drop the ball when it comes to security. Evernote users can manually encrypt specific highlighted excerpts of text, but Evernote does not allow users to encrypt notebooks or even individual notes. OneNote doesn’t encrypt anything unless you’re a Business user. Granted, most people probably don’t need 256-bit AES encryption of their notes. But that’s beside the point––especially if you’re paying almost $100 a year for Evernote Premium.
Should I Ever Choose Evernote Over OneNote?
At this point, the only real reason to choose Evernote over OneNote is if you’ve already been using it for some time and don’t want to go to the trouble of exporting your notes to OneNote.
Evernote Cost Per Year
If you’re thinking of using Evernote or OneNote for the first time, we have to recommend OneNote every time.