Notion vs. Evernote: Which Software Should You Use?

Both Notion and Evernote offer digital note-taking capabilities, but Notion provides additional project management and wiki building features for all users, whereas Evernote only supports limited task management on its most expensive pricing plan.

In this guide, we will dive deep into the differences between Notion and Evernote to help you decide which platform is best for your note taking needs.

Notion vs. Evernote: Comparison table

Notion vs. Evernote: Pricing

Notion pricing

Notion offers four pricing tiers:

• Free: Costs $0; allows you to upload files up to 5 MB and offers a seven-day page history.
• Plus: Costs $8 per user per month billed annually or $10 per user per month billed monthly. It allows you to upload unlimited files and offers a 30-day page history.
• Business: This plan costs $15 per user per month billed annually, or $18 per user per month billed monthly. It allows you to upload unlimited files and offers a 90-day page history.
• Enterprise: Requires a custom pricing quote from the sales team and includes extra features such as unlimited workspaces and unlimited extensions.

You can also choose to add the optional Notion AI to any paid plan for $8 per user per month billed annually or $10 per user per month billed monthly. Notion AI can be used to generate summaries, rewrite documents and brainstorm ideas.

You can request a trial of the Business plan and a demo or trial of the Enterprise plan, but you’ll need to contact the sales team to do both — you can’t sign up for either directly.

For more information, read our full Notion review.

Evernote pricing

Evernote also offers four pricing tiers:

• Free: Costs $0; allows you to sync up to two devices and offers 60 MB monthly uploads and a 25 MB maximum note size.
• Personal: Costs $10.83 per person per month billed annually, or $14.99 per person per month billed monthly. It allows you to sync up unlimited devices and offers 10 GB monthly uploads and a 200 MB maximum note size.
• Professional: Costs $14.17 per person per month billed annually, or $17.99 per person per month billed monthly. It offers 20 GB monthly uploads and a 200 MB maximum note size and connects with apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
• Teams: Costs $20.83 per person per month billed annually, or $24.99 per person per month billed monthly. It offers additional features such as task management tools and single sign-on.

There are 14-day free trials available for the paid plans.

For more information, read our full Evernote review.

Notion vs. Evernote: Feature comparison

Notes management setup

Winner: Evernote

Both Evernote and Notion allow you to take and organize notes, but each takes a slightly different approach to it. Because Evernote focuses solely on notes management, its layout is simple to navigate, and there aren’t a lot of extraneous features that might overwhelm someone who is new to digital note-taking. This means that it’s faster to get up to speed with Evernote vs. Notion, especially if you have never used a dedicated note app before.

In Evernote, you can capture text and images, attach PDFs and documents and use the app’s scanning feature to add handwritten texts or drawings. Once you create multiple notes, you can start organizing them into “notebooks” by topic or project. Evernote also offers a very powerful advanced search feature that lets you search according to 14 different operators, so you can find basically anything even if you have thousands of notes.

Meanwhile, in Notion, you can choose from more than 50 types of content blocks and assemble them into a well-organized page. This means Notion is well-suited to more complex content creation, but that it also presents a higher learning curve compared to Evernote. Documents can be centralized into either a personal or team wiki to keep them organized in a sensible hierarchy, which is especially important since Notion’s search function is less advanced than Evernote’s.

Templates

Winner: Notion

Both Notion and Evernote provide templates to help you create notes and projects faster, but Notion provides a far more extensive library compared to Evernote. Notion offers more than 10,000 templates in total, including over 100 templates for note-taking and nearly 600 templates for projects.

Meanwhile, Evernote offers only 75 official templates, so the selection is much smaller than Notion’s. If having a lot of preloaded templates is important to you, Notion is a better choice for that. Both software allow users to create and save their own custom templates as well.

Productivity tools

Winner: Notion

Notion does offer a nice selection of project management features paired with a relatively low learning curve, which is why it made our lists for both the best project management software for startups and the best project management software for freelancers. In Notion, you can assign tasks to yourself or other people, set deadlines and choose from multiple project views such as kanban boards and Gantt charts (called timelines).

That being said, Notion’s lower learning curve comes with a tradeoff: Its functionality isn’t as advanced as that of other project management solutions such as monday.com, Asana and Trello. For example, Notion lacks certain features, like native time-tracking, that are standard in other productivity software. This means that Notion isn’t the best choice for power users who need a lot of project management features in addition to the note-taking and wiki creation tools.

Evernote does offer some very limited task management tools on its most expensive plan, the Teams plan. If you’re willing to pay $25 a month, you can create, organize and assign tasks within notes to easily keep track of your to-do lists and action items.

Even so, Evernote’s productivity tools are very limited when compared to dedicated project management tools. Most project management solutions on the market offer significantly more functionality on even their bare-bones forever free plans, so if you need these features, you’ll get more bang for your buck with a different provider (such as Notion).

AI capabilities

Winner: Notion

Notion offers an AI add-on that costs $8 per user per month billed annually, or $10 per user per month billed monthly. Users do get a certain number of complimentary AI responses so they can test out the tool before committing to the paid add-on. However, you must purchase the AI add-on for your entire organization, so the costs can quickly add up if you have a large team.

Currently, Notion’s generative AI can help you brainstorm ideas and write a rough draft. It will also summarize existing content and fix spelling and grammar errors, and the AI can even translate content into another language. You can also ask the AI a question, such as “What projects is my team working on this week?” and the system will automatically find the answer for you. It will also autofill tables with text and data if you so choose.

Right now, Evernote offers a limited feature called AI Cleanup, which helps to fix spelling and mistakes. The platform is also in the process of rolling out a beta version of a much more advanced tool, AI Edit, to all accounts. Once it’s fully released, AI Edit will allow all users to create summaries of existing content and generate introductions, conclusions and titles. AI Edit can also translate content into 15 major languages. Evernote does not charge extra for its AI capabilities, which sets it apart from Notion.

Storage and device access

Winner: Notion

Both Notion and Evernote place various limitations on their free plans. Evernote’s free plan allows 60 MB of new data each month, which is much higher than Notion’s. However, Evernote caps note sizes to 25 MB each and only lets you sync two devices on the free plan. In other words, if you want to access Evernote on a laptop, phone and tablet, you’ll need a paid plan.

Both the Personal and Professional plans allow note sizes up to 200 MB. The Personal plan offers 10 GB monthly uploads, while the Professional plan offers 20 GB monthly uploads.

Notion’s free plan only allows you to upload files up to 5 MB, which is a pretty small limit when compared to alternatives, but it doesn’t cap the number of overall uploads. However, it also doesn’t limit the size of individual pages or the number of devices you can sync. Once you jump up to a paid plan, upload sizes are unlimited no matter what tier you are on, which contrasts with Evernote’s various restrictions.

Notion pros and cons

Pros of Notion

• Wiki creation capabilities.
• More than 50 content blocks to choose from.
• Small learning curve for project management features.
• Library of 10,000+ templates.
• Less expensive than some competitors.

Cons of Notion

• No native time tracking.
• Only 5 MB file uploads on free plan.
• Can become unwieldy as you create more projects.
• Could use more native integrations.

Evernote pros and cons

Pros of Evernote

• Very low learning curve for beginners.
• Advanced search function available.
• Numerous prebuilt integrations.
• Can use the apps offline without an internet connection.
• No extra charge for AI features.

Cons of Evernote

• Free plan is rather limited.
• No productivity tools except on the highest-tier plan.
• Expensive compared to competitors.
• Fewer collaboration features than Notion.

Should your organization use Notion vs. Evernote?

Notion is a great solution if you want a tool you can use for note-taking, task management and project management. If you just want to take notes, you might find all the extra functionality overly complicated, but there’s no denying that Notion offers many more features than Evernote does. Notion’s free plan also offers more functionality than Evernote’s: Really, the only drawback is the 5 MB limit on individual file uploads.

If you simply want to take notes and don’t really care about project or task management, Evernote is a better choice than Notion. Evernote’s interface is more intuitive, and it offers more advanced search than Notion does. Unfortunately, Evernote has walked back their free plan features in recent years, so you really need to be willing to pay to get the most out of the tool. If you want to sync more than two devices or upload more than 60 GB of content each month, you’ll have to upgrade.

If neither Notion nor Evernote sounds right for your needs, then check out our list of the best project management software for 2024 to see what other options are out there.

Review methodology

To compare Evernote and Notion, we signed up for free accounts and consulted demo videos, product documentation, user reviews and community resource forums. We considered factors such as pricing, interface design, ease of use and importing, as well as features such as project management, team collaboration and notes organization.