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These two are rarely the same purchase, and the prices show it. Notion Plus costs $120 a year. Evernote Advanced costs $249.99 a year — more than twice as much for what most people use as the same thing.
But the headline prices are the least interesting part. Both companies make their real money at the point where the free plan stops working, and they’ve put that point in very different places.
The prices, read from both companies’ own pages today
Notion charges per member, per month. Evernote’s individual plans are per person. Both default their pricing pages to the annual rate, so the monthly figures below took a toggle click to see — worth knowing before you assume you’re being quoted $10.
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | Annual total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notion Free | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Notion Plus | $12/member/mo | $10/member/mo | $120.00 |
| Notion Business | $24/member/mo | $20/member/mo | $240.00 |
| Evernote Free | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Evernote Starter | $14.99/mo | $8.25/mo | $99.00 |
| Evernote Advanced | $24.99/mo | $20.83/mo | $249.99 |
Notion also lists Enterprise at $35 a month billed monthly, or $336 a year. Evernote’s team tiers start at $10 per seat per month for its Flexible plan, with Enterprise quote-only. Neither is a plan an individual should be looking at, and both are outside what this comparison is about.
Two things jump out of that table. Evernote’s cheapest paid plan is the cheapest option here on an annual basis — $99 against Notion’s $120. And Evernote’s monthly price for that same plan, $14.99, is the most expensive way to buy anything on this page relative to what you get.
The 45% monthly penalty on Evernote Starter
Pay for Evernote Starter month to month and you’ll spend $14.99 × 12 = $179.88 a year. Pay annually and it’s $99.00. That’s $80.88 of difference — you are paying 82% more for the privilege of monthly billing, or, framed the way Evernote frames it on the page, saving about 45% by paying up front.
Compare that with Notion, where the same choice costs $144 versus $120 on Plus — a $24 gap, about 20%.
This matters more than it looks. A 45% penalty is one of the steepest monthly-vs-annual spreads we’ve come across, and it means Evernote Starter is genuinely two different products depending on how you buy it: a good-value note app at $99, or a bad one at $179.88. The general rule we set out in annual vs monthly billing applies with unusual force here — but only commit annually to software you’ve already used for a month or two.
Evernote’s free plan is a demo, not a plan
This is the single biggest difference between the two, and it isn’t about price at all.
Evernote’s free tier, per its own comparison table: 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device, 1 GB of monthly uploads, 20 tags, 200 attachments. One device. Your phone or your laptop, not both. For a note app — a category whose entire purpose is writing something down on one device and reading it on another — that isn’t a free plan, it’s a trial with no expiry date.
So Evernote’s real entry price for anyone who owns both a phone and a computer is $99 a year, not $0.
Notion’s free plan is a different proposition. It syncs across devices, allows unlimited pages for personal use, and its restrictions are ones a solo user can go years without hitting: file uploads capped at 5 MB each, 7 days of page history, and a limit of 10 external guests. Paying for Plus lifts uploads to unlimited (with a roughly 5 GB per-file cap), extends page history to 30 days, and makes guests unlimited.
That’s the honest shape of it: Notion’s free tier is a real product; Evernote’s is a sales page.
The 1,000-note ceiling, and what it costs to hit
Evernote Starter caps you at 1,000 notes and 20 notebooks. Here’s the calculation worth doing before you subscribe, because it decides whether $99 is your price or a waypoint.
Count how many notes you’d genuinely create in a working day. Say it’s five — a meeting summary, two ideas, a link you want later, a shopping list:
1,000 notes ÷ 5 per workday = 200 workdays ≈ 9–10 months.
At that rate you hit the ceiling inside your first annual term, and the only way past it is Evernote Advanced at $249.99 a year — an extra $150.99, a 152% increase on what you were paying.
At two notes a workday you get about 500 workdays, close to two years, and Starter is a sensible long-term home. At ten a day you’ll be at the ceiling in under five months, and you should price this as a $249.99 subscription from the start rather than being surprised by it later.
Notion has no note count. Its free plan has a block limit for teams, but for one person taking notes it is effectively unlimited, and Plus removes the question entirely.
AI: included on both, metered differently
Both companies now put AI at the centre of the pitch, and both have chosen a different way to charge for it.
Evernote lists AI features — AI Assistant, semantic search, transcription, AI editing — as included on both paid tiers, Starter and Advanced. No separate add-on, no metering published on the plan cards.
Notion gives Free and Plus a “Trial of Notion AI” only. The agent features sit on Business at $240 a year, and the pricing page states the metering plainly: “Free to try, then $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits.” If you want Notion’s AI as an individual rather than a business, that’s the number to budget against, and it can move your real cost well above the $120 sticker.
Which reframes the comparison: Evernote Starter at $99 is the cheapest way to get AI note features from either company. Whether those features are worth anything is a separate question, and one worth asking sceptically — as we do about AI subscriptions generally, the free tiers of general-purpose assistants have absorbed a lot of what these add-ons do.
The option that costs nothing
Before either: Obsidian is free for personal use and stores your notes as plain files on your own disk. No account required. Its optional extras are priced separately — Sync at $4 a month billed yearly ($48 a year), or $5 billed monthly, and Publish at $8 a month billed yearly. A commercial licence is $50 per user per year.
So the five-year arithmetic, which nobody does and everybody should:
- Evernote Advanced: $249.99 × 5 = $1,249.95
- Notion Plus: $120 × 5 = $600.00
- Obsidian with Sync: $48 × 5 = $240.00
- Obsidian on one device, or the notes app already on your phone: $0
We earn nothing from any of those links. That’s rather the point — the free option is the right answer for more people than either company’s marketing would like, and an article that leaves it out isn’t comparing, it’s selling.
The verdict
Take notes on one device and mostly forget them? Pay nothing. Obsidian, or the app that came with your phone, does this. If you’re currently paying either company for this use case, it belongs on the list next time you audit your subscriptions.
Want a searchable, syncing notebook and nothing more? Evernote Starter at $99 a year — annually, never at $14.99 a month — provided your note volume stays under about 1,000. Eligible college students can get 40% off a one-year Starter subscription, per Evernote’s own FAQ.
Want to build databases, wikis and project trackers, not just notes? Notion Plus at $120 a year. This is the one case where the extra $21 over Evernote is obviously well spent, because Notion is doing something Evernote doesn’t do. Students and educators get the Plus plan free, with a one-member limit.
Heavy note volume — ten a day, years of archive? Evernote Advanced at $249.99 a year is the only plan here with genuinely unlimited notes, notebooks, devices and storage. Price it honestly at $250, not at the $20.83 a month the page shows you.
Skip both if you’re an individual eyeing Notion Business at $240 a year for the AI. You’d be paying business-tier pricing for a feature set the free tiers of general assistants substantially cover, and $240 is a lot of money to spend on autofill. Buy Plus, or buy nothing.
Verified 30 August 2026. All Notion prices were read from notion.com/pricing on that date, with both the monthly and yearly billing toggles checked; all Evernote prices from evernote.com/compare-plans, likewise on both toggles. Obsidian’s figures come from obsidian.md/pricing. Every figure above is exact as published — no Amazon products are involved here, so nothing on this page is an approximation. Prices change; check before you subscribe.