Which Is Better: Evernote vs. Notion
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For a few days, I've been testing out the apps Evernote and Notion, both of which are designed to help you jot down ideas, manage your schedule, and keep your tasks in order. In addition to my own experiments with them, I checked out what other, longer-term users had to say about them and discovered that while Evernote was historically considered the gold standard, some of its fans have been turned off by buggier updates and increasing prices. Some of them even jumped ship to Notion. I vowed not to let any of that cloud my view of either app and did discover some useful features in both. Ultimately, I do like Notion better, but there are a few use cases where Evernote could still be the winner for you.
What do Evernote and Notion do?
Basically, both of these apps are designed to give you a designed place to jot things down. Consider them similar to a Single Source of Truth (SSOT), which is a practical tool some people use to manage their projects or lives that involves creating a folder or repository for all resources, documents, and pieces of information pertinent to a given task or to-do list item. Both apps open up to a notepad so you can quickly write down whatever it is you're thinking, doing, or seeing, then organize it more thoroughly later. You organize your subtasks and details into "notebooks" on Evernote or "pages" on Notion, but these are essentially the same thing. Both apps allow you to easily search for old notes and content entries, collaborate with other users, and access your account via a mobile app or your desktop browser, plus they give you widgets that grant you easy access to your notes and content from the home screen of your phone. (You have to pay for an Evernote subscription if you want to be logged into more than one device at once; Notion lets you do that for free.) Finally, both Evernote and Notion are available on both iOS and Android.
What are the main differences between them?
Evernote is much more note-focused and Notion is more of a jack of all trades. A huge chunk of using Evernote involves taking quick notes, then sorting them into notebooks at a later time, whereas Notion comes loaded with templates for things like grade tracking, project management, and even meal planning.
Evernote's search function edges out Notion's somewhat, too, as you can append tags and keywords more easily to your notes and notebooks. Notion's search function is fine, but just digs through the text of your notes or to-do lists. Its AI chatbot helper is also pretty unhelpful: As a test, after I built out a to-do list for every day for the following four days, I asked the chatbot what I had to do the next day and it kept telling me it couldn't find any data on the next day's to-dos. I even asked the AI to make a new to-do list for me, told it the same list of tasks I'd already manually entered into tomorrow's list, and then asked again. It still gave me no results.
Evernote is not without its thorns, either. I encountered some sizable issues with bugs and lag when using the app. Sometimes, for instance, pressing a button just didn't work. When I first tried to make an in-app audio recording, I tapped "audio" on the home screen over and over, but nothing happened, which resulted in me having to force-close the app and restart it. That fixed it, but isn't ideal when you're trying to record something that's happening in real time. The "scan" feature also stopped working for me when I tried to access it and capture an image of some text in front of me. The "transcribe" button, which is meant to turn an image into editable text, just didn't work, no matter how many times I tapped it.
Who should use Notion or Evernote?
Both apps have three main use cases: Personal organizing of your home and life, organizing of school, and organizing of work. I recommend them both, especially, for students, since you can use dictation features in both apps to record audio and transcribe it into text, making them ideal for capturing lectures. Evernote does have a substantial amount of features, like the ability to upload and store PDFs or webpages, and Notion also works seamlessly as a collaborative workspace for teams (although, in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't test either app out in that way).
If you're planning on using one of these apps for personal organization in your life, I'd go with Notion, since it comes with such a robust library of templates and ideas. If your primary goal is pure note-taking, Evernote works well there.
The cost difference
The pricing is where this gets interesting. Both have some great features and some kinks to work out, but the starkest difference between them is what you'll pay to learn that for yourself.
Here's what's included in the free version of Evernote:
Create up to 50 notes
Create up to 1 notebook
Connect up to 1 device
250 MB monthly uploads
200 MB max. note size
Access to Tasks, Calendar, and Web Clipper (which pulls screengrabs of websites and loads them into your notebook)
Access to advanced tools like image and document search, offline mode, PDF annotations, and more
And here's what else you get with the Personal plan, which is $129.99 per year:
Create up to 150,000 notes
Create up to 2,000 notebooks
Unlimited connected devices
10 GB monthly uploads
Finally, the Professional plan is $169.99 annually and includes all that plus these:
Adobe Acrobat Standard free for a month, then 20% off after that
20 GB monthly uploads
AI Edit & AI-Powered Search
You must be wondering, then, what you get when you pay for Notion instead. Here's the thing: If you're just using it on your own, not on a work team, you don't have to. All the stuff I mentioned in the review above is free and the app never pesters you to upgrade. There's a very comprehensive free package available to individual users and it includes collaborative workspaces that other Notion users can work on with you, and integrations with apps like Slack and GitHub. If you're using Notion on a team, say, at work, you can upgrade to tiers that cost $10 or $15 per person per month to access things like custom automations, bulk PDF exports, and dashboards. Again, I didn't review this as a team-working software, so I'm only speaking to its value as a personal organizer, which is substantial (and, I reiterate, free).
And the Winner Is...
Ultimately, I recommend Notion over Evernote, if only because you get access to all the same great features without having to pay. Building to-do lists, setting reminders for yourself to complete deadlined tasks, making shopping lists, and managing your schedule are all things you can do for free with the built-in features on any smartphone, so an app like these is just gravy either way. Granted, it's gravy that keeps everything in one place, can be accessed from any device, and syncs with your calendars and other tools to make your life easier, but it's gravy nonetheless. The path of least resistance is the one you don't have to pay for that still provides you all the benefits you need.
Lindsey Ellefson is Lifehacker’s Features Editor. She currently covers study and productivity hacks, as well as household and digital decluttering, and oversees the freelancers on the sex and relationships beat. She spent most of her pre-Lifehacker career covering media and politics for outlets like Us Weekly, CNN, The Daily Dot, Mashable, Glamour, and InStyle. In recent years, her freelancing has focused on drug use and the overdose crisis, with pieces appearing in Vanity Fair, WIRED, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, and more. Her story for BuzzFeed News won the 2022 American Journalism Online award for Best Debunking of Fake News.
In addition to her journalism, Lindsey recently graduated from the NYU School of Global Public Health with her Master of Public Health after conducting research on media bias in reporting on substance use with the Opioid Policy Institute’s Reporting on Addiction initiative. She is also a Schwinn-certified spin class teacher and won the 2023 Dunkin’ Donuts Butter PeContest that earned her a year of free coffee. Lindsey lives in New York, NY.
