Evernote → Joplin
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Evernote, as listed for US buyers on its plans page on 2026-10-03: Free is $0 (50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device). Starter is $14.99/month or $99.00/year (1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, 3 devices). Advanced is $24.99/month or $249.99/year (unlimited notes and devices). Team plans start from $10 per seat/month. Joplin, as listed the same day: the desktop, mobile and terminal apps are free under AGPL-3.0-or-later, and they can sync at no extra cost through Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV, S3 or a local folder. Joplin Cloud Basic is €2.99/month or €28.69/year (2 GB of storage, 10 MB per note or attachment). Pro is €5.99/month or €57.48/year (30 GB, 200 MB per item). Teams is €80.28/year per user, with a 2-user minimum. A self-hosted Joplin Server costs only the server, but its own licence limits it to personal, non-commercial use.
Moves cleanly
Per Joplin's docs, ENEX import brings over notes, tags, attachments (Joplin calls them resources) and note metadata such as author and geo-location, and the text of every note is always imported in full. Each ENEX file becomes its own notebook named after the file, and importing a whole folder creates one notebook per file.
You rebuild
Evernote exports one notebook, or up to 100 selected notes, at a time, so the grouping above notebooks has to be rebuilt as Joplin sub-notebooks on the desktop app. Sharing has to be set up again too. Colours, font sizes and font faces are lost when you import as Markdown. Evernote's OCR data is dropped, and Joplin rebuilds it only if you turn on OCR in Joplin.
What Evernote costs you today
Free tier: 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device, 1GB storage. Starter: $8.25/month billed annually ($99/yr) or $14.99/month billed monthly — 1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, 3 devices, 5GB storage. Advanced (recommended tier on Evernote's own pricing page): $20.83/month billed annually ($249.99/yr) or $24.99-$24/month billed monthly — unlimited notes/notebooks/storage/devices (subject to unpublished 'safeguard limits'). Team plans (Flexible) start around $10-14.99/seat/month; Enterprise is custom-priced. Verified directly against evernote.com/pricing and evernote.com/compare-plans, July 2026.
What actually holds you in
Notes live in Evernote's proprietary format inside its cloud; the only real export path is .enex (an Evernote-specific XML format) generated from the desktop app, notebook by notebook or in an all-notes batch — the web app cannot export .enex at all. Most competing apps (Joplin, Standard Notes, and paid third-party migration tools) can import .enex, but formatting, note history, and some attachment metadata don't always round-trip perfectly. There's no one-click migration to a self-hosted platform.
What you are moving to
Joplin stores every note as a plain Markdown file (with attachments alongside), so your notes stay readable and portable outside the app itself. It runs on desktop, mobile, and terminal, supports optional end-to-end encryption, and imports Evernote .enex exports natively — notebooks, tags, and attachments included. Sync works over your own Nextcloud/WebDAV/S3/Dropbox, Joplin Cloud (a paid hosted option), or a self-hosted Joplin Server.
Core app is free forever with no note/device caps. Sync is free if you bring your own WebDAV/Nextcloud/S3/Dropbox target, or self-host Joplin Server for personal use at no cost; Joplin Cloud (managed hosted sync) starts around $2.99/month.
Joplin strengths
- Notes stored as plain local Markdown files — genuinely portable, readable by other tools, and easy to back up outside the app
- Native .enex importer designed specifically for migrating from Evernote, including notebooks, tags, and attachments
- No note, notebook, or device caps on the free core app — unlike Evernote's tiered limits
- Choice of sync backend: your own cloud storage, self-hosted Joplin Server, or paid Joplin Cloud
What you give up
- The official self-hosted Joplin Server component is source-available under a Personal-Use-only license, not a plain OSI license — fine for an individual, but read the license before using it commercially
- OCR and full-text search across scanned/image attachments is far less capable than Evernote's
- UI is more utilitarian than Evernote's polish; no built-in Web Clipper-style page capture as refined as Evernote's
The migration, step by step
- 1Install the Evernote desktop app, since export does not work on Evernote Web, and let it finish syncing. Export each notebook as an ENEX file with the tags, created-date and author attributes ticked, and use the 300 MB to 2 GB file-size setting to split very large notebooks.
- 2Install Joplin desktop and test-import one notebook through File > Import > ENEX, once as Markdown and once as HTML. Compare a few complex notes, such as tables, coloured text and web clips, and pick the format that keeps them best.
- 3Choose how to sync before importing everything: Joplin Cloud, a self-hosted Joplin Server (personal, non-commercial licence), or Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV or S3. Turn on end-to-end encryption now if you want it.
- 4Import the whole folder of ENEX files so Joplin creates one notebook per file. Then drag notebooks onto parent notebooks on the desktop app to rebuild your stacks, and turn on OCR if you search scanned documents.
- 5Run both apps in parallel for two to four weeks. Capture new notes in Joplin, using its Chrome or Firefox web clipper, and spot-check links between notes, attachments and search results against Evernote.
- 6Cut over: export any notebooks that changed since the first pass and import them, then cancel or downgrade the Evernote subscription at renewal. Keep the ENEX files as an archive.
The gotcha
Links between notes are the weak point. Joplin's import docs say the ENEX format does not carry enough information to restore links between notes reliably, so Joplin matches them by title. That 'mostly works, but not always': it fails when several notes share a title or when the link text differs from the target note's title, and links it cannot resolve stay as Evernote links. A link can only be matched if the note it points to was imported, and Evernote exports one notebook or up to 100 notes at a time. So rename duplicate titles before you export, import every notebook, then search for links that still point at Evernote. A separate trap: Joplin Cloud Basic rejects any note or attachment over 10 MB, so large PDFs and scans need Pro (200 MB per item) or a different sync target.
When to stay on Evernote
Stay if you depend on Evernote's AI features (AI Assistant, semantic search, AI Transcribe), its built-in Tasks and Calendar with Google or Outlook calendars, or team Spaces with central admin, activity logs and SSO. Joplin covers notes, tags, attachments, web clipping and end-to-end encrypted sync, but not those.
More Layer 5 migrations
Figures verified 2026-07-12 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.