For a decade, Evernote was the default answer to "where do I write this down". The free plan was central to that: you signed up without thinking about it, and you stayed for years.
That is no longer the case. Since the restriction announced at the end of 2023, the free offer has been capped at fifty notes and a single notebook.
What the 50-note limit changes day to day
Fifty notes sounds like a lot until you start counting.
Taking notes once a week eats through the quota in a year. Daily use, even light, burns it in two months.
The single notebook does the rest. Everything lands in the same place: meeting notes, the shopping list, drafts, the wrap-up of a project that ended two years ago. Separating work from personal is no longer possible, and search becomes the only way to find anything at all.
The result is a permanent sense of constraint. You hesitate before creating a note, you delete things to make room, you keep stuff elsewhere "so as not to eat into the quota". A note-taking tool you use sparingly no longer does its job. The whole point of having one place is that you put everything in it without weighing each entry.
Export your Evernote notes before you leave
Do it now, even if you have not decided to switch.
Evernote offers an export in the ENEX format, as well as an HTML export. The first can be re-imported into other note-taking tools. The second opens in any browser and will still be readable in ten years, without any particular software.
Export while the account is working normally, not after a change of terms or a loss of access. And open the resulting file right away: it is the only way to know it really contains your notes, and it takes two minutes. An export nobody ever opened turns out to be incomplete the day you need it.
Export before you need to export
An export done calmly beats a last-minute rescue.
Three limits to check in any free alternative
The number of notes is only one of three ways to cap free usage. Comparisons often mention just that one.
| Limit | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Number of notes | Forces you to sort instead of writing |
| Number of devices | Makes note-taking on the move impossible |
| Export | Holds you back through your own content |
A tool that is generous on notes but limited to one device causes exactly the same problem in practice: you can no longer write something down at the moment the idea turns up. As for the lack of an export, you don't pay for it straight away. You pay for it the day you want to leave and everything has to be retyped by hand.
Beyond notes: tasks, calendar and documents
Changing tools is also a chance to ask whether a notes app on its own still covers what you need.
In most real-world use, a note leads to something: an action to take, a deadline, a document to attach, someone to get back to. As long as those follow-ups live in another app, you are maintaining two systems that don't talk to each other.
That is the Flots approach: notes, tasks, calendar and documents live in the same space. A meeting note produces dated tasks without leaving the note, and those tasks show up in your schedule.
Notes are written in Markdown and export to PDF or Word, so the question of getting out doesn't come up again in three years. The details are in Markdown notes: PDF and Word export, and task extraction.
Migrating your notes without taking everything
One piece of advice that holds for any migration: don't copy fifty notes across on principle.
Take the ones that still serve a purpose, the reference documents, the notes tied to a project under way. Archive the rest as an export, available if you ever need it, but out of your day-to-day workspace.
A migration that moves the mess solves nothing. It only makes it more recent.
For a wider comparison, see note-taking apps: the comparison and free organization apps.
Your notes, your tasks and your calendar in one place.
Notes, tasks, calendar and documents in the same space, with PDF and Word export.
