Best Open-Source Evernote Alternatives 2026

Evernote's free tier now caps you at 50 notes and a single notebook. The Personal plan costs $14.99/month ($179.88/year) and Professional runs $17.99/month ($215.88/year). Since Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in late 2022, the company has laid off most of its staff, removed features like Spaces and legacy integrations, and migrated all users to new infrastructure with repeated sync issues. The web clipper — once Evernote's signature feature — has degraded in reliability. Long-time users report slower performance, broken formatting on imported notes, and a general sense that the product is in maintenance mode with a monetization focus.

Privacy is the other concern. Evernote's privacy policy allows employees to access your notes for machine learning training, and the company's servers store unencrypted content. For users who built a decade of personal and professional notes in Evernote, the combination of rising prices, shrinking features, and unclear data handling is driving a serious exodus.

The open source alternatives below solve all three problems: they cost nothing to run (or a few dollars per month for server hosting), they give you full control over your data, and several offer end-to-end encryption that Evernote has never provided.

TL;DR

Joplin is the best direct Evernote replacement — it has a dedicated Evernote import tool, a web clipper, E2E encryption, and syncs via your choice of backend. Standard Notes is the right pick when privacy and zero-knowledge encryption are non-negotiable. Notesnook offers the most polished mobile experience with E2E encryption and a familiar Evernote-like interface. Trilium Notes is the best option for building a structured, hierarchical knowledge base with rich interlinking. Logseq is the outliner for people who think in connected ideas rather than separate documents.

Key Takeaways

• All 5 alternatives are free and open source with active development communities
• Joplin, Standard Notes, and Notesnook offer end-to-end encryption — something Evernote has never provided at any price tier
• Self-hosting eliminates per-user pricing entirely: a $6/month VPS replaces $14.99/user/month
• Joplin has the smoothest Evernote migration path with a built-in ENEX import tool
• Every tool on this list supports Markdown, giving you portable notes that aren't locked into a proprietary format

Quick Comparison

	Joplin	Standard Notes	Trilium Notes	Logseq	Notesnook
License	AGPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0	GPL-3.0
Self-Host Option	✓ (Joplin Server)	✓	✓	File-based	✓
E2E Encryption	✓	✓	✗ (at-rest only)	✗	✓
Web Clipper	✓	✗	✓	✗	✓
Markdown Support	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Mobile Apps	✓ (iOS + Android)	✓ (iOS + Android)	Mobile web	✓ (iOS + Android)	✓ (iOS + Android)
Sync Method	Server / WebDAV / S3 / Dropbox	Self-hosted server	Self-hosted server	Git / Syncthing / WebDAV	Self-hosted / cloud
Evernote Import	✓ (ENEX)	✓ (limited)	✓ (ENEX)	✗	✓ (ENEX)
Rich Text Editor	✓	✓	✓	Outliner	✓

Pricing: Evernote vs Open Source

	Monthly Cost	Annual Cost (Solo)	Annual Cost (5 Users)
Evernote Free	$0 (50 notes max)	$0	$0
Evernote Personal	$14.99/mo	$179.88	$899.40
Evernote Professional	$17.99/mo	$215.88	$1,079.40
Joplin (self-hosted)	$4-6/mo (VPS)	$48-72	$48-72
Standard Notes (self-hosted)	$6-10/mo (VPS)	$72-120	$72-120
Trilium Notes (self-hosted)	$4-6/mo (VPS)	$48-72	$48-72
Logseq (file sync)	$0	$0	$0
Notesnook (self-hosted)	$6-10/mo (VPS)	$72-120	$72-120

The key difference: self-hosted costs are per-server, not per-user. A single $6/month VPS on Hetzner can run Joplin Server for 20 users. That same group on Evernote Personal would pay $3,598/year.

Joplin: The Direct Evernote Replacement

Joplin is the most natural migration path from Evernote. It was originally built as an open source Evernote alternative and it shows — the ENEX import tool handles notebooks, tags, attachments, and internal note links. With 46,000+ GitHub stars and development active since 2017, Joplin is the most mature option on this list.

Joplin stores notes as Markdown files in an encrypted SQLite database and syncs via your choice of backend: Joplin Server (self-hosted), Nextcloud, WebDAV, Dropbox, OneDrive, or any S3-compatible storage. End-to-end encryption means the sync server never sees your plaintext notes — a fundamental advantage over Evernote's architecture.

Web clipper: Joplin's browser extension clips full pages, simplified articles, screenshots, or selected content directly into your notebooks. It's the closest equivalent to Evernote's web clipper in the open source world.

Feature highlights:

• End-to-end encryption on all sync backends
• 200+ plugins for themes, templates, backlinks, diagrams, and integrations
• Rich text and Markdown editing modes
• Notebook hierarchy with tags and saved searches
• Multi-platform: desktop (Windows/Mac/Linux), mobile (iOS/Android), and terminal CLI
• Note sharing via Joplin Server publish links

Self-hosting: Joplin Server runs as a Docker container with PostgreSQL. Minimum requirements: 1 vCPU, 512MB RAM.

docker-compose up -d

Where Joplin wins vs Evernote: E2E encryption that Evernote doesn't offer. No note or notebook limits. No per-user fees. The ENEX import preserves your existing organization. Sync flexibility means you can use infrastructure you already have (Nextcloud, Dropbox) rather than paying for another service.

Where Joplin falls short: The desktop UI is functional but less polished than Evernote's or Notesnook's. No real-time collaboration — Joplin is a personal note-taking tool. OCR on images and PDFs (a core Evernote feature) requires third-party plugins rather than being built in.

Standard Notes: Privacy Without Compromise

Standard Notes takes the most uncompromising approach to privacy. Every note is encrypted on your device before it leaves — the server (whether Standard Notes' hosted service or your self-hosted instance) stores only encrypted blobs. Even with full database access, no one can read your notes without your encryption key.

This zero-knowledge architecture makes Standard Notes the right choice for journalists, lawyers, security researchers, and anyone whose notes contain sensitive information that cannot be trusted to a cloud provider.

Feature highlights:

• End-to-end encryption enabled by default on all notes
• Nested tags for organization (no notebook hierarchy — tags only)
• Multiple editor extensions: rich text, Markdown, code editor, spreadsheets, and task lists
• Cross-platform: desktop, mobile (iOS/Android), and web app
• Note history and version tracking
• Two-factor authentication and encrypted backups

Self-hosting: Standard Notes Server is a Docker-based deployment. The server handles encrypted sync and authentication but never accesses plaintext content.

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml up -d

Server requirements: 1 vCPU, 512MB RAM minimum. Uses MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Where Standard Notes wins vs Evernote: Evernote stores your notes in plaintext on their servers — employees can access them per the privacy policy. Standard Notes makes this structurally impossible. The zero-knowledge model means even a server breach exposes nothing readable.

Where Standard Notes falls short: No web clipper. No OCR. No rich notebook hierarchy (tags only). The editor is simpler than Joplin's or Notesnook's — it prioritizes security over feature breadth. For users who relied heavily on Evernote's web clipping and search-inside-images capabilities, Standard Notes won't fill that gap.

Trilium Notes: Hierarchical Knowledge Base

Trilium Notes is the power user's choice. It's designed as a personal knowledge base with deep hierarchical organization, rich note interlinking, note cloning (a single note appearing in multiple places in the tree), and a relation map that visualizes connections between notes.

Where Evernote gives you notebooks and stacks, Trilium gives you an unlimited-depth tree with every note able to contain child notes. Notes can be cloned into multiple positions in the tree without duplication — a concept that has no equivalent in Evernote's flat notebook model.

Feature highlights:

• Unlimited-depth hierarchical note tree
• Note cloning: one note can appear in multiple tree positions
• Relation maps: visual graph of note connections
• WYSIWYG and code editors with syntax highlighting for 60+ languages
• Note attributes and promoted attributes for structured metadata
• Full-text search with attribute-based filtering
• Evernote ENEX import
• Scripting: JavaScript scripting for automating note creation, transformation, and custom widgets

Self-hosting: Trilium runs as a single Docker container or standalone binary. It's one of the lightest options on this list.

docker run -d \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v ~/trilium-data:/home/node/trilium-data \
  zadam/trilium

Server requirements: 1 vCPU, 256MB RAM. Trilium uses SQLite — no external database needed.

Where Trilium wins vs Evernote: For users with thousands of notes who need deep organization, Trilium's tree structure and cloning model is vastly more powerful than Evernote's two-level notebooks-and-stacks approach. The scripting engine allows automation that no other tool on this list offers. Relation maps give you a visual overview of how your knowledge connects.

Where Trilium falls short: No E2E encryption — notes are encrypted at rest on the server but the server can read them. No native mobile apps — you access Trilium on mobile through a mobile-optimized web interface. The UI has a steeper learning curve than Joplin or Notesnook. It's best for solo power users, not teams.

Logseq: Outliner and Graph-Based Thinking

Logseq takes a fundamentally different approach to notes. Instead of documents in folders, everything in Logseq is a bullet (block) in an outliner. You write in daily journals, reference pages with double-bracket links, and over time a graph of interconnected ideas emerges. If Evernote is a filing cabinet, Logseq is a thinking tool.

With 32,000+ GitHub stars and a devoted community, Logseq is the most popular open source outliner. It stores notes as plain Markdown files in a local folder — your data is portable, human-readable, and never locked into a proprietary database.

Feature highlights:

• Outliner-first editing where every block is addressable and embeddable
• Daily journals as the default entry point for capturing ideas
• Bidirectional linking with automatic backlinks
• Graph view for visualizing note connections
• Datalog-based queries for building dynamic views across your notes
• PDF annotation with highlights linked to note blocks
• Plugin ecosystem for templates, integrations, themes, and export formats

Sync options: Logseq doesn't run a traditional server. You sync the underlying Markdown files via git, Syncthing, or WebDAV. This means sync is free — no server costs at all if you already have a sync mechanism.

Where Logseq wins vs Evernote: Logseq's bidirectional linking and graph view surface connections between ideas that Evernote's search-based model never reveals. The outliner model encourages atomic, interconnected notes rather than long monolithic documents. For researchers, students, and writers who need to build understanding across many sources, Logseq's approach compounds knowledge in a way that Evernote's filing-cabinet model cannot.

Where Logseq falls short: No E2E encryption. No web clipper (community plugins exist but are less polished than Joplin's). The outliner model has a learning curve — users coming from Evernote's document-based approach need to change how they think about organizing notes. No real-time collaboration. Performance on very large vaults (10,000+ blocks) has historically been slower, though the database version in development addresses this.

For more on how Logseq compares to other note-taking tools, see Best Open-Source Obsidian Alternatives 2026 and Notion vs AppFlowy vs AFFiNE vs Obsidian 2026.

Notesnook: The Polished, Privacy-First Newcomer

Notesnook is the newest entry on this list. Originally a closed-source privacy-focused note app, Notesnook open-sourced its codebase under GPL-3.0 and has since built an active community. Its value proposition is simple: Evernote-like polish and usability, but with end-to-end encryption and no surveillance of your content.

The mobile experience is where Notesnook stands out most. The iOS and Android apps are fast, well-designed, and feel like they were built by people who actually use note-taking apps on phones — not an afterthought to a desktop tool. For Evernote users who relied on mobile capture, Notesnook is the smoothest transition.

Feature highlights:

• End-to-end encryption on all notes, enabled by default
• Rich text editor with tables, checklists, embeds, and attachments
• Notebooks with sub-notebooks and color-coded organization
• Web clipper browser extension
• Evernote ENEX import with notebook and tag preservation
• Cross-platform: desktop, mobile (iOS/Android), and web app
• Note locking, favorites, and pinned notes
• Reminders and note publishing (share via link)

Self-hosting: Notesnook's server component (Notesnook Sync Server) can be self-hosted via Docker. Like Standard Notes, the server only handles encrypted data — it cannot read your notes.

docker-compose up -d

Server requirements: 1 vCPU, 512MB RAM with MongoDB.

Where Notesnook wins vs Evernote: E2E encryption by default. No per-user pricing on self-hosted. The ENEX import makes migration straightforward. The mobile apps are arguably better-designed than Evernote's current mobile experience post-acquisition. For users who want "Evernote but private," Notesnook is the closest match in look and feel.

Where Notesnook falls short: Smaller plugin ecosystem than Joplin. No outliner or graph view — it's a traditional document-based note app. The self-hosted server is newer and less battle-tested than Joplin Server or Standard Notes Server. No OCR on images.

When to Use Which

Choose Joplin if: You're migrating from Evernote and want the smoothest transition. You need a web clipper, E2E encryption, and flexible sync backends. You value maturity and a large plugin ecosystem. Joplin covers 90% of what Evernote does with better privacy.

Choose Standard Notes if: Privacy is the primary requirement and you need zero-knowledge encryption where even the server operator cannot read your notes. You're willing to trade feature richness for a stronger security model. You're a journalist, lawyer, or security researcher with sensitive content.

Choose Trilium Notes if: You have thousands of notes that need deep hierarchical organization beyond what notebooks and tags can provide. You're a power user who wants scripting, relation maps, and note cloning. You're building a personal knowledge base, not just storing quick notes.

Choose Logseq if: You want to change how you think about notes — moving from filing documents to connecting ideas. You value bidirectional linking, daily journals, and graph-based knowledge management. You want your notes stored as plain Markdown files with zero server dependencies.

Choose Notesnook if: You want the closest thing to Evernote's polish and usability but with E2E encryption and no vendor lock-in. Mobile note-taking is a priority. You want a familiar interface that doesn't require rethinking your workflow.

For broader knowledge management options beyond note-taking, see Best Open-Source Notion Alternatives 2026. If you're evaluating across every SaaS category, the Open-Source Alternative for Every SaaS Category guide covers the full landscape.