Evernote is a cloud-synced note-taking app for capturing, organizing, and searching notes, web clippings, documents, and images. Created by Stepan Pachikov and publicly launched in June 2008, it has been owned since January 2023 by the Italian app developer Bending Spoons. It runs on a 📝freemium model — a tightly limited Free plan, paid Starter and Advanced tiers, and a custom-priced Enterprise plan — and syncs across Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and the web, with search that reaches text inside images and PDFs.
Under CEO 📝Phil Libin from 2007 to 2015, Evernote became the defining "remember everything" app of the smartphone era, popularizing web clipping and cross-device sync and reaching a billion-dollar valuation in 2012. Growth stalled under his successors amid feature sprawl, and Bending Spoons agreed to buy the company in November 2022. After the deal closed, the new owner cut most of the original staff, moved operations to Europe, raised prices, and in December 2023 capped the Free plan at 50 notes and one notebook, while adding AI search, transcription, and editing tools to paid tiers. Evernote now competes with 📝Notion, 📝Obsidian, Microsoft OneNote, and Apple Notes; writing-first apps such as 📝Bear define themselves against it as tools built to create rather than to capture and organize.
Key Features
- Web Clipper — Browser extension that saves full articles, simplified pages, bookmarks, or screenshots straight into a chosen notebook.
- Search inside images and PDFs — Optical character recognition makes text in photos, scanned documents, and PDFs searchable.
- Notebooks, stacks, and tags — Notebooks grouped into stacks, plus tags, organize notes consistently across every synced device.
- Tasks and Calendar — Built-in tasks with due dates and reminders, plus calendar integration that links meetings to their notes.
- AI tools — Paid tiers add an AI Assistant, semantic search, AI Transcribe, and AI editing and cleanup of existing notes.