Hit Evernote's 50-Note Limit? Free Alternatives That Don't Cap You
8 min read
Evernote's free plan now holds 50 notes and one notebook. Not 50 notes a month — 50 for the life of the account. For a product that spent fifteen years telling people to put everything in it, that is a striking number.
If you have just hit the ceiling, or you saw the warning and decided not to wait, here is what your options actually are — including an honest account of which one fits which kind of Evernote user, because they are not interchangeable.
The limits, precisely
Evernote free plan
Limit
Notes
50 total, for the lifetime of the account
Notebooks
1
Devices
1, plus the web app
Monthly uploads
1 GB
Maximum note size
200 MB
Existing notes above the cap are not deleted. You can still view, edit, export, share, and delete them — you simply cannot keep adding. Paid plans start around $8.25 a month at the time of writing, which is a perfectly reasonable price for a tool you rely on, and an irritating one for a scratchpad.
Before you pick a replacement, work out which Evernote you were actually using — the filing cabinet or the scratchpad. Almost every bad migration comes from answering that wrong.
Which Evernote were you using?
The filing cabinet. Years of clipped articles, scanned receipts, PDFs, meeting minutes. You search it more than you write in it. Its value is the archive, and the features that matter are search, attachments, OCR, and the web clipper.
The scratchpad. A running pile of half-thoughts, links to read, things to remember, a shopping list, the name of that restaurant. Nearly everything in it is from the last fortnight. Its value is speed of capture, and the archive is mostly sediment.
Most people are the second and think they are the first, which is why they migrate to another heavyweight archive tool, use it for three weeks, and abandon it. Check your own account: if the majority of what you have opened this month was written this month, you are a scratchpad user.
The honest rundown
JoplinThe closest free like-for-like
Free, open source, and the most direct replacement: notebooks, tags, attachments, full-text search, end-to-end encryption, and native .enex import so your Evernote export comes straight in. Sync is bring-your-own — Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, or its own paid service — which is either the appeal or the annoyance depending on your temperament. The interface is functional rather than lovely.
Best for: Filing-cabinet users who want the archive intact, free, and under their own control
ObsidianPlain Markdown files you own
Free — including for commercial use since early 2026 — stores everything as Markdown files in a folder on your disk, and has an enormous plugin ecosystem plus an official Evernote importer. Nothing here will ever hold your notes hostage. The trade-off is that Obsidian rewards investment: it is a system you build rather than a tool you open, and scratchpad users tend to bounce off it.
Best for: People doing linked, long-form thinking who want their notes to outlive any company
Microsoft OneNoteFree, capable, heavy
Genuinely free across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, with the deepest free feature set of anything here — handwriting, attachments, offline desktop apps, unlimited notes. The cost is structural: notebooks, sections, pages and sub-pages mean every note starts with a filing decision, which is exactly the friction that stops people writing.
Best for: Anyone already inside Microsoft 365 who wants a real desktop app at no extra cost
SimplenoteFast, plain, free, notes only
Free, cross-platform, instant to open, Markdown-friendly, no upsell. It does one thing well. There are no tasks, no attachments, and no images, so it is a companion to your task app rather than a replacement for both.
Best for: Scratchpad users who want nothing but text, synced everywhere
Slaet ✦Scratchpad, already on screen
Slaet puts unlimited notes and tasks on your browser's new tab, so the scratchpad is already open every time you open a tab — no app to launch, no notebook to choose. Notes are rich text, take pasted code and links cleanly, and can attach to the task they belong to. Reminders read plain English like “email the landlord Friday”. Free with no paid tier, works offline with no account, and syncs across Chrome, Brave, and Edge when you sign in. No web clipper, no OCR, no attachments — deliberately, because that is the archive half of Evernote and not what this replaces.
Best for: Scratchpad users who kept opening Evernote to write one line and check one list
Side by side
Tool
Unlimited free
Tasks
Attachments
Offline
Zero setup
Evernote free
50 notes
Limited
✓
1 device
✓
Joplin
✓
Checklists
✓
✓
✕
Obsidian
✓
Plugin
✓
✓
✕
OneNote
✓
Checklists
✓
✓
✕
Simplenote
✓
✕
✕
✓
✓
Slaet
✓
✓
✕
✓
✓
Get your notes out first
Whatever you choose, export before you do anything else. In the Evernote desktop app, select a notebook or a set of notes and export as .enex, Evernote's own XML format. Joplin imports it natively; Obsidian has an official importer; most others accept .enex, Markdown, or HTML.
Two things people regret skipping. Export before cancelling a paid plan, not after — and keep the .enex file somewhere safe even once the migration looks complete, because you will not notice a formatting casualty until you go looking for that one note in eight months.
Why the filing decision is the friction
The reason a 50-note cap pushes people toward simpler tools rather than bigger ones is that most of the value was never in the filing.
Cognitive load theory, developed by John Sweller, distinguishes effort spent on the task from effort spent on the apparatus around it. “Which notebook does this go in?” is pure apparatus. It is also the moment most quick notes die — the thought was worth three seconds, the filing decision costs ten, so the note never gets written.
The short version
Big archive, want it intact and free: Joplin.
Notes as a body of thinking you own forever: Obsidian.
Evernote's free plan is capped at 50 notes and 1 notebook per account, synced across one device plus the web. The 50 notes are a lifetime total for the account, not a monthly allowance. There is also a 1 GB monthly upload cap and a 200 MB maximum note size. The limits arrived at the end of 2023; if you already had more than 50 notes, you keep the ability to view, edit, export, share, and delete them, but you cannot keep adding new ones on the free plan.
What is the best free Evernote alternative with unlimited notes?
It depends on which part of Evernote you actually used. For a large searchable archive with attachments and web clipping, Joplin is the closest free replacement and it imports Evernote's .enex export files directly. For linked, long-form knowledge work, Obsidian is free — including for work use since early 2026 — and stores plain Markdown files on your machine. For quick capture that you want in front of you all day rather than filed away, Slaet keeps unlimited notes and tasks on your browser's new tab, free and with no paid tier.
How do I export my notes out of Evernote?
In the Evernote desktop app, select the notes or notebook you want and export them as an .enex file, which is Evernote's own XML format. Joplin imports .enex natively, Obsidian has an official importer for it, and most other note apps accept either .enex or a plain Markdown or HTML export. Export before you cancel a subscription rather than after, and keep the .enex file as your archive copy even once you have migrated.
Is Slaet a full replacement for Evernote?
No, and it is worth being clear about that. Slaet has no web clipper, no OCR of scanned documents, no document attachments, and no native mobile app, so it will not replace a decade-old archive of clipped articles and receipts. It replaces the other half of what most people used Evernote for: quick notes and tasks you need to see again soon. If your Evernote is mostly a filing cabinet, use Joplin or OneNote; if it was mostly a scratchpad, a new-tab workspace fits better.
Slaet is a free Chrome extension and web app
Unlimited notes and tasks on your new tab — free, no account, no note cap.