Ampersand vs
Evernote
Evernote is the best capture tool in the category and the notes live in Evernote. Ampersand cannot clip a web page, and the notes are files on your disk.
Evernote invented most of what people mean by a notes app, and it is still the best in the world at the part it invented: getting things in. The browser clipper is widely held to be the best in the category and has been for a decade. It reads receipts, business cards, whiteboards and handwriting, and makes the text inside them searchable. It scans documents on a phone, records meetings, and has fifteen years of mobile development behind apps that are close to the desktop in what they can do. If the problem you are solving is “capture everything, from anywhere, into one place”, Ampersand is not competing for that job and it would be silly to pretend otherwise.
The disagreement starts after capture, and it is about two things: where the notes end up, and what free means now. Evernote notes live in Evernote — a proprietary store, with ENEX or HTML as the way out and nothing that another app can open directly. And the 2025–2026 pricing overhaul that retired the Personal and Professional tiers in favour of Starter and Advanced also cut the free tier to 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 synced device, a 1 GB monthly upload allowance, 20 attachments, 20 tags and 5 Spaces, with no AI features. Several outlets reported significant backlash. Those are the numbers on Evernote’s own compare-plans page today, and they are the reason most people arrive at a page like this one.
Ampersand answers differently and narrowly. Your notes are plain .md files in a folder you chose, with no account, no server and no database in the middle. The app is free with the whole editor in it, and Pro is one payment of $29 rather than a subscription. What you give up is real: there is no web clipper, no OCR, no sync of our own, and no phone app at all. Against a service built to capture from everywhere, that last one is not a footnote.
Ampersand and Evernote, row by row
Every row states what both apps do. A dot marks whichever one leads — including the rows Evernote takes.
| Feature | Ampersand | Evernote |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Advantage: Ampersand.Free, then a one-time $29 (regularly $49) for export, AI agents, encryption and extra vaults. Never a subscription. | A limited free tier, then Starter, Advanced or Enterprise — all subscriptions, billed for as long as you use the app. |
| Where notes live | Advantage: Ampersand.A folder you pick. Plain .md files with optional YAML frontmatter. | In Evernote — its cloud and a local proprietary store. The ways out are ENEX, Evernote’s own re-importable XML, or HTML. No other app opens the notes directly. |
| Works offline | Advantage: Ampersand.Everything except cloud AI, and running a local model removes even that. | Cloud-first with local caching. It works offline on the devices your plan is allowed to sync to, which on the free tier is one. |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Windows 10+ and Linux, on both Intel/AMD and ARM. There is no phone app yet. There is no web app either. | Advantage: Evernote.macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and the web, with mature phone apps close to desktop parity. No native Linux app — the Linux client was discontinued and Linux users are pointed at the web. |
| Free tier | Advantage: Ampersand.The whole editor, full-vault search, wiki-links, backlinks, version history, inline AI and Markdown export, on as many notes, folders and machines as you like. | 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 synced device, a 1 GB monthly upload allowance, 20 attachments, 20 tags and 5 Spaces. No AI features. |
| Web clipping | None. There is no browser extension. | Advantage: Evernote.A browser extension widely regarded as the best in the category — full pages, simplified articles, selections and bookmarks, filed as you clip. |
| OCR and scanning | None. An image you drop into a note is stored and displayed; nothing reads the text inside it. | Advantage: Evernote.Reads receipts, business cards, whiteboards and handwriting and makes them searchable, with document and business-card scanning on the phone. |
| Search | Full text across the whole vault, with case-sensitive, whole-word and regex toggles, and #tags, wiki-links and backlinks indexed alongside it. It covers encrypted notes too while the vault is unlocked. It does not read text inside images or PDFs. Against Evernote, that last limitation is the whole row. | Advantage: Evernote.Full text across everything, with scoped operators — notebook:, tag:, created: and the rest — and no regex documented. Its OCR is the real answer here, and it is the best in this set: typed and printed text inside images, and genuine handwriting recognition in both print and cursive, across 28 typed and 11 handwritten languages, all of it searchable. The one gap is that inside a PDF it recognises typed text only, so a scanned or handwritten page in a PDF is not read. |
| Structured content | Advantage: Ampersand.Notion-style blocks over plain Markdown: tables whose cells take spreadsheet formulas, Mermaid diagrams, Vega charts, KaTeX maths, live calculation blocks with units and currency, callouts and highlighted code — all round-tripping as ordinary .md. | Tables are native, but a basic grid with no formulas. Code blocks are native, by triple-backtick fence or inline backticks. Maths is native LaTeX rendered with KaTeX, added in late 2024 and insertable from the toolbar, a slash command or $$formula$$. No Mermaid, no charts, no callouts and no live calculation. |
| Encryption | Advantage: Ampersand.Per-note, in the app, using age (X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305) under one vault passphrase, with Touch ID on a Mac and a recovery kit. Unlocking your own notes is never gated behind a licence. | No whole-note or whole-database encryption under your control. There is optional per-selection text encryption inside a note (AES-128, passphrase), which covers the highlighted text only. Sync is encrypted in transit and at rest with keys Evernote holds, so the company can technically read your notes. |
| Export | Advantage: Ampersand.Vector PDF from a real layout engine, editable Word with native equations and highlighted code, self-contained HTML, and Markdown. | ENEX, HTML and per-note PDF, in which attachments become placeholder images rather than embedded files. No Word and no ePub. |
| Version history | Advantage: Ampersand.Every save, snapshotted into a git repository kept outside the vault, with a timeline and a line-by-line diff. Browsing and diffing are free; one-click restore is Pro. You set how long it keeps. It works the same on every platform the app runs on. | Note History, kept on Evernote’s servers: open an automatically saved earlier revision and restore it, which replaces the note wholesale, though you can copy text out of an old version instead. It is available on desktop and the web only — the mobile apps do not have it. |
| AI | Advantage: Ampersand.Bring-your-own-key throughout: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, local models through Ollama, and CLI agents, routed per feature. You pay the provider directly at their price, with no credits and no markup, and a local model costs nothing and sends nothing anywhere. Rewrite, grammar, translate and summarise are free; agents and ask-your-vault are Pro. | Built in and requiring no setup, which is genuinely easier than bringing a key — but gated to the Starter and Advanced subscriptions, bundled at whatever price those become, with no bring-your-own-key, no choice of model and no local option. Its transcription and its text-in-images work are counted in the Meeting recording and OCR rows rather than twice here. |
| Sync | None of our own. Point it at iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or a git repo — a vault is just a folder. | Advantage: Evernote.First-party, on by default, across every platform and the web, with nothing to set up. There is no bring-your-own backend, and it is not end-to-end encrypted. |
| Meeting recording | Records a meeting in a room or on a call and transcribes it on your own Mac with a local Whisper model, then writes the note. No bot joins, nothing is uploaded. macOS only, and part of Pro. | A meeting recorder and voice-note modes on desktop and phone. Automatic transcription is AI Transcribe, up to 100 MB or 60 minutes per recording, on Starter and Advanced only. |
| Collaboration | None. No shared notes and no real-time editing. | Advantage: Evernote.Shared notebooks and Spaces, with per-user permissions. |
| Integrations | None, and no plugin API either. | Advantage: Evernote.No plugin API, but first-party integrations with Slack, Google Calendar, Gmail and Google Drive, plus automation through Zapier. |
Across these 17 rows, Ampersand leads 9, Evernote leads 7, and 1 is a draw. The dot marks the leader. Where Evernote leads, the dot is on its side of the table.
Ampersand is desktop-only today. An app for iPhone and iPad is in development and not yet released. The roadmap is where that gets announced.
Evernote details checked against its own pricing and documentation pages on . If something here has gone out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
Where Ampersand pulls ahead
Files that open without us
Every note is a plain .md file in a folder you chose, readable by any text editor on any machine, with no account and no export step in between. Getting your library out of Evernote means producing ENEX or HTML first, and ENEX is a format only Evernote reads.
No note limit, and no monthly bill
The free version has the whole editor, unlimited notes and folders, full-vault search, version history and Markdown export. Pro is one payment of $29 rather than a subscription, where Evernote’s free tier stops at 50 notes, 1 notebook and 1 synced device.
Encryption you hold the key to
Lock a note and its body is age-encrypted on your own disk under a passphrase only you have, unlocked with Touch ID on a Mac. Evernote encrypts with keys it holds and can technically read your notes; its own encryption feature covers only text you highlight inside a note.
Export that produces real documents
A vector PDF laid out by a real engine with running headers and controlled page breaks, and a Word file that is genuinely editable — native equations, real styles, syntax-highlighted code. Evernote offers per-note PDF in which attachments become placeholder images, and no Word at all.
Where Evernote is the better tool
Every page here names at least two, because Evernote genuinely has them and a comparison that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
The best web clipper there is
Evernote’s browser extension is the tool everything else in this category gets measured against, and it has held that position for years. Ampersand has no clipper at all — if the way you work is “see it, save it, sort it later”, that difference decides this on its own.
It reads paper and handwriting
OCR that turns receipts, business cards, whiteboards and handwritten pages into searchable text, with scanning built into the phone app, is genuinely valuable and genuinely hard. Ampersand does none of it: an image in a note is just an image.
Fifteen years of phone apps
Evernote on iOS and Android is close to desktop parity, including capture, recording and scanning, and it has been refined for well over a decade. Ampersand has no phone app whatsoever, which for a capture-first workflow is not a gap you can work around.
Sync that needs no decisions
You sign in and your notes are on every device and the web, with no backend to choose, no folder to point at and nothing to configure. Ampersand has no sync service of its own — you bring iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or git and set it up yourself.
Which one should you use?
Choose Evernote if
capture is the hard part of your day — clipping pages, photographing receipts and whiteboards, scanning cards, recording on a phone — or you need your notes on iOS, Android and the web with sync you never think about. Evernote is still the best in the category at getting things in, and none of that is a consolation prize.
Choose Ampersand if
you want the notes themselves to be ordinary files you own, with no note count, no synced-device limit and no monthly bill — and you would rather have real PDF and Word export, on-disk encryption and bring-your-own-key AI than a clipper you would use twice a week.
Moving from Evernote
Asked plainly
What is the best free Evernote alternative?
It depends on which half of Evernote you actually use. If you need the web clipper and OCR, nothing free replaces them properly and staying is the honest answer. If what you need is somewhere to write and keep notes without a 50-note cap, Ampersand is free with the full editor, unlimited notes and folders, full-vault search, wiki-links, version history and Markdown export, and it stores everything as plain .md files in a folder you choose rather than in a service.
Does Evernote still have a free plan?
Yes, but it is tightly limited. Evernote’s own compare-plans page lists the free tier as 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 synced device, a 1 GB monthly upload allowance, 20 attachments, 20 tags and 5 Spaces, with no AI features. The paid tiers are Starter, Advanced and Enterprise, all subscriptions. Ampersand’s free tier has no note or notebook limit and no synced-device limit, because there is no sync service — your notes are files, and you move them with whatever you already use.
Can I move my Evernote notes to Ampersand?
Yes, but not in one click, and there is no Evernote importer in Ampersand today. Evernote exports ENEX (its own XML) or HTML, neither of which is Markdown, so you convert that export into a folder of .md files with a tool outside both apps, then use Ampersand’s Markdown-folder import, which shows a dry-run preview of every file it will write before it changes anything. Keep the ENEX file afterwards — it is the only format that goes back into Evernote.
Is Ampersand cheaper than Evernote?
Over any length of time, yes, because it is not a subscription. Ampersand is free to use with the whole editor, and Ampersand Pro is a one-time $29 (regularly $49) covering three devices, with a 14-day money-back guarantee. Evernote’s paid tiers — Starter, Advanced and Enterprise — bill monthly or yearly for as long as you keep using the app, and its free tier stops at 50 notes and 1 notebook.
Does Ampersand have a web clipper like Evernote?
No. Ampersand has no browser extension and no way to clip a web page, and it has no OCR either, so an image you paste into a note is stored and displayed but never read. Those are two of the things Evernote is genuinely best at. Ampersand can paste a URL and unfurl it into a bookmark card, and it can import a folder of Markdown, an Obsidian vault, a Notion export or a Word file — but capturing the live web is not something it does.
Which is more private, Ampersand or Evernote?
Ampersand, fairly clearly, though the trade is real. Ampersand needs no account, keeps notes as local files no company holds, and can encrypt individual notes on your own disk with age under a passphrase only you have. Evernote stores your notes on its servers, encrypted in transit and at rest with keys it holds, which means the company can technically read them; its own encryption feature covers only text you highlight inside a note. What Evernote gives you in return is sync, the web and phone apps, none of which Ampersand has.
Other alternatives
Stop reading tables.
Open the app.
Ampersand is free to start and there is no account to make. Point it at the folder your notes are already in — including the one Evernote keeps them in — and see for yourself.
Free to start · Mac, Windows & Linux · No account required