Evernote vs Obsidian Comparison 2026
Both cover project management and writing & scripts. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
The notes app that indexes what it captures
Notes that stay as plain files on your own disk
At a glance
- Obsidian starts cheaper, at $4.
- Both have a genuinely free tier.
Side by side
Evernote | Obsidian | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $8.25 | From $4 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Not stated | Not stated |
| Free trial | 7 days | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Evernote
The notes app that indexes what it captures
Evernote is a note store built around finding things again rather than around writing them. Web clips, scanned pages and photographs are searchable including the text inside images, which is why it has outlasted several tidier competitors. For a creator it is where the research, the receipts and the half-formed ideas go before any of them turn into work. The free plan is deliberately narrow now and the paid tiers carry upload allowances rather than feature gates. Sync across devices is the thing people pay for.
Obsidian
Notes that stay as plain files on your own disk
Obsidian keeps a vault of Markdown files on the local disk and builds links, backlinks and a graph over them. For a creator that means the idea list, the script drafts and the research notes outlive the app: no export, no account, nothing to be locked out of. The app itself is free without a sign-up. Sync and Publish are paid add-ons rather than the product, and a commercial licence is asked for only when notes are used for work at a company.
Our note
Try it before paying for anything, since the free app is the product and the add-ons only matter once you are working across two devices. The commercial licence is the one people miss: it applies to using notes for company work, not to writing for your own channel.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.