Evernote in 2026: Is It Still Worth Using After the Bending Spoons Overhaul and Price Restructuring?

Quick Verdict: Should You Stay, Downgrade, or Switch?

Here is the short version for anyone who does not have time to read the full analysis. Evernote under Bending Spoons is faster, cleaner, and more modern than it has been in years. The rebuilt sync engine works. The new AI features — AI Transcribe and AI Edit — are genuinely useful additions. But the pricing has shifted dramatically. The free tier is now a 50-note trial. The Starter plan costs $99/yr and caps you at 1,000 notes. The Advanced plan runs $249.99/yr, making it the most expensive individual note-taking subscription on the market.

• Power OCR user who searches scanned documents daily → Stay on Advanced. No competitor matches Evernote's text-in-image search.
• Heavy web clipper with moderate note volume → Consider Starter. The 1,000-note limit is tight but workable if you archive regularly.
• Budget-conscious user or student → Switch to OneNote or Obsidian. Both offer robust free tiers.
• Team user needing collaboration → Switch to Notion. Evernote's collaboration features are basic compared to Notion's.
• Apple-only user → Consider Bear or Apple Notes. Both are cheaper and deeply integrated into the Apple ecosystem.

What Changed Under Bending Spoons?

Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in early 2023, and the changes since then have been substantial. The company rebuilt the sync engine from the ground up, which eliminated the long-standing issue of note duplication and edits failing to propagate across devices. The desktop and mobile apps received a visual overhaul that stripped away years of accumulated interface clutter. Performance improved noticeably — the app no longer freezes during typing or consumes over 1 GB of memory, a complaint that had been common among long-time users.

On the feature side, Bending Spoons introduced several AI-powered capabilities:

• AI Transcribe: Converts audio recordings and meeting conversations into searchable text directly within notes.
• AI Edit: Provides smart rewriting, summarization, and tone adjustment for existing note content.
• AI Meeting Notes: Automatically captures and structures meeting notes from calendar events.
• Semantic Search and AI Assistant: Marked as 'coming soon' on the official pricing page, these promise natural-language querying and conversational interaction with your note database.

The result is an app that, as Zapier put it in its December 2025 roundup, 'feels like a modern digital note-taking app' and 'it's good to see Evernote is back to just being expensive; not expensive and outdated.' The tension is real: the product is better than it has been in half a decade, but the pricing has moved in the opposite direction.

Evernote's 2026 Pricing Breakdown: Free, Starter, and Advanced

Evernote's official FAQ, updated April 9, 2026, confirms the current plan structure. The older Personal and Professional plans have been retired, and users on those legacy tiers cannot revert to them once they switch. Here is the exact breakdown: