Evernote to Obsidian Migration Guide: Preserve 14+ Years of Notes with Yarle and the Importer Plugin

Why Long-Time Evernote Users Are Finally Leaving in 2026

Your annual renewal jumped from $75 to $129.99 with almost no warning. That is the kind of number that makes you open the export settings. I know because I have done it, and I have helped others do it. The new Starter plan—$99 a year for 1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, 5 GB storage—is not a safety net. It is a wall.

Evernote Advanced runs $249.99 per year. That is more than a Microsoft 365 subscription that includes OneNote and the full Office suite. The old Personal and Professional plans disappeared on April 9, 2026. The free plan now holds just 50 notes in a single notebook. If you have been using Evernote since 2013, your entire archive no longer fits inside the free tier, and the paid tier costs more than it ever did.

Obsidian costs zero for personal use. Sync is optional at $48 per year. The gap is not small, but the technical argument—the one worth paying attention to—is not about the price tag alone. It is about what you keep and what you lose in the move.

What You Actually Lose in the Move

Most migration guides skip this step. I have watched people export their entire Evernote account, run the import, and only then discover that their encrypted notes are gone, their embedded PDFs left no trace, and their notebook structure is now a flat wall of Markdown files.

Three things to check before you export a single ENEX file:

Export: The One Step That Is Straightforward

Open the desktop app, select a notebook, choose File > Export Notes, and save as ENEX. You can export up to 100 notes at a time or an entire notebook. The official help page says the file size can be between 300 MB and 2 GB. I have seen large archives split naturally: one notebook with heavy attachments may hit the 2 GB ceiling, so keep an eye on size and split into smaller batches if the export stalls.

Attributes you can include: tags, created date, author. The export dialog lets you check those. I always include them. You cannot add them back later.

1. Open Evernote desktop
2. Right-click a notebook → Export Notes
3. Format: ENEX
4. Check: Include Tags, Include Attributes
5. Save to a folder you will remember

After Import: The Real Work Begins

The Obsidian Importer plugin (backed by Yarle) does a remarkable job with what it can: tags land as YAML front matter, dates survive, attachments (except embedded documents) come along. I have tested it on a 1,200-note archive, and the import itself ran without error. But that is only the first pass.

What the plugin does not do: restore your notebook hierarchy. It turns every notebook into a folder, ignoring any stack structure unless you pre-organize the export. So you inherit a flat list of folders. And note-to-note links inside your Evernote notes? They become dead text. You will need to either accept that or spend time manually re-linking.

Two plugins help: Notebook Navigator (for browsing notebooks) and Custom Attachment Location (to keep attachments organized). But installing and configuring them adds friction, especially if you have never had to manage a file system inside a note-taking app. The original case studies on jc.kiwi and marcel-jan.eu are useful existence proofs, but they are single-user reports. They show what is possible, not what is guaranteed.

The real test of a successful migration is not whether the import runs without errors. It is whether you can find a note from 2013 in five seconds after reorganization. For someone with more than a thousand notes, the Obsidian Importer (backed by Yarle) is the most faithful path I have seen. But the real work begins after the import runs without errors. If you are not prepared to reorganize, to accept some broken links, and to manually handle encrypted notes, the migration will not feel like liberation. It will feel like moving boxes without labeling them. The price of leaving Evernote is not the $50 difference. It is the weekend you spend re-creating order.