AFFiNE vs Evernote
AFFiNE and Evernote are both note-taking software. AFFiNE is open source under a license set out in its repository, with 74k GitHub stars. Evernote is a commercial product from Bending Spoons.
Which to pick
- Pick AFFiNE when
- You want an open alternative to Notion that also does visual whiteboarding and can run offline.
- Pick Evernote when
- You already keep years of notes in Evernote, or want strong web clipping and scanned-document search.
Side by side
A workspace combining Notion-style documents and Miro-style whiteboards on the same content, local-first with sync and self-hosting.
A note-taking app with notebooks, tags, web clipping, document scanning and search inside images and PDFs.
Still pre-1.0, the license is not a standard open-source one, and self-hosted sync lags the cloud version.
Since Bending Spoons bought it, prices rose and the free plan was cut to one notebook and 50 notes.
Usable
Production-ready
Desktop app, self-hosted server, cloud service and mobile app
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
TypeScript, Rust, Electron and Swift
Not published
Open source, license unclear on GitHub
Closed source, sold by Bending Spoons
GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
74k GitHub stars
2k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v0.27.4.
Not known
Other comparisons
More note-taking apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.