Evernote vs Obsidian
Evernote and Obsidian are both note-taking software. Evernote is a commercial product from Bending Spoons. Obsidian is a commercial product from Dynalist Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Evernote when
- You already keep years of notes in Evernote, or want strong web clipping and scanned-document search.
- Pick Obsidian when
- You want notes as plain files you own, work offline, and are happy to tune your setup with plugins.
Side by side
A note-taking app with notebooks, tags, web clipping, document scanning and search inside images and PDFs.
A note-taking app that stores notes as Markdown files in a local folder, with linking, a graph view and a large plugin ecosystem.
Since Bending Spoons bought it, prices rose and the free plan was cut to one notebook and 50 notes.
Closed source, sync and publishing are paid add-ons, and team collaboration is weak.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Desktop app and mobile app
Not published
Electron and Markdown
Closed source, sold by Bending Spoons
Closed source, sold by Dynalist Inc.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code. (both)
2k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
6.2k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
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.