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Note-Taking Apps: Notion vs. Evernote vs. Microsoft OneNote (2026 Buyer's Guide)

The old cheap monthly Evernote plan doesn't exist anymore — here's what all three actually bill in 2026.

By The StackMatch Research Team

Evernote restructured its pricing — here's what the three actually cost now

$10-12Notion Plus, per user/mo (annual vs. monthly)
$8-21Evernote Starter vs. Advanced — no mid-tier monthly plan anymore
$0OneNote alone — cost only appears once you add the rest of Office

Evernote restructured its consumer plans within the last year — if you're comparing against an older price list, these are what's actually being billed in 2026.

Evernote used to be the easy budget pick at a flat monthly Personal-plan price. That plan doesn't exist anymore — it's been replaced with annually-billed Starter and Advanced tiers, which changes the comparison against Notion and OneNote more than most "best note-taking app" roundups have caught up to.

Each platform structures information differently — notebooks, pages, or databases — and that structure is the real product, not the price.

Notion: $10-12/user/mo, still the only one with a real database underneath

Notion's Plus plan runs $10/user/mo billed annually, or $12/user/mo month-to-month — a small gap compared to Evernote's now annual-only pricing. The reason to pay for Notion specifically is the database layer underneath the notes: a team wiki that's also a searchable, filterable tracker is a different tool than a notebook, and treating it as "just notes" undersells what the price buys. The failure mode runs the other direction, too — teams that build increasingly complex nested databases with no single owner end up with a wiki nobody can navigate, which is a documentation problem money doesn't fix.

Evernote: $99/yr Starter to $249.99/yr Advanced — no more cheap monthly tier

The old $15/mo Personal plan is gone. Evernote now sells Starter at $99/yr (about $8.25/mo) and Advanced at $249.99/yr (about $20.83/mo), both billed annually — there's no inexpensive monthly option anymore, which matters if you're used to testing a tool before committing to it. Advanced is worth the jump over Starter specifically for OCR search across scanned PDFs and photographed whiteboards; skip it if your notes are mostly typed text, since Starter's plain-text search already covers that.

If a vendor quote or an older article still cites Evernote's '$15/mo Personal plan,' it's out of date — that tier was discontinued, and current pricing is annual-only.

OneNote: free by itself, priced by what else you need from Office

OneNote has no standalone paid tier — it's genuinely free as an app. Cost only enters the picture once you want it bundled with the rest of Office: Microsoft 365 Personal runs about $8.33/mo billed annually ($9.99/mo month-to-month) and adds Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and 1TB of storage on top of OneNote. That means the real comparison isn't "OneNote vs. Notion" — it's whether you need the rest of Office badly enough to justify $8-10/mo for the bundle, since OneNote alone costs nothing either way.

What you're actually paying for

ToolNotion PlusEvernote AdvancedMicrosoft 365 Personal (OneNote)
Monthly cost$10-12$20.83$8.33-9.99
BillingAnnual or monthlyAnnual onlyAnnual or monthly
Structured database
OCR / image search
Includes Word/Excel/PowerPoint

Monthly cost, entry paid tier

Questions before committing to a note-taking platform

  • Do you need a real database — linked records, filtered views — or just searchable notes? That's Notion vs. everything else.
  • Is a meaningful share of your notes scanned documents or photos of whiteboards? That's the case for paying up to Evernote Advanced for OCR search.
  • Would you use Word, Excel, or PowerPoint anyway? If yes, Microsoft 365 Personal makes OneNote practically a rounding error on a bundle you'd buy regardless.
  • Are you being quoted Evernote's old $15/mo Personal plan? Ask for current Starter/Advanced pricing before you budget.

The wrong question is 'which note app is cheapest' — Evernote's entry tier and OneNote's bundled cost land within a dollar of each other. The right question is whether you need a database, OCR, or an Office bundle, because that's what actually separates the three.

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