The short answer
Open Evernote on a Mac or Windows desktop, right-click a notebook, choose Export, pick ENEX, tick every attribute checkbox, and save one file per notebook. Do that before you cancel anything. Decrypt your encrypted notes and rename child tags to Parent/Child first, because both of those are fixed inside Evernote and nowhere else. Before you import, split the files in two: notebooks that are mostly writing go to a note app, notebooks that are mostly scans and paperwork go to a document vault.
Evernote’s own learn page says exporting preserves attachments and “ensures complete data retention, including embedded files and images.” The format tells a narrower story. The published definition of an .enex file, which Evernote has not revised since 2021, has no element for a notebook name, a stack, a note ID, a share, or trash state. Those things are not lost by a careless importer. They were never in the file.
Export, step by step
Eight steps, in this order. Two of them have to happen before you click Export, which is why the order is the whole point.
- Decrypt every encrypted note inside Evernote.Encrypted note text stays encrypted on the way out. Evernote’s developer documentation describes the exported block as ciphertext plus a hint, the cipher name and the key length, and no key. Only one importer documents a route back in: Obsidian’s Evernote engine takes a comma-separated list of your note passwords. Everything else treats the block as unreadable text. Select each encrypted block in Evernote, decrypt it permanently, save the note. Done looks like: no lock icons left in the notebook.
- Flatten the tag hierarchy.Obsidian’s help page says so directly: an Evernote export does not keep the tag hierarchy. The format agrees, because tags are written as flat names of 1 to 100 characters repeated on each note, with no parent recorded anywhere. Rename each child tag inside Evernote to Parent/Child. Do it now and the relationship rides along inside the name; do it later and there is nothing in the file to reconstruct it from. Done looks like: every tag name carries its own parent.
- Export one notebook at a time, as ENEX, from the desktop app.Right-click the notebook, choose Export, select ENEX, tick the attribute checkboxes, click Export. Evernote caps a multi-select export at 100 notes, and a whole notebook exports in one action however many notes it holds, so work notebook by notebook. Set the chunk size deliberately: Evernote splits an ENEX export into files of a maximum size you choose, between 300 MB and 2 GB, per Evernote’s help article, read 2026-09-13. Name each file for its notebook and its stack, because the file itself records neither. Obsidian’s documented convention is
Stack1@@@NotebookA. Done looks like: one .enex per notebook, named for the notebook and its stack. - Verify the counts before you close Evernote.Write each notebook’s note count beside its filename, and check the file size is plausible for the attachments inside it. A notebook of scans that exported far smaller than the scans themselves did not export its scans. If you are comfortable at a terminal,
grep -o "</note>" Notebook.enex | wc -lcounts the notes in the file directly. Done looks like: a written list of notebooks, counts, and file sizes. - Sort the files into two piles before you import any of them. This is the step the rest of the internet skips, and it decides everything downstream. Notebooks that are mostly writing go to a note app, where the text stays editable and the links between notes are worth trying to save. Notebooks that are mostly scans, receipts, statements, policies and contracts go to a document vault, where each attachment becomes a record in its own right. Done looks like: the same written list, now with a destination against every notebook.
- Import one file at a time.Take the smallest notebook first and look at the result before you run the rest. Destinations behave differently enough to matter: Joplin creates one notebook per file with no layer above it, Apple Notes puts everything into a single Imported Notes folder, and Notion does not read the file at all, because its Evernote import signs into your Evernote account over the API and runs into Evernote’s rate limits instead of the format’s limits. Notion’s own documentation calls that import reliable up to roughly 5,000 notes and says larger ones may fail, per Notion’s help, read 2026-09-13. Done looks like: one notebook imported, opened, and read.
- Reconcile what arrived against what you counted. Match the note counts first, then check the three things that fail quietly: attachments, internal note links, and checkbox ticks. Apple Notes drops any attachment or feature it does not support, with no error and no list of what it dropped, which is the worst kind of loss because nothing tells you it happened. If your destination stores Markdown, counting occurrences of
- [ ]and- [x]is the fastest checkbox audit available. A Granite import is the exception: it writes the glyphs ☑ and ☐ instead. Done looks like: counts that match, or a written list of what does not. - Cancel or downgrade last.Downgrading deletes nothing, so there is no reason to take the risk in the other order. Evernote’s help article says free users can export and download their content with no need for a paid subscription, and its free-tier announcement says free users over the limit keep the right to view, edit, export, share and delete existing notes and notebooks. Done looks like: the reconciliation is clean, and only then does the plan change.
Scroll sideways for all three stages.
Mac, Windows, and web
Evernote for Mac and Windows
The flow is the same on both, and Evernote’s help article gives identical steps for each: select a notebook or a set of notes, right-click, choose Export, select a file format, check or uncheck the attributes you want, click Export. In the current v10 client the same job also appears on the Notebooks screen under More actions, as Export Notebook, which is the wording Obsidian’s help page uses.
There are three formats, not two. ENEX is the one every importer wants. Single-page HTML gives you one HTML file containing every note plus one folder holding every attachment. Multi-page HTML gives you one HTML file per note, one shared resources folder, and an index that links them. The HTML formats are readable without any app at all, which is a real argument for keeping one alongside the .enex.
The attribute checkboxes are where the most preventable loss lives. Tags, created date and author are checkboxes, which means it is possible to produce a file that is silently missing them and looks fine. Jon Tromans of the Taming The Trunk newsletter says the same list includes tasks and reminders. Tick everything.
There is no whole-account export button. A multi-select export stops at 100 notes, a whole notebook exports in one action regardless of size, and notebooks come out one at a time, per Evernote’s help article, read 2026-09-13. Evernote gave the same advice itself when it retired the legacy apps, recommending that people export on a per-notebook basis because it is faster than going note by note and keeps each file small enough to re-upload without exceeding Evernote’s monthly upload limits.
Evernote on the web and on a phone
Neither can produce an .enex. Evernote’s help article says exporting is only available in the desktop app and that it is not possible to perform exports on Evernote Web. On the web and on iOS the only output is a PDF, and only through the print dialog, per Evernote’s help documentation. No Evernote document describes an ENEX path on Android either.
PDF export inside the app does exist, and has since July 2021. Per Evernote’s help documentation, the paths are: one note through More actions and Export as PDF, several notes through shift-select and the action bar, and on Mac a whole notebook from the notebook’s own More actions menu. The 100-note cap applies there too. Guides saying Evernote cannot export a PDF from inside the app are out of date.
What breaks on the way out
Two very different things get called breakage. One is what Evernote writes into the .enex file, read off the format definition Evernote publishes at xml.evernote.com; the other is what a named destination app does with it, taken from that app’s own documentation. The table below gives both, plus a column for what Granite’s own importer does, which is the one column we can read straight from source code. A loss in the file is a loss everywhere, and can only be prevented before you export. A loss on import is one app’s decision, and a different app may not make it. We chose Joplin, Obsidian, Notion and Apple Notes because all four publish import documentation.
The format is smaller than people expect. An exported note carries exactly eight things: title, content, created, updated, tags, note attributes, tasks, and resources. Nothing else exists. There is no element for a notebook name, a stack, a note ID, a share, or trash state, which is the format-level reason note links, stacks and notebook names cannot be restored by any importer, however good. Inside the note body, the markup is ENML, Evernote’s own HTML variant. Four of its tags carry the things this table tracks: en-media pins an attachment to its place in the note by a checksum, en-crypt holds encrypted text, en-todo holds a checkbox and its tick, and a recognition block carries the searchable text Evernote read off a scan. Evernote now files that specification under a heading labeled Legacy API, Deprecated.
| What is in the note | Worst case | In the .enex file | After import into a note app | In Granite |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The words themselvesBefore export: Nothing. | Survives | One content block holding the whole note body. | Joplin's documentation says the text itself is always imported in full, regardless of formatting. | Becomes a read-only text document that Granite reads, classifies and files. |
| Internal note linksBefore export: Build a table-of-contents note in Evernote, per Yarle's maintainer documentation. | Lost | A link ID, and nothing in the format that says which note the ID points at. | Joplin guesses the target from the note title and leaves the dead Evernote link in place when it cannot. | Passes through untouched, so it arrives as a link to a scheme nothing outside Evernote resolves. |
| Tag hierarchyBefore export: Rename every child tag to Parent/Child inside Evernote. | Lost | Flat tag names, 1 to 100 characters each, repeated on every note. No parent, no child. | Obsidian's help page says the export does not keep the tag hierarchy. | Flattened again, into a single Tags line on the document. |
| Notebook name and stacksBefore export: Name the file for the notebook, and encode the stack as Stack1@@@NotebookA. | Lost | Neither exists. The format has no element for a notebook or a stack. | Joplin creates one notebook per file; Notion maps notebooks to sidebar pages. | One .enex becomes one optional collection that you name yourself. |
| AttachmentsBefore export: Check your Office files and voice notes separately. | Partly survives | Encoded inline as text, 25 MB each at most, and only seven file types are named in the format. | Joplin imports attached files; Apple Notes drops anything it does not support, with no error. | A PDF always becomes its own document. Office files, zip archives, audio and video are never imported. |
| Inline imagesBefore export: Nothing. Open a clip-heavy note when you check the result. | Partly survives | Pinned to their place in the note by a checksum of the image, inside an en-media tag. | Obsidian's importer files them into a _resources folder; Notion warns images may not render correctly. | Becomes its own document, unless the note is text-heavy, when the image is treated as article furniture and dropped. |
| Searchable text on a scanBefore export: Nothing. Expect the destination to read every scan again. | Lost | Present, in a recognition block attached to the image. | Joplin's documentation says it is not preserved, and is recreated only if Joplin's own text reading is on. | Discarded: the parser reads seven fields and this is not one of them. The scan then goes through Granite's normal reading pipeline. |
| Encrypted textBefore export: Decrypt inside Evernote. This is the fix that has to happen while the account still opens. | Lost | Ciphertext in an en-crypt tag, with a hint, the cipher name and the key length. No key. | Only Obsidian's importer documents a route in, and it wants a comma-separated list of your passwords. | Removed silently, with no marker left where it was. |
| Created and updated datesBefore export: Tick the created-date checkbox in the export dialog. It is optional. | Partly survives | Both, in UTC. | Obsidian's importer restores both onto the file; Notion says dates looking wrong after import can be expected. | The created date is kept. The updated date is dropped. |
| Tasks and remindersBefore export: Tick every attribute checkbox; Jon Tromans reports the list includes tasks and reminders. | Partly survives | Present, with status, due date, time zone and a recurrence rule. | Obsidian's importer reads them; Joplin, Notion and Apple Notes document nothing about them. | Dropped. The parser has no field for them. |
| Web clip source URLBefore export: Decide whether you want the clips at all before you import. | Partly survives | Present, as the source-url attribute on the note. | Obsidian's importer converts clips, and its sample configuration skips them by default. | Kept, as a Saved from line on the document. Clips are their own import bucket, off by default. |
| CheckboxesBefore export: Count the ticked and unticked boxes on both sides. Nobody will tell you. | Partly survives | Present, tick included, inside an en-todo tag. | Not one of the four destinations documents what it does with a checkbox. | Converted to the glyphs ☑ and ☐, so the tick survives as text, though not as Markdown task syntax. |
| Tables, colors, fontsBefore export: For heavily formatted notes, use Joplin's option to import the file as HTML. | Partly survives | The note body, as one block of ENML. | Joplin converts tables to Markdown tables and says colors, font sizes and font faces are not imported on very complex notes. | Converted to Markdown, which the importer source itself calls lossy for tables, nested formatting and embedded media. |
| Trash stateBefore export: Go through the trash first. Trashed notes still count against your plan's note limit. | Never in the format | The format has no element for trash state. | There is no trash flag in the file for a destination to read. | Nothing to read. The file carries no trash state. |
| Shared notebooksBefore export: We found no Evernote documentation on whether shared notebooks export. | Never in the format | The format has no element for a share state. | Notion's documentation says it does not import Evernote Teams content. | Nothing to read. The file carries no share state. |
Scroll sideways for all five columns.
What survives
Of fifteen note elements, one survives intact everywhere, seven survive partly, five are lost, and two were never in the format. The one is the words themselves: they survive an Evernote export in every destination, regardless of formatting. Joplin’s documentation is blunt about it: on very complex notes some formatting data might be lost, in particular colors, font sizes and font faces, and the text itself is always imported in full regardless of formatting. Nobody loses the words.
Joplin also imports tags, attached files, author and geolocation, and converts Evernote tables into Markdown tables. Apple Notes imports Evernote tags on macOS 13 or later. Obsidian’s importer restores each note’s original creation and modification timestamps onto the file itself, files every attachment into a _resources subfolder, and can keep the original image sizing.
Two things are in the file that the folklore says are not. Evernote v10 Tasks are in the export format as first-class items, carrying status, due date, time zone and a recurrence rule, and reminder completion time is in there too. Obsidian’s importer is the only one of the four destinations that documents reading them, and it loses due dates and reminders unless you choose its Obsidian-task output format. Checkbox ticks are in the file as well. Not one of the four destinations documents what it does with them.
The export itself is better than the genre implies. It is free on every tier, it takes a whole notebook in one action, it offers three formats, it lets you choose which attributes ride along, and it lets you set the file chunk size. The problem is not that Evernote makes leaving hard. The problem is that the file is smaller than the app.
Two destinations, not one
Most Evernote migration advice assumes the notes are prose. For a household archive, half of them are paperwork with a sentence stapled to the front, and the attachment is the payload.
Those two halves want different homes, and forcing them into one is what makes migrations feel like a failure. Prose needs an editor, a link graph, and a way to keep writing: Joplin, Obsidian and UpNote are all built for that. Documents need something else entirely. A receipt from 2021 is never edited again. It needs to be read, filed, and found in 2031 by someone who does not remember what it was called.
There is a mechanical half to this, and it belongs in Evernote, before the export. The notebook is the unit of export, so a notebook holding both kinds produces a file that has to be picked apart by hand. Move the attachment-led notes into a new notebook inside Evernote first, then export that notebook on its own. And for the document-heavy notebooks, consider exporting twice: once as ENEX for the vault, and once as multi-page HTML, which produces one HTML file per note, one shared resources folder, and an index that links them.
So split the export by notebook before you import anything. Notebooks that are mostly writing go to a note app. Notebooks that are mostly scans, receipts, statements, policies, contracts and IDs go to a document vault, where collections form around tax years, vehicles and policies on their own. There are no folders to build. Our guide to going paperless at home covers what that pile looks like once it is out of Evernote, and getting meeting notes out of an AI notetaker is the same job one app over.
Will I lose my notes if I cancel Evernote?
No. Downgrading does not delete notes. Evernote’s free-tier announcement, published 29 November 2023, says free users over the limit will still be able to view, edit, export, share, and delete existing notes and notebooks. What they lose is the ability to create new ones.
Export is not paywalled either. Evernote’s help article says free users can export and download their content with no need for a paid subscription. Between those two statements, Evernote has committed in writing, on two separate properties, to letting you take your data out.
Export first anyway. Not because Evernote will delete anything, but because an archive you can only read inside one company’s app is not an archive you control, and because the two losses you can still prevent, encrypted text and tag hierarchy, are both fixed inside Evernote and nowhere else. Tag hierarchy is the one that is genuinely unrecoverable afterwards: the file never recorded which tag was the parent, so there is nothing for any importer to work from.
For context on what changed: the free tier is 50 notes and one notebook, announced 29 November 2023 and effective 4 December 2023, and notes sitting in the trash still count toward that limit. The current plans are Free, Starter, Advanced and Enterprise at 50, 1,000, unlimited and custom notes. Read live on evernote.com/compare-plans on 2026-09-13: Starter is $99.00 a year or $14.99 a month, and Advanced is $249.99 a year or $24.99 a month. Pricing pages change; check the current one before you plan around a number here.
What was the downfall of Evernote?
Evernote was bought by the app company Bending Spoons, which laid off 129 staff in February 2023, cut most of its US and Chile employees that July and moved operations to Europe, raised prices in April 2023, cut the free tier to 50 notes in December 2023, and switched off every pre-v10 desktop client in March 2024.
The dates, from the record. Alex Kras, a former Evernote engineering manager, puts the acquisition announcement in November 2022 and the close in January 2023. TechCrunch reported the February 2023 layoffs as affecting 129 people. Evernote’s own blog announced in July 2023 that most of its Chile-based and US-based employees would be laid off as operations moved to Europe. In April 2023 it raised Personal to $129.99 a year and Professional to $169.99 a year, which it described as its first price increase in almost seven years. On 29 November 2023 it announced a free tier of 50 notes and one notebook, effective 4 December. And every version released before v10 for macOS, Windows and Android stopped working on 26 March 2024.
None of that is an argument for leaving in a hurry, and none of it changes the mechanics above. It is the reason the question gets asked alongside the export question, and it is why canceling is the last step in this guide and not the first.
Where did all my Evernote notes go?
Five places, in the order worth checking: the trash, local-only notebooks that never synced, notebooks someone else owns and shared with you, the 50-note free-tier cap that applies to existing archives and not only to new accounts, and the legacy desktop app, which stopped working on 26 March 2024.
The legacy shutdown is the one that catches people. Every version of Evernote released before v10 for macOS, Windows and Android stopped working on 26 March 2024, and the iOS legacy app had been retired before that. If your notes lived in a client that no longer opens, they are almost certainly still on the server, reachable from v10 or the web app, and the thing you lost is the window, not the notes.
Local notebooks are the exception, and this one is a real loss. Evernote v10 does not support local notes, and Evernote’s own help documentation carries a data-loss warning saying any unsynced notes in legacy clients were lost during the transition to v10. If a notebook was deliberately kept off the server, check whether an old machine still holds the database file before you conclude anything.
The rest are simpler. Notes in the trash still count against your plan’s note limit, so a full trash can make an account look over its cap while the notes you care about are fine. Notebooks shared with you belong to someone else, and the export format has no element for a share state at all, so treat anything shared as something to copy into a notebook you own. And on the free tier the 50-note limit landed on archives people already had, and not only on new signups.
Common mistakes
Exporting before decrypting
The single unrecoverable one. Encrypted text leaves Evernote as ciphertext with no key attached, and three of the four common destinations do not document any way to deal with it. Granite’s own importer removes the block entirely and does not leave a marker where it was. Decrypt first.
Leaving the attribute checkboxes alone
The defaults are a dialog, not a promise. Tags, created date and author each have their own checkbox, so an untouched dialog can produce a file that opens perfectly and has lost your chronology. Tick them all, every time.
Looking for the one-click account export
It does not exist, and the time spent looking for it is time not spent exporting notebooks. Related: if you set the chunk size to 2 GB you will produce files that some destinations cannot accept, including ours, which stops at 500 MB per file.
Canceling first
People downgrade to save the renewal, then discover the export needs the desktop app, a working account, and an afternoon. Nothing is deleted by downgrading, but the job still gets harder under time pressure. Export, reconcile, then cancel.
Assuming the searchable text on a scan survives the move
The searchable text Evernote read off a scanned page travels inside the file, attached to the image. Joplin’s documentation says it throws that text away and re-creates it only with Joplin’s own reading turned on; the others say nothing about it at all. The scan arrives looking identical and is no longer findable by its contents until something reads it again. Nothing warns you, because visually nothing changed.
Counting nothing
Every silent loss in this guide is caught by the same cheap habit: a note count per notebook, written down before the import and checked after it. Do it for attachments and checkbox ticks too. It is ten minutes and it is the only evidence you will ever have.
How this looks on a real archive
Take a household archive of about six years: scanned receipts and warranty paperwork in one set of notebooks, insurance PDFs and policy documents in another, and a genuine notebook of prose, house projects, a running list of who fixed what, notes from phone calls with the insurer.
Inventory it by notebook rather than by note, because notebooks are the unit of export. Two lists: notebooks that are mostly writing, and notebooks that are mostly attachments with a line of text on top. That single split decides everything downstream.
Then the mechanics. Open every note with a lock icon and decrypt it, because that is the one loss nobody can undo. Rename the child tags so each one carries its parent, since Insurance/Auto survives and a child tag called Auto does not. Export each notebook on its own from the desktop app as ENEX with every attribute checkbox ticked, and set the chunk size low. Write each notebook’s note count next to its filename.
Import the prose notebooks into the note app, where the writing stays editable and the links between notes are worth trying to preserve. Import the receipt and insurance notebooks into the vault, where each PDF becomes its own record, gets read, and gets filed by type. Reconcile both sides against the counts you wrote down. Open a clip-heavy note and a scan-heavy note by hand, because those two fail in ways a count does not catch.
Then cancel. The insurance notebook is the test of whether the migration worked, and the test does not happen this month. It happens the day a claim gets filed and someone needs the declarations page from three policy terms ago, by asking for it in words rather than by remembering where it was filed.
What Granite does with an .enex
Granite’s importer reads an .enex one note at a time and turns the contents into documents. Every PDF becomes its own document. An image usually does too. A note carrying real prose becomes a read-only Markdown document that goes through the same reading, classification and extraction as a scanned tax form. Text notes stop being notes here, which is the right trade if you need to find something in five years and the wrong one if you are still writing in it.
Read from the importer source on 2026-09-13: the rule that decides the shape of the result is a length test. A note body under 200 characters of visible text is treated as a caption on its attachment rather than as a document of its own, which is why a scan with “car insurance 2021” typed above it produces one document rather than two. A PDF attached to a note always becomes a document. An image becomes one too, unless the note is text-heavy, in which case the image is treated as article furniture and dropped.
One .enex maps to one optional collection that you name yourself, because the file carries no notebook name to read. Granite keeps the Evernote creation date on the imported document, and flattens the note title, its tags and its source URL into one encrypted note field on the document. Tags survive as text, not as structure. Every decoded attachment is re-checked by its actual bytes, and the type label in the file is treated as a hint. Re-importing the same .enex does not create duplicate documents: every note payload goes through the same intake, which hashes the bytes and skips a byte-exact match already in the vault, counting it as a duplicate. A re-export whose bytes changed, because you edited the note or Evernote rendered it differently, is treated as new and surfaced as a possible duplicate later instead of being merged. The reading runs on a low-priority queue polled a fifth as often as live uploads, so a large import never starves anything you do by hand.
Now the losses, which belong in the same section as the wins. Granite drops the modified date, Evernote Tasks and reminders, the author, and the note’s location, because the parser has no field for any of them. It removes every encrypted block silently, with no marker left behind, which is the reason step one of this guide is what it is. Links starting with evernote:/// pass through untouched, so they arrive as ordinary Markdown links pointing at a scheme nothing outside Evernote resolves. Office documents, zip files, audio voice notes and video are never imported at all, because Granite reads PDFs, images and text and nothing else. And when something is skipped, you get a bare count with no per-file reason, which is a weakness we would rather you read here than discover halfway through a migration.
The limits: 500 MB per .enex file, so the 2 GB chunk setting will not upload; 50 MB per individual file; PDFs up to 50 pages on Free and 200 on Paid; five import uploads an hour. There is no ceiling on the number of notes in a file. Imported documents count against the Free plan’s 25-document lifetime limit, and past it every further file is skipped, so a real archive needs the $99 a year plan. Each document is matched against a library of more than 110 document types, which is what makes a receipt file itself as a receipt. Limits checked 2026-09-13; they change.
Three things a note app does better
Editing and round trips. Granite is not a note editor. Imported notes are read-only documents, the conversion to Markdown is lossy by design for tables, nested formatting and embedded media, and there is no path back into Evernote. If the notes are still being written, they belong somewhere else.
The note-link graph. A vault has no note-link primitive, so there is nothing here to reconnect even if the export carried the targets, which it does not. If the value of your Evernote account is notes pointing at other notes, Obsidian and Joplin are trying to solve that problem and we are not.
Web Clipper capture.Clips are their own bucket in Granite’s import picker and are off by default, because a saved article is usually not a document you need to find again in a decade. If clipping the web is the habit you are migrating, keep a note app for it. Granite as an Evernote alternative covers the rest of the comparison.
Sources
Primary sources for the claims above, read on 2026-09-13: the ENEX 4.0 format definition and Evernote’s note markup documentation; Evernote’s help articles on exporting notes and notebooks, exporting notes as PDF, and note limits; Evernote’s blog on free-tier note limits (29 November 2023), legacy app decommissioning (26 March 2024), and PDF export (21 July 2021); evernote.com/compare-plans, read live in a browser because the prices are rendered by script; and Evernote’s own export explainer. On the destination side: Joplin’s import and export documentation, Obsidian’s Evernote import help page, the Yarle README(the engine Obsidian’s own importer uses), Notion’s import documentation, and Apple’s support pages on importing notes from Evernote and importing, exporting and printing notes. Menus and prices change; check the current version before relying on one here.