Moving your notes · Updated October 6, 2026

Get your notes out of Evernote

Evernote exports a notebook at a time as ENEX, an XML format only Evernote reads. Free tools turn it into a folder of Markdown files, pictures and all.

Why people leave

Evernote taught a generation to keep everything, and since Bending Spoons bought it at the start of 2023 it has been giving them reasons to take it elsewhere. Prices first: the Personal plan went from $69.99 to $129.99 a year in 2023, and in November 2025 Personal and Professional were discontinued for a Starter plan at $99 a year, capped at 1,000 notes and 20 notebooks, and an Advanced plan at $249.99, with existing subscribers moved up to Advanced at renewal unless they chose otherwise. The free plan has allowed 50 notes and one notebook since December 2023, and one device since August 2024. And leaving is slow work: the old Legacy app, which could export everything at once, was switched off in March 2024, and the current app exports a notebook at a time or up to 100 selected notes, and fails outright on some large notebooks.

What the export gives you

Export lives in the desktop app only, Mac or Windows; the web and mobile apps have none. In the sidebar, open Notebooks, hover a notebook, open its ⋯ menu and choose Export Notebook…, pick ENEX, and leave every attribute ticked: tags, created and updated dates, the source URL of a web clip, the author. Evernote names the file after the notebook, which matters later, because that name is the only record of which notebook a note was in. A notebook larger than the size you choose (300 MB to 2 GB) is split into several files. You can also select up to 100 notes in the list and right-click them to export, which is the only way to export notes from several notebooks together. Recent versions may let you select several notebooks and export them in one go; if yours does, use it.

ENEX is XML. Each note is there with its title, its content in ENML (an HTML dialect of Evernote’s own), its dates, tags and attributes, and every attachment encoded inside it as text, which is why the files are so large. Not in the file: the notebook, except as the filename; the tag hierarchy; note history; and where a link between notes points. Links are written as evernote:/// addresses naming an ID the file doesn’t carry, so every converter has to guess the target from the link’s text, and a note renamed since the link was made is lost to it.

The easiest way

Use Obsidian as the converter, even if you don’t mean to keep it. It is free for personal use, and its Evernote importer was rebuilt in August 2026 to read ENEX as a stream and to stop losing notes with duplicate titles, which an earlier version did quietly; make sure the plugin is up to date.

1. Tidy up in Evernote first. Let sync finish. Empty the Trash, or the trashed notes may come along. Permanently decrypt any encrypted text you mean to keep (select it and choose Decrypt text permanently): no converter can read it without the passphrase.
2. Export every notebook as above, into one folder.
3. Install Obsidian and create a new vault in an empty folder. In Settings › Files and links, turn off Use [[Wikilinks]], so that links come out as standard Markdown links.
4. In Settings › Import, choose Evernote (.enex), add all the files, choose where attachments should go, and open the preview. Each file becomes a folder named after it. In the template, add each note’s created and updated dates as properties: otherwise they are stamped only on the files, and files lose their stamps when copied. Import.
5. Read the report: how many notes came in, against Evernote’s count for each notebook, and which links between notes it could not match.
6. The vault folder, minus its hidden .obsidian folder, is your notes as Markdown files. Keep the ENEX files as an archive; they re-import into Evernote losslessly.

Two other converters with a window rather than a terminal: Joplin, free and open source on Mac, Windows and Linux, imports ENEX (File › Import, ENEX - Evernote Export File (as Markdown)) and exports again as MD - Markdown + Front Matter, with created and updated dates, tags and a folder per notebook, and attachments in a _resources folder. And Yarle, the longest-serving ENEX converter, has a desktop app for Windows and for Apple-silicon Macs.

With a terminal

Two tools cover the whole account. evernote-backup signs in as your desktop app does, syncs every note to a local database and writes one ENEX file per notebook, which gets around the app’s export limits and its failures on big notebooks. evernote2md turns ENEX into Markdown: one file per note, its pictures in an image folder and other attachments in a file folder beside it, checkboxes as task lists, tags and dates in the front matter, and the file’s own timestamps set to the note’s.

brew install evernote-backup evernote2md
evernote-backup init-db --oauth-method import   # reuses the desktop app’s sign-in
evernote-backup sync
evernote-backup export ./enex                   # one .enex per notebook
for f in enex/*.enex; do
  evernote2md --addFrontMatter "$f" "notes/$(basename "${f%.enex}")"
done

The import sign-in method matters on the free plan, which allows one session at a time: the default method would sign your desktop app out. The loop keeps each notebook as a folder, which evernote2md does not do by itself. Its front matter calls the dates date and updated_at; Skysa Notes, and most apps, read created and updated, so rename the keys:

find notes -name '*.md' -exec perl -pi -e 's/^date: /created: /; s/^updated_at: /updated: /' {} +

(A line inside a note that begins with date: would change too. It is rare; search for it first if you like.) Then count and check:

find notes -name '*.md' | wc -l           # against Evernote’s note count
grep -rl 'evernote:///' notes | wc -l   # links between notes still unresolved

What to check afterwards

• Counts. Per notebook, against Evernote. Duplicate titles and the hundreds of “Untitled” notes most accounts hold are where notes go missing.
• Links between notes. Search for evernote:///. Each one is a link no converter could match to a note; fix the ones you care about by hand.
• Web clips. A clipped page is a heap of nested HTML and inline styles, and Markdown has nowhere to put most of it. For clips whose layout matters, export those notes from Evernote as HTML too and keep that.
• Tables. Merged cells don’t exist in Markdown; a table that had them comes out shifted.
• Handwriting. Ink notes are stored in Evernote’s own format and no converter renders them. Open each one in Evernote and save it as a picture or PDF first.
• Dates. If your converter only set the files’ timestamps, they will not survive a copy through most sync tools. Front matter does.