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If a vendor quote or an older article still cites Evernote's '$15/mo Personal plan,' it's out of date — that tier was discontinued, and current pricing is annual-only.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

Tool	Notion Plus	Evernote Advanced	Microsoft 365 Personal (OneNote)
Monthly cost	$10-12	$20.83	$8.33-9.99
Billing	Annual or monthly	Annual only	Annual 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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