Evernote Alternatives: How to Move Your Notes (Including the Scans)

Search for “Evernote alternative” and you get lists. This page is a route instead — because the hard part of leaving Evernote isn’t choosing a new app, it’s moving fifteen years of notes without losing the thing that made Evernote sticky: the scans. Receipts, contracts, whiteboard photos, PDFs. Text notes migrate anywhere; the scans are why people stay.

The route below gets everything out, keeps the text notes in open Markdown, and keeps the scans searchable — with page-level sources on top.

Step 1: Export everything from Evernote

In the Evernote desktop app, select a notebook and export it as ENEX (.enex) — repeat per notebook to keep the structure. ENEX is Evernote’s XML format and contains your notes and their attachments. Do this on desktop; the web app doesn’t offer full export.

Two practical notes: export notebooks separately (a single giant file makes the next step slower and errors harder to find), and check the file sizes — a notebook that’s suspiciously small usually means offline notes weren’t synced.

Step 2: Convert with the Obsidian Importer

The free, open-source Obsidian Importer plugin reads ENEX and writes clean Markdown — one file per note, attachments in a folder, links preserved. Install Obsidian (free), add the Importer plugin, point it at your .enex files.

This step is worth doing even if you don’t plan to keep Obsidian, because it converts your archive from a proprietary XML into the one format every tool on earth can read. The same importer also handles Notion, OneNote, Apple Notes, Bear, Roam and Google Keep — this guide’s route works for all of them.

If Markdown files on your machine are all you wanted, you’re done here, and honestly: for pure text collections that’s a fine place to stop.

Step 3: The scans — where most routes end

Now the honest part. Your notes are Markdown; your scans are image and PDF attachments sitting in a folder. Obsidian will show them, but it can’t read them — file-based tools index text, not pixels. In the Mac Power Users forum, an Evernote emigrant put it plainly: Obsidian is “good at text only/minimal images”, and getting receipts and scans in is “clunky”. That’s not a knock on Obsidian; it’s just not what it’s for.

So the receipts and contracts that made Evernote your external memory become file names. Searchable by title, mute inside.

Step 4: Make the scans searchable again

This is the step Memexa exists for. Zip the vault folder from step 2 and upload it — notes become linked entries in a knowledge graph (wikilinks preserved), and every attachment runs through OCR. The scanned contract is readable again, and better than before: search hits cite the source down to the page, and any MCP client — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor — can query it. The setup guide is here.

The chain in one line: Evernote → ENEX → Obsidian Importer → Markdown → Memexa. No step loses data, every step uses an open format, and you can stop at any rung and still be better off than inside Evernote.

And if you just want a new note app?

Fair question, short answers: Joplin is the closest free, open-source Evernote replacement (clipper included). Obsidian if you want linked Markdown notes and are happy text-first. Capacities if you want structure without building it, hosted in the EU. Our full comparison of nine tools covers the field — including where each one hosts your data.

Frequently asked questions

Does the OCR handle German documents? Handwriting?

Printed text in the usual European languages works well, including German umlauts and mixed-language documents. Handwriting recognition is honest-to-goodness harder; clear block writing often works, cursive is a lottery.

What about Evernote’s tags and notebooks?

The Importer turns notebooks into folders and tags into Obsidian-style tags; Memexa’s import maps both into the graph. Nothing is silently dropped.

How long does the whole migration take?

The Evernote export is the slow part (minutes to hours, depending on archive size). Importer and Memexa upload are minutes each. Plan an evening for a decade of notes.