Evernote keeps your notes on its servers, behind a subscription that only ever moves one way. NotePrivate keeps every note encrypted on your own Mac or Windows PC with a key only you hold, imports your Evernote ENEX export straight in, and charges one flat yearly price with no tiers to climb.
macOS and Windows · You hold the keys · Import from Evernote, Apple Notes, Standard Notes and more
The same everyday notes, but encrypted with a key only you hold and stored on your own machine.
| Capability | NotePrivate | Evernote |
|---|---|---|
| End-to-end encrypted | Yes | No |
| You hold the keys | Yes | No |
| Works fully offline | Yes | PartialCloud oriented |
| One flat price | Yes$59/year | PartialRising subscription |
| Code, spreadsheet, one-time-code notes | Yes | No |
| Full export, no lock-in | Yes | Partial |
| Web and mobile everywhere | PartialiPhone in progress | Yes |
Competitor details are a general reading and change over time; verify on the vendor's site.
Almost nobody leaves because the writing is bad. They leave because of where the notes live and what the plan costs.
The plan you signed up for is rarely the plan you are on now, and basic things keep drifting behind a higher tier. NotePrivate is one flat yearly price, planned at $59, with every feature in the box.
Evernote can read what it stores. NotePrivate encrypts every note and attachment with a master key wrapped by your password, on your own Mac or PC. Not even we can read them.
Evernote is built around its cloud. NotePrivate opens, searches and edits your whole vault with the wifi off. Sync runs through a cloud folder you already own, still encrypted, and you can skip it.
Rich text, code, checklists, spreadsheets, one-time codes and saved web pages all live in the same encrypted vault, with on-device OCR so text inside images and PDFs is searchable too. If one of those notebooks is a diary, the private journal app page covers that use on its own.
Ten years of notes is the real reason people stall. Here is the whole move, including the parts that do not survive it.
Coming from more than one app? The same importer reads Standard Notes backups, Google Keep and Simplenote JSON, Markdown, HTML, DOCX, RTF, CSV and plain text, so the scattered years come in with the Evernote years.
Images and file attachments embedded in Evernote notes stay behind. If your archive is mostly scanned receipts and PDFs, that is a real reason to wait rather than switch.
Most roundups rank by feature count. The honest split is what happens to your notes when you close the laptop.
Free, quick, and tied to a Microsoft or Google account. If cost is the deciding factor these win, as long as you are comfortable with notes stored on an account you do not control.
Databases, wikis and teams, which is more machinery than most people leaving Evernote wanted. If you like the structure but not the hosting, read the private Notion alternative comparison.
Local-first and free, which is the right instinct. Obsidian's files sit on disk as plain Markdown anyone with your laptop can open, and Joplin asks you to set encryption up. Here is the encrypted Obsidian alternative comparison.
Encrypted, privacy focused, with a free tier, and extras arrive on paid plans. See how the feature split differs on the Standard Notes alternative page.
Free and already installed, and fine until a Windows PC joins the household. The Apple Notes alternative page covers that jump.
Encrypted on your own disk with a key only you hold, on both Windows and Mac, one flat price, and rich enough to be the only notes app you keep.
Details on other apps are a general reading and change over time; check the vendor's site before you decide.
NotePrivate is planned at $59 a year. If the budget is zero, Joplin and OneNote are the sensible stops and we would rather say so here than waste your afternoon.
This is a single-person vault. Shared notebooks, comments and team permissions are not the job it does.
Mac and Windows are solid today, iPhone is still in progress. If most of your capture happens on a phone, wait for that release.
Yes. Export your notebooks from Evernote as ENEX files and import them into NotePrivate. Note titles, formatted text and tags come across, and each file lands as its own folder.
ENEX is Evernote's own export format. A single .enex file is one XML file holding every note in one notebook, which is why exporting notebook by notebook gives you tidier folders after the import.
Not yet. The importer carries titles, formatted text and tags, and leaves embedded images and file attachments behind. Keep your Evernote export until you have checked the notes you care about most.
Several. OneNote, Joplin, Google Keep and Simplenote all cost nothing, and Standard Notes has a free tier. NotePrivate is planned at one flat $59 a year with every feature included, and what that buys is a vault encrypted with a key only you hold.
Evernote can read the notes sitting on its servers. NotePrivate encrypts every note with a key derived from your password that never leaves your device, so we cannot read them either. Encryption is not a force field for the rest of your machine, but nothing readable leaves it.
Both, and the vault works the same way on each. There is more detail on the encrypted notes app for Windows.
Always. Your vault lives on your Mac or PC and the app works with no connection. Sync runs through your own cloud folder, still encrypted, and you can skip it entirely.
Yes. Export the whole encrypted vault, or every note as Markdown, whenever you want. Leaving should be as easy as arriving.
Private by design, rich enough to be your only notes app, and yours to keep forever.
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