Notom vs Evernote
Capture the thought, find it later, act on what's inside it. Notom is the original promise, without the decade of bloat.
Evernote built a generation of fans around one promise: type a thought, find it later. Then it kept building. Notebooks. Stacks. Tags. Spaces. Tasks. Templates. Home boards. A web clipper. Document scanning. OCR. Email-in addresses. By the time the dust settled, the original "capture and find" use case was buried inside a maze of menus.
Notom does one job. Turn the messy note into the surfaced to-do, and refuses to grow sideways. No notebooks, no tags, no rituals. Just notes, and the actions they spawned, both searchable, both linked.
Evernote's task feature was bolted on years after the fact. It lives in its own pane, doesn't really integrate with the notes themselves, and very few people actually use it. The original sin was leaving the to-dos buried in the body of the note.
Notom reads every note when you save it and pulls the actions out. "Caught up with Anna. She's sending the Q4 deck before Friday, then we both need to read it before the board meeting on the 18th" becomes two actions with their due dates resolved, both linked back to the conversation that triggered them. The note isn't an archive; it's the source.
Evernote's pricing history is its own genre of churn. Free got crippled. Personal, Professional, Teams. Note size caps. Device caps that came and went and came back. Surprise price hikes every couple of years.
Notom is $9 a month or $90 a year. There's a generous lifetime free cap, 500 notes and 100 AI-extracted actions. That's enough to actually evaluate whether the loop fits your brain. The free isn't a trial countdown; it's a real ceiling that you grow through at your own pace.
Every notes app with an AI feature now has to answer: are my private notes being used to train someone's foundation model? Evernote's parent-company shifts and policy updates have made that an evolving question. Notom's answer is fixed: no.
AI inference runs only when you save a note, only against our AI provider, only to pull out actions. Your notes are not training data, not advertising data, not data sold to anyone. The privacy posture is part of the product, not a footnote.
| Notom | Evernote | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Notes → to-dos. That's it. | Everything: notes, tasks, calendar, docs, OCR |
| To-dos from notes | Pulled out automatically | Manual; separate Tasks pane |
| Natural-language dates | "by Monday". Resolved | Calendar picker |
| Organisation | None needed. Just search | Notebooks, stacks, tags, spaces |
| Web clipper | Mobile share-sheet only | Mature, multi-browser |
| OCR / scanned docs | Not in scope | Yes |
| Pricing | $9/mo, $90/yr, lifetime free cap | Tiered, periodic price hikes |
| AI training on your data | Never | Policy-dependent |
“Came back to a notes app after years off. Notom is what Evernote felt like in 2013. Without the bloat.”
FAQ
Because the original Evernote pitch. Capture everything, find it later. Was right; it was the execution that went sideways. Notom is the same promise, modernised: capture stays fast, search stays effective, and to-dos are pulled out for you so the notes aren't just an archive.
Not yet. Evernote exports as ENEX files, and most lapsed users find the realistic move is to leave the archive alone. The active value is in new captures. Start fresh in Notom and the action extraction works from your first save.
Notom is $9/month or $90/year, with a 500-note, 100-action lifetime free cap that you genuinely can use to evaluate the loop. No tiered Free-Plus-Premium-Personal-Professional pricing maze. No surprise jumps.
Mobile share-sheet capture works for URLs and most content. OCR / handwriting search / scanned-document indexing are not in scope. That's a deliberate narrowing. Notom does notes-to-actions excellently; it doesn't try to be your digital filing cabinet.
No. AI inference runs only when you save a note, only against our AI provider. Your notes are not sold, mined, or used to train models. Each AI-extracted action stays linked to the note it came from so you can always see why it appeared.
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