Evernote

Evernote's privacy policy states that when a device syncs, content "will be replicated on servers maintained in the United States," and personal data is "transmitted to, hosted, and accessed" there. Bending Spoons S.p.A., headquartered in Milan, Italy, became the data controller after the January 2023 acquisition and applies EU GDPR and Italian data-protection law. However, the infrastructure remains US-based, so content is subject to US legal access frameworks like the CLOUD Act regardless of the controller's EU location.

Evernote encrypts data in transit and at rest but stores the encryption keys itself so that staff can access content and the data remains subject to legal warrants. Users can encrypt individual blocks of text within a note with a local passphrase, but this does not cover entire notes, notebooks, attachments, or titles and is not full end-to-end encryption.

Evernote's privacy policy states note content is not used for advertising, but under CCPA disclosures, Evernote "shares" identifiers, network activity, and geolocation data with third parties for personalized advertising. It contracts with ad networks to serve Evernote ads using hashed identifiers for retargeting across the web. This is behavioral tracking data shared with third parties, not just anonymized aggregate analytics, so it does not meet the top score, even though note content is excluded.

Evernote states plainly that user content is not used to train AI models by Evernote or any third party. For the AI Assistant, data sent to OpenAI is processed only to fulfill the request and deleted immediately afterward with no retention or training. Semantic Search runs on Evernote's own internal models with nothing shared externally. AI features are on by default but can be disabled individually without losing core note-taking functionality. This is a clear, well-documented no-training policy, one of Evernote's strongest scores.

Evernote is fully closed source. No client or backend component is published under an open license.

Evernote announced ISO/IEC 27001 certification in December 2025, its first independent security certification of this kind, covering its information security management practices. The certification is recent (within the three-year window) and publicly announced, though it is a management-system certification rather than a published penetration-test report with named findings.

As closed-source software with no contributor community, there is no documented governance model or contribution process.

Evernote discontinued its Personal and Professional plans in late 2025 and replaced them with Starter ($99/year) and Advanced ($249.99/year), both structured primarily as annual subscriptions (with a costlier month-to-month option available for Advanced).

The current Free plan is capped at 50 notes, 1 notebook, and sync across 2 devices, down from the previous free-plan ceiling of 100,000 notes and 250 notebooks. Core note-taking works within that cap, but it is a narrow, unmistakably-designed-to-convert free tier.

In November 2023, Evernote announced via an in-app pop-up that free accounts would be cut to 50 notes and 1 notebook starting December 4, a steep reduction from 100,000 notes and 250 notebooks. The public pricing page did not reflect this limit at the time, so users saw the change as a surprise inside the app rather than through transparent upfront disclosure. Bending Spoons also raised the annual price of the Personal plan by roughly 86% shortly after acquiring the company.

Evernote prices differ across at least 13 countries, with Turkey and Argentina notably cheaper. But independent willingness-to-pay analysis finds several markets (UK, France, Nordics) priced well above local affordability relative to Evernote's own benchmark, indicating the variation reflects currency and ad hoc localization rather than a documented, coherent purchasing-power-parity policy.

Evernote exports notes as .enex files: plain-text XML that includes note content, attachments, tags, and timestamps, and can be inspected with any text editor or converted by third-party tools. However, ENEX follows Evernote's proprietary Document Type Declaration rather than a general-purpose open standard and is designed primarily to round-trip with Evernote itself.

No self-hosting option exists. Evernote runs entirely on Google Cloud infrastructure operated by Evernote/Bending Spoons.

The Windows and Mac desktop apps store all synced notes in a local database, providing full offline access. Mobile apps cache only titles, tags, and short excerpts by default; full offline notebooks on mobile require a paid plan. This is a real but uneven offline experience depending on platform and subscription tier.

Evernote ships native clients for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, as well as a web app that supports major browsers. There is no officially supported native Linux or BSD client (an API exists for third-party Linux clients), and no F-Droid listing, so it stays within closed ecosystems despite broad platform coverage.

User reports on AppleVis describe the iOS app as usable and navigable with VoiceOver, with some historically reported issues that have since been resolved. Evernote does not, however, publish a formal WCAG conformance statement or dedicated accessibility documentation.

Evernote is owned by Bending Spoons S.p.A., an Italian company that built its growth through private-equity and growth-capital backing (including investors such as NB Renaissance) and an aggressive acquisition strategy across consumer apps (Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, and others). Bending Spoons completed a roughly $1.68 billion IPO in mid-2026. This is neither a bootstrapped indie nor Big Tech; it fits the large, institutionally backed category most closely.

Bending Spoons completed its acquisition of Evernote in January 2023, laid off Evernote's existing staff in mid-2023, and relocated operations to Europe. The direct financial and product consequences of that acquisition, including the November 2023 free-tier cuts and an approximately 86% price increase on the Personal plan, continued to unfold through 2025. Bending Spoons itself then went public in a 2026 IPO, a further change in ownership structure within the review window, though it did not change which company controls Evernote.

Bending Spoons publishes a Code of Ethics that references principles on environmental and business conduct. In practice, its ownership of Evernote has been marked by mass layoffs of Evernote's original staff, a steep, undisclosed cut to free-tier limits, and a sharp price increase shortly after acquisition. This record sits uneasily alongside the published ethics language.

Bending Spoons' Code of Ethics names environmental protection as a guiding principle and references the UN Rio Declaration, but sets no measurable targets. An independent emissions assessment found no reported emissions figures and no reduction targets or initiatives, placing the company below its sector average. This is acknowledgment without a coherent, measurable policy.

Evernote's first public web application launched on June 24, 2008, making it 18 years old as of this evaluation.

There is no public contributor community, forum, or roadmap, since Evernote is closed, proprietary software. But since 2024, the company has shipped more than 250 features and improvements, culminating in the v11 release in January 2026, indicating active vendor-driven development rather than an abandoned product.