The Evernote alternative
with no built-in AI —
and no price creep.
Evernote has been many people's notes app for over a decade. It is also heavier, pricier, and more AI-driven every year — the free plan now stops at 50 notes, real use runs $8 to $14 a month, and AI features now read across everything you have saved.
Tareea is the Evernote alternative for people who want calm back — notes and tasks permanently connected, end-to-end encrypted, no built-in AI anywhere near your writing, with a flat price that does not keep moving.
Evernote has earned
a decade of loyalty.
This page is for people who have used Evernote for years and feel it drifting away from them — toward more AI, higher prices, and a free plan that no longer holds a real workload. Before explaining where Tareea starts, it is worth being precise about what Evernote does genuinely well, because long-time users already know.
The plan that used to be
generous.
For years, Evernote's free plan was generous enough that most people never needed to pay. That is no longer true. The free plan now holds 50 notes in a single notebook, with a 250 MB monthly upload limit and sync to one device plus the web. For anyone using Evernote as an actual notes app, that is a plan you outgrow in a week.
Past the free plan, the cost climbs. Starter runs around $8 a month; Advanced — the plan with unlimited notes — around $14. The prices have risen repeatedly, and under new ownership the direction of travel has been consistent: more features, more AI, more cost.
None of this makes Evernote a bad app. It makes it an expensive one — and one heading somewhere a lot of long-time users did not sign up for.
Tareea takes the opposite approach. The free tier — up to 25 active notes, 50 active tasks, and 3 active Folios (archived items don't count) — includes the note-to-task connection and end-to-end encryption, free on every tier, forever. Pro is a flat $9 a month for unlimited everything. No AI you are quietly paying for, no plan you are nudged off, no feature removed from under you.
Evernote added AI
to a decade of your notes.
Evernote's paid plans now include AI features — AI-Powered Search and AI Edit among them. These tools work by reading across your note content. For a workspace many people have been filling for ten years or more, that is a great deal of history becoming input for a model.
AI-Powered Search and AI Edit operate over your note content. To be useful, an AI feature has to read what you wrote. For a recent, lightly-used account that may be a small thing. For an archive a decade deep — client work, personal journals, half-finished ideas, things you forgot were even in there — it is a different proposition.
Evernote is not unique here; most note apps are adding AI. That is exactly the problem. The question is no longer whether your notes app has AI — it is whether you can still find one that doesn't.
Tareea has no built-in AI. Nothing reads your notes, summarizes them, or searches them with a Tareea-owned model. Not as an option you toggle off. Not as a paid add-on. Not at all.
The architecture has no path for note content to reach a model — because that path was never built. There is nothing to turn off, because there was never anything there.
What you write is encrypted before it leaves your device. In Private mode — the default for every new account — even your note titles, task titles, and tags are encrypted. We can't read it. Evernote, by contrast, is not end-to-end encrypted at all.
Evernote has tasks.
They don't remember the note.
Evernote added a Tasks feature — you can create tasks, and they can sit inside notes. What they do not do is carry the note with them. A task lives in its own list; the thinking that produced it lives somewhere else. Reconnecting them is manual, and mostly it just does not happen.
In Tareea, the connection is the core mechanic, not an add-on. Select any text in a note and turn it into a task — and that task carries a permanent link back to the exact note it came from. Months later, open the task and the original thinking is one click away. The note can be renamed or rewritten; the link does not break.
The official version and the real version are probably different. Find out whether the board saw the risk assessment before or after the vote.
Cross-reference the timeline with the leaked February memo. Check if her name appears in the subsidiary filings→ Create a task — it might. Send a thank-you within 24 hours.
Your notebooks,
as a shape you can see.
Evernote gives you notebooks, stacks, and tags. Tareea adds a view it has no equivalent for. The Connection Map shows every note and task in a project as a spatial graph — nodes joined by lines drawn the moment each task was created. Notes that generated more work have more lines radiating outward. You see which notes are driving things before you read a single label.
Everything you noted down,
placed across time.
A stack of notebooks tells you nothing about when the work inside them is due. The Timeline does — sixty days ahead, fourteen behind, your tasks as colored dots across the calendar. Dense where the work clusters, open where there is room. Drag a dot to reschedule; hover one to see the task.
An honest split.
Side by side.
Including where Evernote wins.
This table is honest about where Evernote is better. A switch only makes sense if you can see the whole picture.
| Feature | Evernote | Tareea | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI in your notes | AI-Powered Search, AI Edit | Never — by architecture | Evernote's AI reads across your notes. Tareea owns no AI path — any AI is BYOAI: your provider, your key, your browser-direct call. |
| Note-to-task connection | Tasks exist — no backlink | Permanent automatic backlink | Evernote tasks do not carry their source note. Tareea tasks always do — the link survives renames. |
| End-to-end encryption | Not end-to-end encrypted | Always on, every tier | Evernote can read your notes on its servers. Tareea can't — encryption is the default, on every tier. |
| Free plan | 50 notes · 1 notebook | 25 active notes · 50 active tasks · 3 active Folios | Evernote's free plan is a trial in disguise. Tareea's free tier includes the note-to-task connection and encryption, forever. |
| Price for real use | ≈ $8–$14/month | $9/month flat | Evernote has several tiers and a history of increases. Tareea Pro is one flat price for unlimited everything. |
| Connection Map | None | Spatial graph · Pro | See which notes generated the most work and which threads are still open. |
| Timeline planning | None | 60-day timeline · Pro | Drag tasks across time spatially. Evernote has no temporal planning view. |
| Web clipper | Excellent — best in class | Not a web clipper | Evernote wins here. If clipping the web is central to your work, Evernote does it better. |
| Search inside images & PDFs | Yes — OCR search | Note text search | Evernote indexes text inside images and scans. Tareea searches your note text. |
| Platform availability | All platforms — native apps | Web — any device | Both work across platforms. Evernote has native apps; Tareea runs in any browser. |
| Markdown export | Exports .enex / HTML | Unlimited .md export | Evernote exports its own .enex format. Tareea exports clean, portable Markdown. |
What Evernote users ask
before switching.
that stays calm.