Notion vs Evernote: Workspace or Archive?

Noor runs operations at a design agency with 14 people and about 30 active clients. Today the onboarding checklist is in a Google Doc, client contacts are in a spreadsheet, and project status lives in people's heads. She wants one place that the whole team edits.

Recommendation: Notion, on Plus or Business. A Clients database with a page per client, a Projects database related to it, and a board view by status gives her what three tools did. The onboarding checklist becomes a database template every new project starts from. Evernote's sharing would cover the documents but not the structure. She should design the two databases with one colleague first and invite the rest of the team only once the views answer the questions she gets asked every Monday.

Marco sells homes in a mid-sized market. Every deal produces signed disclosures, inspection reports and photos of handwritten notes from showings. He clips comparable listings from the web, and clients call asking "what did the inspector say about the roof on Elm Street?"

Recommendation: Evernote, on a paid plan. He scans paperwork with his phone, clips listings with the web clipper, and search reads inside the scans and PDFs, which is the whole job. Notion would store the PDFs as files but would not search the text inside them. A notebook per year and a tag per property address keep it simple. He passes 50 notes in his first week, so the subscription is a cost of doing business, not an option.

Ruth is a consultant with 9,000 notes in Evernote: meeting notes, clipped research and scanned invoices from 14 years of work. A friend swears by Notion and she is curious, but her archive is the point.

Recommendation: keep the archive in Evernote, try Notion for new projects first. Notion's own help page calls its Evernote importer reliable up to about 5,000 notes and warns that images and dates may need cleanup, so 9,000 notes means several batches and a lot of checking. Scanned invoices would also stop being searchable. She should run one new client project in Notion for a month. If she misses nothing, export Evernote notebooks as ENEX one at a time, keep the files as a backup, and import notebook by notebook.

Kofi writes for travel and food magazines. He started keeping pitches, interview notes and drafts in Evernote free and hit the 50-note limit four weeks in. He works on a Chromebook and an Android phone and will not add another subscription this year.

Recommendation: Notion free. For one person, the free plan has no page cap, and his notes are typed text, so Evernote's search inside scans would go unused. A simple Pitches database with a status property (idea, pitched, commissioned, filed) does more than notebooks did. Two cautions: AI is a trial on the free plan, and uploads are capped at 5 MB, so large interview recordings belong somewhere else. He should export his 50 Evernote notes as ENEX first and keep the file.

Sam is a second-year mechanical engineering student. Problem sets are handwritten on an iPad, lectures are diagrams, and there are two group design projects this semester. The university provides Microsoft 365, and Sam has used Notion for clubs.

Recommendation: OneNote for coursework, Notion for the group projects. Handwritten derivations need ink, which neither Notion nor Evernote does well, and OneNote comes free with the school account. The group projects need shared task lists and a place for the design brief, which is what Notion does best. The free plan covers a shared project space, with a block limit once a workspace has two or more members. Evernote does not earn a place here: its strengths are clipping and scanning, and the free plan's 50 notes would last a week. Before graduating, Sam should move what is worth keeping out of the school account.