Notes and project management

How to move from Evernote to Notion: notebooks, notes and what to check afterwards

SwitchTo HQ · Updated 18 October 2026 · Notes and project management · How we write

Notion has a built-in Evernote importer that connects to your Evernote account and copies notebooks across. It works well for most personal collections, but it has documented limits on size, dates and images, so it pays to take a backup and check the results. This guide covers both halves: protecting your Evernote data and running the Notion import.

What the Notion importer does

According to Notion's import help page, Evernote notebooks import as pages in your Notion sidebar, and the notes inside each notebook become items in a database within that page. You can then drag individual notes anywhere else in your workspace.

Notion lists what imports and what doesn't:

Imports: notebooks and notes.
Doesn't import: Evernote Teams content.
Limits: Notion describes the importer as reliable up to around 5,000 notes, and says larger imports may fail. There is no progress bar, and Evernote's rate limits can cause long pauses during an import.
Known issues: images inside notes may not render correctly and may need tidying up, and created and updated dates may look wrong after import.

If your account is bigger than about 5,000 notes, plan to import it in batches of notebooks rather than all at once.

Step 1: Take a backup export from Evernote

Before you connect anything, save a copy of your notes. Evernote's export help page explains that exporting is only available in the Evernote desktop app for Mac or Windows. It isn't possible from Evernote Web. Free users can export too, so you don't need a paid plan.

Open the Evernote desktop app.
Select a notebook, or the notes you want to export.
Right-click and choose Export....
Pick a format: ENEX (Evernote's XML format), single-page HTML or multi-page HTML.
Choose which attributes to include, such as tags, created date and author.
Click Export. The file is saved to your desktop.

Evernote notes that you can export up to 100 notes at a time, or entire notebooks. ENEX files can be split at a maximum size you choose between 300 MB and 2 GB. Exporting notebook by notebook is the simplest approach for a full backup.

Which format should you keep? ENEX is the format other note apps are most likely to import. HTML is easier to open and read without any special software. Keeping both for important notebooks costs only disk space.

Step 2: Prepare your Notion workspace

Decide where the notes should live before you import. The importer lets you send each notebook to a teamspace, to your private pages, or into an existing Notion database. Importing into an existing database is useful if you have already built a notes database with properties you want to keep, because Notion lets you map Evernote fields such as created time and created by to that database's properties.

If you are not sure, import into your private space first. You can move pages later.

Step 3: Run the Evernote import in Notion

Notion's instructions are:

In Notion, go to Settings in the sidebar, then Import, then Third party imports, then Evernote. You can also type /evernote on a page and choose the import option.
Sign in to your Evernote account and authorise the connection to Notion.
Tick the notebooks you want to move.
Choose a destination for each notebook: a teamspace, your private space or an existing database.
If you chose an existing database, map the note fields to its properties.
Select Import.

Your notebooks then appear as pages in the sidebar, each containing a list database of notes.

Step 4: Check the import

Large imports can take a long time and there is no status bar, so give it time. Notion's troubleshooting advice is to wait to see whether a stuck import resumes, and then try smaller batches. If no new notes appear for three consecutive hours, Notion suggests escalating it to their support.

Once it finishes, check:

Counts. Compare the number of notes in each Evernote notebook with the number of items in the Notion database.
Images and attachments. Open a sample of notes that contain images, scanned PDFs or audio. Notion warns that images may not render correctly.
Dates. If created or updated dates matter to you, Notion suggests adding a Date property after import and filling it in where needed. Your Evernote ENEX or HTML backup still holds the original dates.
Tags. If you rely heavily on Evernote tags, check how they appear on the imported items and whether you want to turn them into a Notion property you can filter by.
Links between notes. Internal Evernote note links may not point to the new Notion pages. Spot-check any notes that link to each other.

Things Notion handles differently

A few Evernote habits translate differently into Notion:

Notebook stacks don't exist in Notion. Use a parent page that contains several notebook pages, or one database with a "Notebook" property.
Web Clipper. Notion has its own web clipper. If you clip a lot of web pages, install it before you stop using Evernote.
Offline access and search behaviour differ between the two apps. Check how Notion's current offline features work on your devices before you rely on it while travelling.
Scanned documents. If you use Evernote to search text inside scanned PDFs and images, test how your most important scans behave in Notion before you delete anything.

When to cancel Evernote

Keep your Evernote account, or at least your exported ENEX and HTML files, until you have checked your most important notebooks in Notion. If you are on a paid Evernote plan, check your renewal date so you can cancel in time. Store your export files somewhere backed up, such as an external drive or a cloud storage folder you already pay for.

Checklist

Export every notebook from the Evernote desktop app as ENEX (and HTML if you want a readable copy).
Decide where each notebook should go in Notion.
Import through Settings, then Import, then Third party imports, then Evernote.
Import in batches if you have more than about 5,000 notes.
Check counts, images, dates, tags and links.
Cancel Evernote only after you have checked the results.