Obsidian over Evernote: how I dropped a subscription and kept notes on my own storage

After dropping my paid Evernote plan, I moved to Obsidian and sync my notes through my own storage, eliminating monthly app fees entirely. The trigger was rising prices and heavy AI integration that no longer justified the cost.

I had long relied on Evernote's basic features but kept a premium plan for unlimited notes, notebooks, and attachments. When my subscription ended, I canceled it and chose Obsidian because it stores data locally. Moving years of archives seemed tedious, but the urge to break free from subscription lock-in won out.

Obsidian works with a vault—a folder on your device where each note is a plain Markdown file any text editor can open. The key advantage is its linking system: typing two square brackets and a note name creates a link, and the app automatically records the reverse connection. If I mention a project in another note, it shows up in the linked list without manual setup. In Evernote, I had to copy and paste internal links by hand, with no automatic backlinking.

The graph view, which renders the vault as a network of connected points, I use less than expected, though it clearly visualizes note mapping. Plugins are another strong point: thousands of community extensions add tasks, calendars, tables, and more. Evernote has no plugin system, so users are stuck with what it offers.

Evernote beats Obsidian in some areas: its web clipper is more polished, and search reads text inside images and PDFs without extra tools. I rarely clip pages, but I was paying a premium partly for features like those.

The catch with Obsidian is cross-device syncing. A vault stays a local folder, so nothing moves between devices unless you arrange it yourself, and Obsidian sells its own service to solve that. Paying a subscription to escape a subscription was clearly the wrong move. Instead, I set up syncing through my own storage, completely removing monthly costs.