Scrinium vs Evernote: what to do with a decade of notes

How Evernote handles encryption

Evernote’s encryption feature protects selected text inside a note with a passphrase of your choosing. That is useful for a password or an account number, and it is not end-to-end encryption: the note around it, the title, the attachments, the tags, and the metadata are stored in a form the service can read, as is everything in notes you have not manually encrypted.

So the honest description of Evernote is a cloud notebook with a local lockbox inside it. The operator can read the notebook; the lockbox is yours.

Scrinium encrypts the whole thing: body, title, attachments, and the note key hierarchy that ties them together. The server’s entire view of your notebook is a set of opaque blobs plus a login verifier, which is why it can hand over nothing of value even under compulsion.

Who can read your notes

Evernote’s export is ENEX, a proprietary XML archive, or HTML. Both are real, and both mean that leaving is a conversion project rather than a copy. Attachments come out as files beside the archive; formatting is approximate; nothing comes out as Markdown.

The commercial context matters too. Evernote has changed owners, raised prices, and repeatedly reshaped its free tier, which is what a decade of notes looks like when its continuity depends on one company’s business model, rather than on a file format.

Scrinium’s answer is deliberately boring: the notes are Markdown, export is Markdown, and the encrypted backend can be self-hosted. If Scrinium disappeared, the notes would open in any editor.

Editing: Evernote vs Scrinium

Evernote is a rich-text editor with attachments, reminders, and OCR, built for capturing and filing. It is good at that. It is not a Markdown environment: code blocks exist but no syntax highlighting, tables are structural rather than textual, and there is no Markdown export to close the loop.

Scrinium renders Markdown inline while you type, with syntax-highlighted code fences, tables, task lists, math and diagrams, folding, version history on Pro, and local search over decrypted content. The file you write is the file you keep.

Pricing: what you actually pay for

Evernote’s free tier has been narrowed over time to a small note count, a single notebook, and limited device access, with paid plans carrying the product.

Scrinium’s free tier is unlimited: notes, encrypted sync, devices, and the Markdown editor — no note ceiling and no device limit. Paid tiers add features such as encrypted attachments, version history, burner notes, and a graph view.

Where Evernote is the better choice

Keep Evernote if you depend on the web clipper, document scanning, and a large archive that is working fine where it is. It is also a reasonable home for scanned paperwork, receipts, and correspondence where the value is in the filing rather than the writing.

If your archive is long-lived and mostly receipts and clippings, migrating it is not automatically worth the effort. Scrinium is for the notes you write, not the paper you store.

Where Scrinium is the better choice

Choose Scrinium for the part of your Evernote archive you actually return to: notes you wrote, thinking you want to keep, projects with a life beyond the filing cabinet. Those are the notes that benefit from Markdown, from encryption, and from a format that does not require a conversion tool in ten years.

A sensible pattern is to separate the two: leave the clippings behind, export the writing, and start the encrypted part of your archive with a clean notebook.

Moving from Evernote to Scrinium

Export from Evernote as ENEX (one file per notebook) or HTML, then convert to Markdown. The common converters handle ENEX directly and are good enough for text-heavy notes; expect to fix formatting in notes with tables or heavy styling.

Import the Markdown into Scrinium and check attachment references as you go. Once the notes are in, delete nothing from Evernote until you have searched the new vault for something you remember writing.

Questions people ask