Evernote is a cloud notebook with a web clipper, OCR, and decades of stored snippets. Good at being a personal archive — and increasingly priced like one. Morion is the opposite axis: a local-first notebook with native MCP, a kanban your AI agents can work from — free and open source, no subscription.
| Morion | Evernote | |
|---|---|---|
| Local-first storage | Yes — SQLite on disk | No — cloud sync only |
| MCP access for AI agents | Core feature | None |
| Built-in AI | Mo built in — BYO key | Evernote AI on Personal+ |
| Kanban / task board | Built in | Tasks add-on, not a board |
| Web clipper | Not yet | Yes — flagship feature |
| OCR on images / PDFs | Not yet | Yes |
| Hybrid semantic search | Built in, on-device | Keyword + AI Search (paid) |
| Cross-device sync | Local only for now | Cloud sync, all platforms |
| Usage limits | None — unlimited notes & boards, all MCP | 50 notes, 1 notebook (free tier) |
| Mo work packets + assistant | Mo built in — BYO LLM key | Not available |
| Auto-code build/review loop | Built in — your models | Not available |
| Price (daily use) | Free $0 | Personal $14.99/mo, Pro $17.99/mo |
If your workflow is "see article → clip → file → search later", Evernote's clipper is still best on the market. Morion has no clipper today.
Receipts, business cards, handwritten pages — Evernote's done OCR for over a decade. Morion doesn't index image text yet.
Phone → laptop → tablet, same note. Evernote ships that. Morion is local-only today; sync is on the roadmap, not in your hands yet.
Claude Code, Cursor, Cline — any MCP client can search your notes and move tickets on your kanban. Evernote AI lives only inside Evernote.
No cloud account, no breach surface, no migration when the vendor pivots. One SQLite file you can back up, sync via your own tools, or move to another machine.
Tickets reference notes; agents read both. Evernote's Tasks add-on is glued on; there's no agent-workable board.
Evernote's free tier caps you at 50 notes. Morion is free and open source with no caps — unlimited notes and boards, MCP, audit, and hybrid search.
Pick Evernote if your daily flow is web-clipping, OCR, and cross-device cloud sync — and you're fine paying $15+/mo for it.
Pick Morion if you want a local-first notebook your AI agents can actually use, a kanban they can work from, and a free, open-source app with no note caps.
Migrating from Evernote? Export to ENEX, convert to markdown, drop the files into your Morion folder. Your archive becomes searchable by any MCP-connected agent.