Compare Evernote and SMRY side by side on features, pricing, and the workflows each one is designed for.
Your second brain: capture notes, clip web pages, and find anything in seconds.
Free, paid from $8.25/mo
Paste an article URL, get a clean reader with AI summaries, audio, and chat.
Free, paid from $6/mo
Here's how Evernote and SMRY compare across the features people actually look for. They share 4 core capabilities; the differences show up in what each tool focuses on.
| Feature | Evernote | SMRY |
|---|---|---|
| Capture and save | ||
| Browser extension | Web Clipper (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) | Chrome extension captures from your authenticated session for paywalled and JS-rendered pages |
| Mobile apps | iOS, Android | |
| Save from email | Forwarding address | |
| Save tweets | ||
| Save YouTube videos | Paste a YouTube URL to get a readable transcript, summary, and TTS | |
| Save GitHub stars | ||
| Save PDFs | ||
| Save files (docs, spreadsheets) | Attachments | |
| Save audio files | Voice memos | |
| Save via API | ||
| Auto-sync sources | ||
| RSS auto-sync | ||
| YouTube channel sync | ||
| X bookmarks sync | ||
| GitHub stars sync | ||
| Newsletter inbox sync | Partial | |
| Library and reading | ||
| Reader view | Partial | 11 themes, custom typography, 6 interface languages |
| Offline reading | ||
| Full-text search | No personal library to search across | |
| Semantic / AI search | ||
| Highlights | Partial | 5 colors, notes per highlight, syncs across devices on Pro |
| Notes | Per-highlight notes | |
| Tags | ||
| Collections | Notebooks + Spaces | |
| Public sharing | Share quote links with rich social previews | |
| Full-text RSS extraction | ||
| AI and agents | ||
| Markdown export for AI agents | Manual highlight export to Markdown only, no per-item markdown URL | |
| Bulk markdown export | Highlights export to Markdown / Notion / Obsidian on Pro, not the full article | |
| MCP server | ||
| CLI tool | ||
| Claude Code skill | ||
| AI summaries | AI Rewrite, AI Meeting Notes, Advanced+ | Summaries in 6 languages, plus chat with the article |
| Public API | ||
| Import and export | ||
| OPML import / export | ||
| Pocket import | ||
| Instapaper import | ||
| CSV / JSON export | ENEX | Highlights only, Pro feature |
| Send to Kindle | ||
| Import Kindle highlights |
Evernote is free, paid from $8.25/mo and SMRY is free, paid from $6/mo. The tier that fits best usually comes down to how many items you save each month.
Free
50 notes, 1 notebook, 5 spaces, 20 tags, 1 device, 1 GB storage.
Starter
1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, 10 spaces, 100 tags, 3 devices, 5 GB storage.
Advanced
Unlimited notes, notebooks, spaces, tags, devices, and storage. All AI features.
Enterprise
Team collaboration, admin controls. Custom pricing.
Free
20 AI summaries per day, 2 voices, basic AI model, no export, no ad-free reading. Rate limited to 6 summaries per minute per IP.
Pro
Unlimited summaries, 10 voices including a studio-quality voice, premium AI model, highlight export to Notion / Obsidian / Markdown, ad-free reading, priority support. 7-day free trial. Annual is half price ($3/mo effective).
Both tools do their category well, but the specifics differ. Here's what each one is good at and where it tends to fall short.
Evernote is the grandfather of note-taking apps and the inventor of the modern Web Clipper. After Bending Spoons acquired it in 2022, the product was rebuilt, repriced, and refocused on a more AI-forward direction. The current plans are Free (50 notes total), Starter ($8.25/mo or $99/yr), Advanced ($14.17/mo or $249.99/yr), and Enterprise. Advanced includes the full AI suite: AI Transcribe, AI Rewrite, AI Text-to-Speech, AI Meeting Notes, AI Diagrams, and AI Detector. The Web Clipper still saves full page context (not just links) and is the feature that pulls read-later workflows into Evernote's orbit.
SMRY started life in late 2023 as an open-source paywall bypass tool that piped articles through archive.org and ran a ChatGPT summary on top. Two years on it has been repositioned as a full AI reading app. You paste a URL (or prepend smry.ai/ to it) and get a clean reader with 11 themes, an AI summary, text-to-speech in up to 10 voices, highlights in 5 colors, an article chat, and a YouTube transcript mode. The product is intentionally narrow. There is no personal library, no inbox, no RSS, no auto-sync from anywhere, and no mobile app. The pricing matches that scope: free with a daily summary cap, or $3 per month on annual ($6 monthly) for unlimited summaries, the premium voice, highlight export, and ad-free reading. The Chrome extension is optional and captures from your authenticated session so JS-rendered and paywalled pages render cleanly.