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"Best note app" is a trick question, because the three biggest options are built on genuinely different ideas of what notes are for. Here's how to match the tool to your workflow instead of chasing feature checklists.
Notion: notes as a database
Notion Plus treats every note as a row in a database — pages can have properties, be filtered, sorted, and linked to other pages relationally. It's the strongest option if you're building a personal wiki, a project tracker, or anything that benefits from structured views (kanban, calendar, table) over the same underlying content. Notion Business adds the admin controls and SSO a team needs to run it as a shared knowledge base.
Evernote: notes as a filing cabinet
Evernote Premium is the oldest of the three and still the best at one specific thing: capturing messy input — web clips, scanned documents, handwritten notes via photo, PDFs — and making all of it searchable, including text inside images. If your note-taking is mostly "save this so I can find it later" rather than "structure this into a system," Evernote's search is still hard to beat.
Obsidian: notes as a personal knowledge graph
Obsidian Sync stores everything as local Markdown files and builds bidirectional links between notes, visualized as a graph. It's the choice for people who want to own their data outright (no proprietary format, no lock-in) and who think in terms of connected ideas rather than folders. The tradeoff is a steeper setup curve — Obsidian's power comes from plugins and configuration, not an out-of-the-box structure.
Migration cost is real — trial before committing
All three support some form of export, but formatting rarely survives a move perfectly intact — Notion's block-based pages don't map cleanly to Markdown, and Evernote's rich formatting can lose fidelity moving to Obsidian's plain-text files. Before migrating years of existing notes, trial your actual workflow (not just a demo) in the new tool for a couple of weeks, since the real cost of picking wrong isn't the subscription price, it's the time spent re-organizing everything later.
Offline access is another point worth checking directly: Obsidian works fully offline by default since files live locally, while Notion and Evernote both depend on a connection for full functionality with more limited offline caching. If you frequently work without reliable internet, that difference alone can outweigh feature preferences.
Pricing structure also differs meaningfully — Obsidian's core app is free with paid add-ons for sync and publishing, while Notion and Evernote are subscription-first from the start, which changes the long-term cost picture significantly if you mainly need local notes without cloud sync.
What actually decides it
If you want structure and views: Notion. If you want frictionless capture and search: Evernote. If you want ownership, offline-first files, and idea-linking: Obsidian. None of the three do all three jobs equally well, and switching later means a real migration, so it's worth trialing based on your actual daily habit rather than app-store ratings. Compare pricing across all three in Productivity & Education.