A notes app
Thaw vs Evernote
People who used Evernote as a filing cabinet for years, often with Scannable, and watched the price climb while the product drifted toward notes and tasks.
Evernote is a good notes app that many people bent into a document store. It never watched the channels paper arrives through, it does not know what a W-2 is, and it will not tell you the registration lapsed. Thaw imports an .enex export directly, keeping notebooks and tags as hints.
Side by side
| Thaw | Evernote | |
|---|---|---|
| How paper gets in | Email-in address per family or business, scanner-to-email, browser upload, folder import, Evernote and paperless-ngx imports. Dropbox and Drive folder watch next. | You clip, scan (Scannable) or forward to a personal Evernote address, then file into notebooks yourself. |
| What it understands | Every document is read once: category, type, title, facts with roles, the people & things it concerns, every date. Uncertain reads are flagged, never queued. | OCR makes scans searchable; the AI Assistant and semantic search on paid plans answer questions over your notes. Notes are notes; there is no notion of a policy, a lease or a tax year. |
| Dates and deadlines | Every renewal, expiry, due date and notice period becomes an item with what happens if missed and what to do, from the document itself. Resolved by the next document. | Reminders and tasks you create by hand. |
| What is missing | Knows what a person, vehicle, property, pet or business should have on file; lists what is missing, lapsed, expired or duplicated, worst first, with where to get it. | None. |
| Notes and clips | A quick note is a document. Web clipping is not a goal. | Excellent notes, web clipper, tasks, calendar. This is what it is for. |
| Security | Per-document keys wrapped by per-account keys wrapped by a KMS master key. Identifiers encrypted with a blind index and redacted from the search index. Hash-chained audit log. Crypto-shred on delete. | Encryption in transit and at rest; content is indexed for search. No per-user key model published. |
| Getting out | Originals in a folder tree named the way Thaw names them, plus facts as CSV and JSON. Continuous mirror to your own cloud folder on the roadmap. | .enex export of notes with attachments embedded. |
| Price | Free for the first 500 documents sorted; paid plans from $8 a month or $79 a year. | Free is 50 notes and one notebook. Starter $99 a year (1,000 notes, 5 GB); Advanced $249.99 a year, which is where document scanning and advanced search live. Plans have been renamed and repriced several times. |
Stay with Evernote if
- You mostly write and clip, and documents are a minority of what you keep.
- You rely on Evernote tasks, calendar or web clipper every day.
Move to Thaw if
- Most of your notebooks are scans and PDFs you never want to file again.
- You want the map and the checkup, not a search box.
- You are tired of paying for a notes app to be a filing cabinet.
Moving over
Export each notebook as .enex (or all notes at once). Import the file into your family or business in Thaw. Notes with attachments become documents; notes without attachments become note documents. Notebook names and tags ride along as hints for the reader.
Point it at the pile and walk away.
Early access is open to a small group of households and owner-run businesses. Tell us a little about your paper and we will send an invitation.