If you are an Evernote power user, there’s good news! Evernote has officially brought back tabbed notes, a feature that Mac users loved and lost back in October 2020. When Evernote rebuilt its app from scratch for an identical cross-platform app for Windows, Mac, and desktop, tabs were scrapped entirely.
Back then, tabs were a Mac-only perk that never existed on Windows; so it was dropped to keep things uniform across platforms. Five years later, they are back and this time available on both Mac and Windows.
How do tabs actually work in Evernote now?
Opening a note in a new tab is straightforward. You can right-click any note from the note list, the sidebar, or the three-dot menu and select “Open in New Tab.” There is also a plus button sitting to the right of your open tabs for quickly adding a new one.
You can set what a new tab defaults to opening with, whether that is your home page, all notes, or all notebooks, by going into Settings, then Preferences, then Application. You can also drag and reorder tabs however you like, which is handy for prioritizing notes during a busy workday.
Wait, there is more to this update
Tabs are not limited to notes alone. You can open Tasks, Calendar, Home, Notebooks, and Templates too in separate tabs. Keyboard shortcuts are available as well, including Ctrl and Cmd and O to open the current note in a new tab, and Cmd and W to close one.
One particularly useful detail is the red pulsing dot that appears on a tab when a recording is active, so you always know which note is capturing audio.
That’s great, but Evernote’s growing price tag is becoming hard to ignore
The return of Tabs and version 11’s new AI features are clearly a part of Evernote’s effort to win users back. For anyone who lives inside Evernote, the latest update brings useful features worth getting excited about.
That said, Evernote’s pricing has ballooned dramatically over the years. The company brought a steep price hike in 2026, which has nearly doubled subscription costs to $250 a year.
What was once beloved for offering incredible value at little cost has repositioned itself as a premium productivity suite, bundling AI tools, calendar sync, and task management into every tier, whether you want those features or not.
For users who crossed the 20-notebook threshold or used more than three synced devices, the cheaper Starter plan at $99 is simply not an option anymore. To make things worse, the new pricing introduced a 1GB total storage cap on the Starter tier, a jarring shift from the previously unlimited storage model. For context, $100 a year gets you 2TB on Google.
Long-time subscribers who stuck with Evernote through years of changes are now actively moving to alternatives like Notion and Notesnook, drawn by better value, unlimited storage on free tiers, and cleaner interfaces without forced AI integration. Are you sticking with Evernote or have the price hikes finally pushed you to look elsewhere?
