Evernote Web Clipper vs Obsidian Web Clipper: Which is better? (2026)
The short answer
Obsidian Web Clipper is the better default: free, local-first, and genuinely powerful at capture. Evernote only earns its $99–$250/year when you need OCR search inside images and PDFs, chat over your archive, and a managed cloud backend.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Evernote Web Clipper | Obsidian Web Clipper | Marqly |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI auto-tagging | — | — | ✓ |
| Semantic search (find by meaning) | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| AI summaries | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| YouTube AI (summary, chat, transcript) | — | — | ✓ |
| Chat with your saves | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Web highlighter | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Notes on highlights | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Save page as PDF | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Full-text search | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Save all open tabs | — | — | ✓ |
| Public sharing (boards/collections) | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Pocket import | — | — | ✓ |
| Browser bookmarks import | — | — | ✓ |
| Offline reading | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| iOS app | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Android app | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Browser extension | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free tier | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Public API | ✓ | — | — |
| Self-hostable | — | ✓ | — |
| Price | Free · Evernote Starter $14.99/mo or $99/yr; Advanced $24.99/mo or $249.99/yr | Free | Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month |
- Evernote Web Clipper
- Free · Evernote Starter $14.99/mo or $99/yr; Advanced $24.99/mo or $249.99/yr
- Obsidian Web Clipper
- Free
- Marqly
- Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month
Pricing
- Evernote Web Clipper: Evernote Web Clipper has a free tier; paid plans are Evernote Starter $14.99/mo or $99/yr; Advanced $24.99/mo or $249.99/yr. The clipper extension is free, but it saves into Evernote — and Evernote's free plan is capped at 50 notes, 1 notebook, and 1 device, so sustained use effectively requires a paid plan. Prices have risen repeatedly under owner Bending Spoons.
- Obsidian Web Clipper: Obsidian Web Clipper has a free tier. The clipper and the Obsidian app are completely free, including commercial use (policy since February 2025). The only paid add-ons are optional: Obsidian Sync from $4/month billed annually ($5 monthly) for cross-device sync, and Obsidian Publish at $8/site/month for public sharing.
- Marqly: Marqly has a free tier; paid plans are $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month. 7-day free trial of Pro. Free tier needs no card; Pro unlocks chat with saves and video chat.
About Evernote Web Clipper
Evernote Web Clipper is the browser extension for Evernote, the long-running note app now owned by Bending Spoons. Available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera, it clips full pages, simplified articles, selections, or annotated screenshots into your notebooks, with tags and remarks added at save time. The backend is where it earns its keep: Evernote's search reads text inside images and, on paid plans, inside PDFs and documents, and the v11 release in January 2026 added an AI assistant that chats across your notes, semantic search, and AI meeting notes. Apps cover web, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, with offline notebooks on paid plans and a public API. The catch is pricing: the free plan is capped at 50 notes, one notebook, and a single device, while paid plans run from $14.99 per month (Starter, $99/year) to $24.99 per month (Advanced, $249.99/year) — among the most expensive in the category.
About Obsidian Web Clipper
Obsidian Web Clipper is the official, open-source browser extension for Obsidian, the local-first Markdown note app. It runs on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari — including Safari on iOS and iPadOS — and saves pages, selections, or highlights as clean Markdown files in your vault, where they stay on your own disk with zero lock-in. Per-site templates decide how each clip is titled, tagged, and filed, pulling metadata through selector and Schema.org variables. An optional Interpreter feature runs natural-language prompts at clip time — summarize, extract, translate — using your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and others, or a local Ollama model at no cost. Everything is free, including commercial use of Obsidian since early 2025. The trade-off is that cloud conveniences are add-ons: cross-device sync via Obsidian Sync starts at $4 per month, and public sharing via Obsidian Publish costs $8 per site per month.
Which should you choose?
This is renting a second brain versus owning a filing drawer. Evernote Web Clipper feeds a managed cloud platform that does heavy lifting for you — OCR across images, search inside PDFs, an AI assistant that converses with twenty years of product maturity behind it. Obsidian Web Clipper converts the web into plain Markdown on your own disk, where nothing is done for you and nothing is ever taken from you. Both capture well; they differ on who holds the archive and who pays whom.
Choose Evernote Web Clipper if:
- Your archive mixes web clips with scanned documents, PDFs, and images whose text must be searchable — Evernote’s OCR has no Obsidian equivalent.
- You want a backend that just works: sync across web, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android on paid plans, with no vault management.
- Chatting with your archive appeals — the v11 AI assistant answers questions across your notes, while Obsidian offers only clip-time AI prompts.
Choose Obsidian Web Clipper if:
- Zero cost and zero lock-in outrank convenience: free forever, plain files, no subscription creep — a real concern given Evernote’s repeated price hikes under Bending Spoons.
- You capture passages, not pages — highlighter mode saves exactly what you marked, something Evernote cannot do on live pages.
- Automation via per-site templates and a bring-your-own-model Interpreter (including free local Ollama) fits your tinkering instincts.
Bottom line: recommend Obsidian first. It costs nothing, respects your data completely, and its capture tooling now rivals the paid incumbent. Move to Evernote only when a specific need — OCR, PDF search, managed sync, archive-wide chat — is worth up to $249.99 a year, and know that its 50-note free plan will not let you trial it seriously.
The option both sides overlook
If the real problem is finding things again, neither Evernote Web Clipper nor Obsidian Web Clipper fully solves it. Marqly auto-tags and summarizes every save with AI and lets you retrieve any of them by describing what you remember — plus a highlighter, YouTube summaries with transcripts, and save-as-PDF. There's a free tier with no card required.
Evernote Web Clipper vs Obsidian Web Clipper FAQ
Is Obsidian Web Clipper really free where Evernote costs money?
Yes. The clipper is open source and Obsidian itself has been free for all use, including commercial, since February 2025 — only optional Sync ($4/month) and Publish ($8/month) cost anything. Evernote's extension is free but feeds a platform whose free plan caps at 50 notes and one device, making real use a $99–$249.99/year proposition.
Which clipper is more capable at save time?
Closer than the price gap suggests. Evernote offers five capture modes across five browsers, including annotated screenshots, with tags and notebooks set at clip time. Obsidian counters with a highlighter mode that captures marked passages, per-site templates that auto-title and file clips from page metadata, and an Interpreter that runs AI prompts at clip time via your own key or local Ollama.
Which has less lock-in?
Obsidian, definitionally — clips are plain Markdown files on your disk, readable by any editor, with no export step because nothing is locked up. Evernote is fair on the way out too: ENEX, HTML, and PDF exports on every plan, and ENEX imports widely. But leaving Evernote is a migration project; leaving Obsidian is just closing the app.