Evernote is a great way to store information for your own reference, but it becomes even more powerful when you use it to share with others.
Sharing is easy to do, but it becomes slightly complicated because there are different types of Evernote accounts:
- Free: Self-explanatory.
- Premium: Additional storage, sharing ability, and other features. $5 USD a month or $45/year.
- Business: Additional features for businesses who want more administrative control.
A common question that comes up is how sharing works between different types of accounts. Can Free members share with Premium members? Are the notebooks read-only or can they be edited?
This post will run through some of the permutations.
What This Post Does Not Cover
- Sharing individual notes: Any account can create a link to share an individual note with others. That’s not what we’re talking about here – we are only going to cover sharing entire notebooks.
- Evernote Business: We won’t be getting into sharing business notebooks here. We’ll only be talking about sharing Evernote notebooks between Premium and Free users.
Sharing Notebooks From Free Users
Free Evernote users can share notebooks with Premium users and other Free users.
There has been a notable change in behavior recently (as far as I am aware).
Previously, Free users could only share notebooks and have them be read-only.
Now it appears that Free users can share one notebook and allow other users to view and modify notes.
For example, here you can see that I am using a Free user to share a notebook with another Free user. I am able to allow the recipient to View notes and activity and Modify notes.
Now when logged in using the recipient’s account, I am able to modify the note and those changes are synchronized back to all users.
When I try to share a second notebook, I can still share it, but the recipient will only be able to view the notebook contents and will not be able to make changes.
Sharing Notebooks From Premium Users
When you are an Evernote Premium user, you can share a notebook with anyone (Free or Premium) and give them the ability to view or modify notes.
In this example, a Free user added a note to my Premium-shared Recipes notebook.
So there you go: Premium users can share notebooks with anyone, and allow anyone to modify them. Free users can also share notebooks with anyone, but can only create one notebook that can be modified by others.
(Photo by Heisenberg Media)
