OneNote vs Evernote: A personal look at two great note-taking apps (2023)

What's the king of note-taking apps?

There are two leading contenders for the crown: Microsoft's OneNote and the independent Evernote. OneNote was launched in 2003 and was added to the Microsoft Office suite (most versions of which are now called Microsoft 365) in 2007. OneNote is also now bundled with Windows 10 and 11 and offered for free as a standalone product.

Evernote was launched in 2008 and has seen a steady increase in user numbers since then; companysays it has 225 million users worldwide. (Microsoft hasn't released user numbers for OneNote, but between Microsoft 365 and Windows 10 and 11, more than a billion users probably installed some version of it on their machines.)

OneNote and Evernote are available for all major desktop and mobile operating systems, each can sync your notes across all your devices and the web, and both promise to be the only note-taking app you need. But they also have some very clear differences. So which is better for business users?

I'm a longtime user of both apps, so I checked out the latest version of each app for Windows, macOS, iPad, iPhone, and Android. This isn't an in-depth review, but rather a personal take on what I like and don't like about each - and the main points of difference between the two. I spend more time on the Windows version of each, but I will notice similarities and differences in other versions as well.

Note that after several years of Microsoft confusing everyone with three different versions of OneNote, there is now only one version that the company will continue to update, called OneNote for Windows. (OneNote for Windows 10 will no longer be distributed and will end in October 2025.) This review is based on OneNote for Windows.

OneNote: A great way to get organized

A noteis a highly developed application. It lets you take simple or complex notes from scratch, organize them into searchable and viewable notebooks, and sync them across platforms, including Windows PCs, Macs, iPads, and iPhones, Android devices, and the web.

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It's packed with tools for annotating drawing, recording audio and video, scanning images, embedding spreadsheets, and viewing other people's edits (although the capabilities of these tools vary slightly by platform). Its note-taking tools are even more comprehensive than Evernote's.

Organizational people will appreciate OneNote's basic structure. You make individual notebooks; within each notebook, you can create section groups that contain multiple sections. Each section has separate pages and each page has a separate note. It is ideal for organizing content with a logical structure.

For example, if you use OneNote to keep notes about your sales staff, you might have a sales staff notebook and then section groups for each sales person, and within each of those section groups, there could be sections for each of their customers. Within each of those customer sections, you could have individual pages with notes about the seller's relationship with them and include links to sales data.

OneNote is gradually becoming more integrated with the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite. For businesses, live collaboration is especially important, and it works exactly like in other Microsoft 365 apps, so there shouldn't be a learning curve. (Click to startSharebutton in the top-right corner of the screen, no matter where you are in OneNote.)

What makes OneNote even more powerful for businesses is that it integrates quite well with Microsoft Teams. You can add a OneNote notebook to Teams and anyone in the same Teams channel can view and edit it as long as they have access.

Webclip

As good as OneNote is at taking notes, it falls short of Evernote's considerable ability to scrape content from the web. OneNote offers a browser plug-in for Microsoft Edge, Chrome, and Firefox called OneNote Web Clipper. Please note that you must sign in to the extension with a Microsoft account to use it.

The OneNote Web Clipper interface is generally the same across all browsers. When you are on the web page you want to clip content from, clickClip on OneNoteicon on the browser toolbar and select a snippet of the whole page, part of the page (click and drag to select), or just the article. You can also bookmark the page. Once you've decided on the type of clip you want, you can save it directly to a OneNote notebook.

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Unfortunately, clipping is a mixed bag. For example, if you cut an article, sometimes that article will not be saved. Instead, you get a title, subtitle and link. It's not much more than a glorified bookmark. And if a site deletes that page, you lose it.

The web clipper often works well with full-page snippets, capturing the entire page, including any scrollable parts of it that you can't see. But he can be temperamental and mischievous. In some cases, it cannot capture full pages and instead displays an error message that says, "Sorry, this type of page cannot be truncated." When it manages to capture the entire page, it sometimes overlaps the content with other content, making the page difficult to read. Sometimes it seems to ignore the HTML commands on the page and display a long scrollable page with little rhyme or reason. And for heavy pages, like pages with videos, you'll have to wait a few seconds for the full preview to load before you can clickEmphasisknob.

Ironically, I've encountered these issues most often on Microsoft-made websites, including one in the Microsoft Store that describes Clipper and makes it available for download, and another that describes new OneNote features.

Additionally, if you capture an entire page or part of a page, the clip will only be saved as a graphic image, so any links or multimedia elements on the page will not work. You can add your own text above and below that image, but you cannot edit the content that appears on the image.

In addition to web clipping, OneNote has a tool that can record anything on your screen. To do this, right-click on the OneNote icon in the taskbar, selectTake a screenshotand then draw a rectangle around the portion of the screen you want to crop. You can then save it to any OneNote notebook. It is only included as a photo.

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Differences between versions

OneNote really shines on Windows. Here it has a full set of note-taking tools. This is also where its legacy as an Office application is most apparent, as it uses the Office ribbon as a way to give you access to all of its features.

OneNote for Windows has eight tabs on the ribbon - File, Home, Insert, Draw, History, Show, View, and Help - all of which give you access to a wealth of features. (To save screen space, you can press Ctrl-F1 to make the ribbon commands disappear from under the tabs or reappear later.) The File tab lets you open, print, share, and export files; change settings; and more. On the Home tab, you can format text, add tags, highlight important items, and more. The Insert tab provides tools for inserting objects into your notes, including spreadsheets, images, recordable audio and video, equations, and symbols.

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The Draw tab has the usual drawing tools, while History shows you older versions of the page, your edits, recent edits by other users, and so on. The preview includes familiar Office features, including a spell checker, thesaurus, and translation tool. View has many ways to change the look of your notebooks and their pages, such as adding lines, resizing, changing colors, and so on. Help lets you search for help information, contact technical support, and provide feedback to Microsoft. Evernote has nothing like this array of advanced tools.

Each page you create is a blank slate where you can add, move, and style text, images, media, and free-form objects with ease. For those willing to put in the time, this could mean creating extremely rich pages. But if you just want text, that's easy to do too.

The iPad and Mac versions have the same look, feel, and organization as the Windows version, albeit with fewer features. (The Mac version has more options than the iPad version.) They only have four tabs at the top: Home, Insert, Draw, and View.

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In some cases, the tabs are as complete as in the Windows version - for example, the Home tab on the Mac contains all the formatting and other functions of the Windows version. (The iPad doesn't have many options.) Other tabs have fewer features, especially the Insert tab. There, the Mac and iPad versions let you insert a variety of basic items such as tables, images, files, links, PDFs, equations, and the date and time. You can also record audio and take and insert screenshots (on a Mac) or photos (using the iPad camera). But you can't insert spreadsheets or online videos or record video like you can with the Windows version.

The web version of OneNote has a tabbed design like the Windows, Mac, and iPad versions, with the same basic features as the Mac and iPad versions. It also lets you open a page or notebook in the client version of OneNote on the device you're working on, if the device has OneNote installed.

The Android tablet version looks and works similarly to the iPad version, with Home, Insert, Draw, and View tabs, though it's not as fully featured. For example, the Insert tab only allows you to insert images, audio, files, cue points, bookmarks, and links.

The iPhone interface is much simpler than on computers or tablets. You see your section groups in a scrollable list and then you can easily navigate to individual sections and pages. There are no tabs, given the limited screen space on phones, and it's mainly built for taking quick and dirty notes or checking your existing notes.

Eat the boots

At some point, Microsoft will provide artificial intelligence features to OneNote that can dramatically improve performance.Microsoft 365 Copilot, powered by Microsoft's generative AI chatbot, will be integrated, according to OneNoteblog post by OneNote product manager Greg Mace. Copilot within OneNote will be able to "create plans, generate ideas, create lists, organize information, and ... transform existing text by summarizing, rewriting, formatting, and adding visual context," Mace wrote .

For example, here are two specific tasks Mace says Copilot will be able to do:

• Collapse notes into bullets on a new page.
• Generate a list of topics and talking points to discuss at the annual investor meeting.

Of course, these are just promises. We don't know if it will work in practice. And there's no date when Copilot will be integrated into OneNote. However, when this happens, we'll let you know.

Storage and prices

OneNote syncs content across all your devices and the Internet via Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint. It comes with subscription versions of Office (Microsoft 365 or Office 365), but is not included in non-subscription versions. If you download the OneNote app but don't use Microsoft 365/Office 365, you get up to 5 GB of cloud storage for everything including OneNote content, although you can purchase additional storage.

If you or your organization subscribe to Office 365 or Microsoft 365, you get a lot more storage: 100 GB to 6 TB, depending on the plan you buy. Businesses get 1 TB or unlimited storage per user, depending on plan. (See OneDrive and Microsoft 365 planspersonalicompanyuse.)

Evernote: The best web clipping tool you can find

Evernoteis a completely different beast than OneNote. While it offers the same basic functionality - the ability to take, organize and sync notes across multiple platforms, including Windows PCs, Macs, iPads and iPhones, Windows Phones, Android devices and the web - it has a much more colorful and attractive interface. And it is absolutely great at clipping and saving content from the web.

If you haven't used or updated Evernote in a while, you'll be surprised by the new home screen interface, which is packed with widgets for quick access to notes, notebooks, recently taken photos, and more. On the one hand, it gives you more ways to view and create notebooks and notes. On the other hand, it can be a bit overwhelming. But you can always find what you're looking for by using the search box in the top left corner of the screen or by clicking or tapping the notebook icon to view your notebooks. You can add or remove widgets on your home screen to make it look and work exactly the way you want.

The left side of the screen is used for navigation; click or tapNotebooksto see a list of all your notebooks, then click or tap on each individual notebook to see all your notes in a scrollable list. If you want, you can tap or clickNotesin the left navigation to see all your notes chronologically in a scrollable list, regardless of which notebook they're in. For easy searching, you can add tags to each note as you write or record it; the main navigation also allows you to view notes by tags.

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I find Evernote more visually appealing than OneNote. The screen is especially attractive when scrolling through the notebook, with a list of notes inside the notebook with small images pulled from each note.

Evernote doesn't have nearly as many note-taking tools as OneNote. There are the usual text formatting tools and you can embed tables, files and images in your notes; use electronic "ink" on it if you have a pen-touch device; and include audio and video as part of your notes. You can also connect it to Google Calendar so you can view your schedule and meetings in Evernote, take notes based on those meetings, and more. (As I write this, Evernote is working on a similar integration for Outlook.) You can also connect to Google Drive and embed files from it in your notes. It's a reasonable choice, but it doesn't include OneNote's advanced features, such as previewing other people's edits.

Webclip

Where Evernote really excels is capturing content from the web, organizing that content, and making it easy for you to find and use.

His web scraper is exemplary. The tool works as a browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Opera; exact features vary slightly from browser to browser. Overall I find it most robust in Chrome and Edge, it can handle even the most complex web pages.

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In most browsers, when you are on the page you want to capture content from, clickEvernoteicon on the toolbar and a clipper appears on the right with a number of options, including:

• include only the article itself, remove ads and other unnecessary material
• include a "simplified article" - just text and images with no original layout or video
• recording the entire page as you see it
• capture only the bookmark on the page
• take a screenshot of the page

When you clip something from the web, you can also add tags and notes. And you can choose which notebook to add content to or create a new notebook directly. In addition, Clipper has annotation tools when you take screenshots, so you can annotate what you capture by adding text, highlights, arrows, drawing on them, and so on. After you save the clip, you will see aSharebutton that lets you share the note with colleagues or share a link to the original source via email or social media.

Once you've captured your content, you can do more with it. When you open a note in Evernote, the text is live - you can copy it, paste it in, edit it, change the formatting, and so on. The links are also live, so you can click on any link to open it in your browser. However, all multimedia content on the page, such as videos, is inactive. Click on it and you will be sent to the original page you recorded.

Differences between versions

Evernote has a similar look and feel in its Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and web apps. They have the same widgets and layout on the home screen and similar navigation on the left side. You will have no problem switching between versions.

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The iPad version's home page is full of widgets for quick access to notes, notebooks, recently taken photos, and more, and it can be a bit overwhelming. But you can always find what you're looking for by searching; tap the search icon in the left margin and a search field will appear in the top left corner of the screen. As with other versions, you can tap the notebook icon to display your notebooks in alphabetical order and then browse through them.

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On the iPhone, Evernote isn't as complicated and cluttered as it is on the iPad. It looks and works like a more modern version of its Windows, Mac, and Web versions. Tap the three-line menu button in the bottom left corner of the screen to display the navigation, tapNovito create a new note and tap the search button for Evernote's well-designed search capabilities.

Storage and prices

Evernote's basic version is free, but limits you to adding 60MB of new notes per month, lets you sync between just two devices, and doesn't include any advanced features. There are alsoPersonal and professional subscriptionsavailable, which have different features, such as whether you can turn notes into presentations; search PDFs and attachments; and integrate with other software and services such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. Personal, intended for individuals, costs $80 per year and allows you to transfer 10 GB per month. Professional, also for individuals, costs $110 per year and includes 20 GB of data per month.

Evernote-teamsIt is designed for business collaboration and offers shared workspaces, a training program, and centralized management tools. It costs $150 per user per year and offers 20 GB in monthly transfers plus 2 GB per user.

The point

While Evernote and OneNote are note-taking tools, they have very different emphases and can be used for very different purposes.

If you're primarily looking for a tool that makes it easy to capture, organize, and find content from the web, then you'll want Evernote because its tools are great for that. If instead you want to take notes from scratch and have them in well-organized notebooks, or if you use Microsoft 365 heavily, OneNote is the way to go.

On the other hand, maybe you're like me. I've been using both for years. OneNote is my favorite tool for organizing and recording projects like books and articles. I use Evernote for research. Since both are free (at least for the basic version of Evernote), I have the best of both worlds.

This article was originally published March 2014 and last updated May 2023.

Related:

• Productivity software
• Office packages
• Enterprise applications
• Microsoft Office
• Microsoft 365
• Enterprise review

Preston Gralla is a contributing editor to Computerworld and the author of more than 45 books, includingWindows 8 hakovi(O'Reilly, 2012) iHow the internet works(Koji, 2006).

Bing's AI chatbot started working for me. I had to fire him.