Over the past year, Microsoft has been consciously unbundling OneNote from their Office Suite. Now, it’s a completely standalone service backed by OneDrive and available on all major platforms – Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and of course, the web. When MS did that, many eyebrows rose simultaneously across the world. Here’s a company that produces world-leading productivity software that has just made a big part of their suite free for everyone. And it’s from MS after all, so it must be good, right? Well, that’s what we’re here to find out.
We’re pitting it against Evernote, currently the most popular and versatile note taking service. It’s cross platform, has great features and has proved for more than half a decade that it’s a reliable system. Let’s get started.
In reality, Evernote and OneNote have 2 drastically different uses As I said before, Evernote is an Everything Bucket. It’s a ‘we don’t need no organization’ briefcase stuffed full of. If, like me, you're not a hierarchical person, there is only one winner: Evernote. OneNote is weak on organisation. It has notebooks, sections and pages but primitive tagging capabilities, with custom tags only available in the Windows client; custom tags don't sync and show in non-Windows clients. OneNote and Evernote share the same main objective: To help you get organized by keeping all your ideas, saved web pages, and other documents in one place. They also offer similar features, such. Evernote has some kind of a reminder system, OneNote has none. While both apps can create internal links to other notes, this is much easier in OneNote because you can just Wiki Link to other pages. OneNote can do indented, collapsible outlines a la apps like Workflowy and is one of the strongest outliners on the market.
OneNote Has Lots of Stuff for Free
OneNote is a very small part of MS’s business. Even if it was a paid service, the revenue wouldn’t make a dent in the giant’s multi-billion dollar quarter results. OneNote storage is backed by OneDrive. So as long as you have a couple GBs of storage there (or a couple of hundred if you jumped on any promotions), you should be fine.
Evernote is the opposite (you only get 60 MB of storage for free every month). The note taking app is all they have going on (yes, they sell accessories as well). This app is their major source of revenue. But they’re smart about it. Evernote is set up in a way that most users can get by without paying anything (I’m a proud Evernote freeloader). A small part of the user base pays a couple of dollars a month and that (along with the funding) keeps them going.
The $2.99 Evernote Plus plan gives you offline access, a 1 GB monthly upload limit, a passcode lock and the ability to turn emails into Evernote notes. $4.99 a month gives you unlimited storage space and enables business related research features.
OneNote, on the other hand, has features like OCR in images and PDFs, attaching PDFs to notes, and more for free.
Evernote Has a Better UI
Evernote looks better than OneNote on every platform. The web and Mac client is gorgeous. OneNote, on the other hand, reminds me of Office apps. I hate Office apps. But that might just be my personal pet peeve.
OneNote’s Mac and Desktop apps look like any other office apps with an added tab bar that doesn’t really make sense. My pet peeve for Office apps is significantly exploited here. When I’m taking notes, the last thing I want to see is options for everything from checklists to starring to audio recording. Please, just show me the important stuff.
OneNote Has Complex Features, Lots of Them
If you’re a multi-device user and you switch between mobile and desktop frequently for note taking, OneNote’s experience can be downright alienating. On the mobile apps, you just tap and start typing like any other note taking app. But OneNote’s desktop app has this weird floating input field that takes a lot of time to get used to.
When you click anywhere and start typing, you get a text box that’s not confined to the text area. What this means is that each piece of information is its own box standing on top of a grid. You can do crazy things like drop in an image or PDF, draw over it, put some text on it, overlap media, bring objects forwards and backwards, make images into background and a lot more. And I’m not done. You can insert tables, files, and even calendars. This is mostly limited to the desktop app (some of it is available on the iPad).
This is powerful stuff, but it’s also complicated and not very intuitive to use.
A note taking app needs to be feature-rich, but it needs to be simple as well. Evernote has none of the features I described above, but in my everyday use, I don’t need them. Evernote has basic text formatting options, voice recording, and the ability to import images and PDFs (can’t do crazy annotating but that’s fine).
OneNote’s Android App Sucks, but the iPad App Is Good
OneNote lacks in equal features and UI parity between platforms. Sounds like a no-brainer right? Someone at MS didn’t get the memo.
OneNote’s iOS app has a tabbed interface. The Android app as a pane-based interface (desktop has dropdown + tabbed UI). The iOS app has a helpful toolbar to create checklists, format text, indent text (great for creating outlines). No such thing on Android. And the Android app is just not good. It’s slow and it crashed in the first 5 minutes of use.
OneNote’s iPad app is killer (irony, amirite) and very different from the iPhone app. The updated app has support for stylus input, handwriting recognition and searching through the handwritten notes. So you can use OneNote to scribble notes in lecture, draw stuff and more. You can do some of this from the desktop app, like importing PDFs and images and annotating/drawing over them. I imported a 200 page PDF book for the kicks. It didn’t go well. But for small files, it shouldn’t be a problem.
Evernote Is Much Easier to Use
This might just be me, but I don’t understand OneNote’s note taking hierarchy. There’s a notebook, then there are sections (that show up as tabs in one app and panes in another), and each section has pages.
I’m not saying Evernote is without its problems but the app has a simple tree structure. There are notebooks and there are notes within them. While you can do crazy things like add tags, add shortcuts, or create a notebook stack, the basic idea is simple to grasp. You can just pick up Evernote and start using it.
And this is the same in every platform. Yes, Android has Material Design UI that’s a bit different from the iOS app but the basic structure is the same.
Evernote Is for the Always Online
The fact that Evernote doesn’t support offline access for notes can be a turn off for many. But it’s not as simple as it looks. Evernote’s support page says:
On mobile devices, Evernote stores only note titles, tags, a small excerpt of text from the note, and some other system information related to your notes and notebooks. All of this information is stored to a temporary file so you can search and browse notes.
Upgrading to the $2.99/month Plus plan lets you selectively save notebooks for offline use.
In my experience: On Android and iOS, a dozen or two of my most recent and used notes are available fully even when I’m offline. I can edit them and the changes are saved offline until there’s an internet connection, when the changes are uploaded and synced to all my devices. On desktop, the entire Evernote library is available for offline use. All my notes are text-based, so it seems the temporary file is large enough to accommodate all the notes that are important enough for my work (around 2 dozen). It rarely happens that I’m left without the internet and I need to write something in Evernote. If nothing else, I have access to 2G, and that’s enough for syncing text.But if you’re a heavy user of notes – in that you want to sync PDFs, images, and audio recordings – you won’t have access to all that offline.
So Who Is OneNote For?
I believe OneNote is for people who have specific needs that can’t be covered (for free) by Evernote or other note taking apps. Need to create multi-page notes filled with floating text, images, PDFs, and annotations but don’t want to invest in a Pro PDF app? There’s OneNote for you. The experience won’t be great but it will do the job.
Also, if you’re used to Office apps, you get the familiar Ribbon UI. Perhaps you have a Windows Phone and you’re already using OneDrive storage, so you’ve got 100s of GBs of storage there for free. For these types of Windows power users, OneNote is for you. For the rest of us, there’s Evernote.
Become an Evernote pro: Learn how to search in Evernote like a pro, the best integrations for Evernote and how it compares to Notability.The Winner: Evernote
I’ve written about software on the internet for a couple of years now and I like to think of myself as a pro user. And I get by with the free Evernote plan just fine – for the reasons I’ve highlighted above. But I use Evernote for text-only note taking. I’m not a student or an office user who might need to scan images and have them OCR’d or to upload and annotate PDFs (when I do need to, I use GoodReader for it).
Evernote’s basic plan is fine for most of us. And if you’re not a spec-sheet guy, you’ll understand why. Evernote is a joy to use. It is simple if you want it to be. But don’t be fooled, Evernote is also really powerful. People have written books on how to use Evernote to do all sorts of things.
If you value ease of use, thoughtful design and an overall pleasant interface, just go with Evernote. OneNote has a great spec-sheet and it’s all free. But unless MS takes the product and does a re-write, bringing UI and feature equality between all the different versions, it’s not a worthy contender. And something tells me that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
I’ve used Evernote for a couple of years now and I’m not planning to stop or switch. I’m removing the OneNote apps from all my devices as soon as I’ve turned in this article.
The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
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- Published on October 6, 2020
- Updated on
- Read time 6 minutes
- Category
Note-taking is one of the most important skills that the managers or any other working professional should have. It helps you to note down all of the different tasks and activities that you have to do in your work and personal life.
As with project management, software plays a major role in the note-taking world as well. While we talk about nTask as the best project management application in the market, in this article, we will talk about the two big software in the note-taking world. Evernote and OneNote.
The comparison is named Evernote vs OneNote but when we talk about note-taking apps, nTask has a dominant place in that genre as well.
Here is a side by side comparison of Evernote vs OneNote vs nTask, so that you can get an idea of what these apps have in common, and how they are unique to each other.
Evernote vs nTask vs OneNote
| Systems | Evernote | nTask | OneNote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Starting at $3.99 | Starting at $2.99 | Free with an Office 365 subscription |
| Integrations |
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Let’s take a look at Evernote and OneNote in detail.
Evernote – An Amazing Web-clipping Tool
One of the best note-taking applications in the market right now, Evernote is an incredible software that lets you note down all of your different thoughts and processes in its incredible database.
But the amazing thing about this software is that it doesn’t feel like it was designed as a note-editor to create notes from scratch.
It looks like it was designed to clip different types of content from the web.
This feature really sets apart the software from OneNote, as all of the other major functionalities between the two software are the same.
Key Features
- Web clipping support
- Mobile and Web interface
- Store notes, web clips, files, and images
- Web clipper browser extensions
- Share notes and collaborate on files
- Store all itineraries, confirmations, travel documents
- Other products include Skitch and Penultimate
- Annotation and markup
- Give feedback and share ideas
- Edit rich text and sketches
- Geolocation
- Content available on any device
- Save online resources in one place
- Snap photos, record audio, save documents
- Save favorite webpages
- Evernote Food for collecting food moments
- Evernote Clearly for clearing web content
- Shapes, arrows, and quick sketches
Pricing
- The basic version of the application is free to use
- The premium version of the application starts for $7.99/month
- The business version of the application starts for $14.99/month
Pros
- Offline access
- Syncing across multiple platforms and devices
- Quick to capture notes and thoughts
- Sharing capabilities
- Syncing to multiple devices
- Easy to use layout
Cons
- When the user is using images, most of the times it is extremely hard to input text from the bottom panel
- Sometimes the clipper feature of the application inputs the notes into random places
- Cannot turn notes into notebooks after published
Looking for apps like Evernote? Check this out:
OneNote – An Amazing Organizational Tool
Microsoft OneNote is an amazing organizational tool that enables you to create different types of notes from scratch, different browsable notebooks, organize all of the different notes into a searchable format, and can sync all of that data among a large variety of platforms.
One of the features in which Evernote excels and OneNote falls short of is Web clipping.
The software has a web-clipper extension for different browsers like Chrome, Edge IE, and Firefox, but that extension still lacks many capabilities of Evernote’s web-clipping.
Key Features
- Page Templates
- Custom Tags
- Internal Links
- Version History
- Integration with Outlook
- Integration with Other Apps
- Quick Notes
- Quick Access Toolbar
- Docked Note Taking
- Real-time Collaboration
- Audio/Video Recording
Pricing
- The application is Free with the Office 365 subscription that you purchase.
Pros
- Cloud syncing to save all of the information that you input into the application
- Outlook Integration to hook up your email with your note-taking application
- Flexibility to use the software however it suits you
- You can use the cloud-based version and link it to things like MS Teams and SharePoint
Cons
- The iPhone app doesn’t allow drawing
- No Task Management
- robust tools available in the desktop version as the cloud version
Issues-Wise Comparison
Before we head off to the conclusion, it’s best that we highlight some of the issues.
If tags are one of your key takeaway features in any note management software, then OneNote will do you solid. The program facilitates users with the ability to apply tags to a range of organizational elements.
Meanwhile, Evernote seems to struggle a bit in the tags department. With OneNote, tags can not only be applied to the conventional Notebooks, Sections, and Pages elements, but they can also be applied to multiple elements of the same page.
Moving on, Evernote tends to be a bit sluggish when a certain number of notes is reached. You cannot organize quick notes. They can become messy after a while and keeping track of all those quick notes is another story to share.
Evernote Vs Onenote Vs Notion
Evernote’s storage capacity is fair. Seriously, you could create thousands of notes. However, when you compare it with OneNote, the former app sets limits at 60MB upload capacity. This is… a bit… tedious at best.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Can I use OneNote without a Microsoft account?
No, you cannot use OneNote if you don’t have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription.
2. What is the cost of Evernote?
Here are the pricing plans for Evernote:
- The basic version of the application is free to use
- The premium version of the application starts for $7.99/month
- The business version of the application starts at $14.99/month
3. What’s the difference between OneNote and OneDrive?
Both of these applications are from Microsoft. The difference between the applications is that OneNote is a powerful note-taking application that enables you to store all of your different thoughts and ideas into a digital database, and OneDrive is that cloud storage where that data is stored.
4. Is OneNote in the cloud?
OneNote is an incredible cloud-based note-taking application. So yes, it is connected to the cloud.
5. How do I make Evernote more secure?
Here are some of the steps that you can follow to make your Evernote application more secure.
- The first step is to purchase the paid subscription to unlock the security features
- Keep your devices up to date and synchronized
- Manage the access to your Evernote account
- Encrypt text in a note
- Add two-step verification
- Store your data locally
- Log in with your email address and a unique password
- Create a local notebook
6. Which software is better for long term users?
Well, if you are thinking about long term usage, we’d advise OneNote. It’s comparatively better than Evernote. Especially, if you are looking to expand your business without paying for new software tool licenses in near future, you should invest in OneNote.
Evernote Vs
That being said, Evernote has its advantages over OneNote, but the latter seems to be a much better option for thriving businesses at the verge of expansion.
7. Which version of Evernote/ OneNote is recommended to cross-platform users?
It depends on the version of the program that you are currently using.
Top it off with a need for cross-platform compatibility, we’d recommend OneNote once again. It takes multi-client compatibility to the next level. Of course, OneNote is Windows-centric, so you cannot switch from Windows to Linux or Mac.
But, if you are running a business with a sizeable employee count, OneNote will do the job. Don’t forget to use the Desktop version of both applications because you cannot manage everything on a smartphone.
Conclusion
Onenote Or Evernote Reddit
So there you have it. This was our Evernote vs OneNote comparison. There isn’t much of a difference between the two applications apart from some features and pricing plans.
Onenote Or Evernote 2019
Both of these tools are champs when it comes to note-taking. But then again, it depends on your personal preference and requirements. To that end, if you have a favorite application other than the two, we talked about, feel free to holler in the comments section below.
Evernote Or Onenote For Students
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