As a marketer at a fast-paced agency, I would be terrible at my job if I didn’t take good notes. You know—project deadline reminders, priority lists, links to resources, research notes—all the things that, if unkempt, could turn into a pile of colorful sticky notes and paper mountains on my desk.
There are a lot of note-taking apps out there that solve this problem, but two of the most powerful are Evernote and Microsoft OneNote. Evernote went to pot for a few years, losing its edge, but it’s made a comeback. OneNote, however, has consistently held its ground, especially for those already embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem.
I downloaded both apps and spent several days using each one to better understand their nuanced features. Read on for an in-depth look at Evernote vs. OneNote, and decide which app is right for you.
Table of contents:
Evernote vs. OneNote at a glance
In short:
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OneNote is better for those who love Microsoft Office’s software layout and who don’t want to shell out cash for a note-taking app.
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Evernote is better for those who have the budget and want a subscription to a powerful, aesthetically pleasing, and user-friendly note-taking app.
But don’t stress about your decision. Both apps offer similar features and serve the purpose you need them to: organized note-taking.
|
Evernote |
OneNote |
|
|---|---|---|
|
User experience |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Very sleek and intuitive; anticipates user needs very well; more structured |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Well-organized and offers solid features; a bit harder to navigate, but the freeform nature will appeal to a lot of people |
|
Price |
⭐⭐ Not criminally expensive, but you need a paid subscription to access a reasonable amount of storage. Free plan offers 60 MB per month $14.99/month for 10 GB/month $17.99 per month for 20 GB/month |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ All features and a decent amount of storage are available for free; Microsoft 365 subscription needed to add more storage. |
|
Flexibility |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Easy to move notes around, customize home page, and create custom templates |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Easy to move notes around; can create note text boxes wherever your cursor is on a page |
|
Integrations |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers extensive integration opportunities—Zapier, Google Suite, Microsoft Office, and more |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Offers extensive integration opportunities—Zapier, Microsoft Office, Google Drive, WordPress, CloudHQ, and more |
|
Privacy |
⭐⭐⭐ Collects user information for marketing purposes; no Evernote employee will view your content without your consent; shares your data with third parties if you choose to integrate Evernote, like with the calendar integration |
⭐⭐ Collects user information for marketing purposes; enables users to control some of their privacy settings; less clear/explicit about how data is collected and how to prevent it from being collected |
|
Advanced features |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Very advanced web-clipping feature, maintaining page formatting and text interactivity; excellent text recognition in images; with the Teams plan, you can share notes and notebooks and create a single source of truth with the Spaces feature |
⭐⭐⭐ Offers effective but imperfect web-clipping feature; text search within images not as consistent; Dictate transcribes voice-to-text pretty well but lacks accurate punctuation and formatting; Math Assistant is available with a Microsoft 365 subscription |
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AI |
⭐⭐⭐ AI features like AI Note Cleanup or AI Search are in beta or coming soon |
⭐⭐⭐ Copilot can be added for an additional $30/month (TBD on launch date) |
What’s not different between Evernote and OneNote
Overall, Evernote and OneNote are far more similar than they are different. Both apps:
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Include several note formats—text, images, audio, drawings, files, and more
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Have a file storage hierarchy, allowing you to store documents in folders
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Allow you to add tags to notes and use those tags to locate them
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Enable collaboration with other teammates
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Allow you to seamlessly sync your data across multiple devices
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Allow you to clip content from the web
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Integrate well with other apps, including Zapier
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Require a paid upgrade to add more storage
Evernote is more structured, where OneNote offers more flexibility
When I first opened OneNote, I was met with crickets. No tutorial, no helpful pop-up tips—nothing. Thankfully, I’ve had experience using Microsoft Office products (far too many college essays written in Microsoft Word), so I didn’t have much trouble navigating the interface. If you also have experience using Microsoft Office, there’s a good chance you’ll find your way around without too much difficulty.
That’s an indication of the flexibility of the app, and it’s even more prominent when you start actually taking notes. The note-taking interface itself is—to put it simply—loosey-goosey. Unlike nearly any other word-processing or note-taking app you’ve used (whether that be Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Evernote, or Apple Notes), wherever you click on the interface, your cursor creates a text box for your note (shown below).
It feels like you’re writing on a blank piece of paper, wherever you want, and it allows you to move your text boxes wherever you want them on the page. Not gonna lie—this isn’t my vibe. But I can see where it’d be helpful for some folks, so I’d say this one comes down to personal preference.
Another example: OneNote’s tagging feature also isn’t clearly marked—I spent several minutes just trying to locate tags and finally found them by clicking a tiny arrow on the app’s home tab (shown below).
Granted, OneNote’s folder structure is very clear and organized, with pages grouped into sections and sections grouped into notebooks. Colorful tabs mark sections, which is reminiscent of a physical notebook—pretty cute, if you ask me. But overall, it’s a lot freer than Evernote.
On the other hand, when I opened Evernote for the first time, I was greeted by a very friendly tutorial bot that walked me through everything the app had to offer—creating tags and tasks, using templates, sharing notes with teammates, and an option to import content from alternative note-taking apps. After a couple of minutes, I could navigate the interface with no problems.
Evernote’s user experience makes note-taking and organization feel natural and comfortable. The app’s menu navigation is very user-friendly, and its widget structure makes it easy to see and navigate to anything you may need.
I felt like I was at a Michelin-starred restaurant with all the personalized touches. For example, the home page suggested notebooks to me based on my activity (similar to Google Drive’s “Priority” list). And I always knew exactly what to expect.
I was most impressed with the interface for setting task due dates. It provides easy preset options, a full calendar view, and options to add a specific time and time zone (shown below)—total customization, all within a user-friendly pop-up interface.
Both apps offer full access for free, but Evernote comes with a catch
Evernote recently overhauled its pricing structure, and it’s significantly shifted what you can do on its free plan. Besides its AI features, all the bells and whistles that used to be locked behind a paywall are now accessible to everyone. Sounds like a great deal, right? Well, there’s a bit more to the story.
The free plan caps you at 50 notes, a pittance compared to the 150,000 notes you can store with a paid plan. You’ll also face a maximum note size of 25MB and a total of 60 MB in monthly uploads. Users who regularly store documents with high-resolution images or multimedia will probably quickly hit that ceiling. And if you rely on syncing your notes across multiple devices—think laptop, tablet, and phone—I’ve got some bad news. Evernote restricts syncing across devices to paid users only. So, if you plan to access your notes from anywhere other than your main device, you might find yourself scrambling to upgrade sooner rather than later.
So what about OneNote? Unlike many other Microsoft Office apps, you can download and use OneNote without paying for a Microsoft 365 subscription—it’s free for anyone to download and use.
OneNote offers flexibility that Evernote’s free plan doesn’t. You can create as many notes as you like, with no limitations on size or monthly uploads, and sync them across multiple devices. While Evernote’s free plan can start feeling restrictive pretty quickly, OneNote remains wide open for your organizational needs.
You only need a Microsoft account to get started, and you’ll immediately get 5GB of cloud storage via OneDrive. And if that’s not enough space for you, there’s always the option to bump it up to 1TB with a Microsoft 365 subscription—but 5 GB total is already pretty generous compared to Evernote’s free version’s 60 MB per month.
Both offer impressive features, but Evernote has an edge
The web clipper
Both Evernote and OneNote offer a web clipper—a browser extension that captures webpage contents at the click of a button. This makes grabbing page contents with unique formats (such as recipes or poems) a breeze.
While both tools are powerful, I found Evernote’s web clipper to be most accurate and helpful. When I clipped an entire article on how to write a blog post, OneNote captured what seemed like a screenshot of the webpage. As a result, I was unable to interact with the text at all—the clipped webpage was just an image.
Evernote, on the other hand, made it possible to interact with the text—highlighting it, copying it, and navigating to all links that were on the page. I was especially impressed to see that Evernote kept the page’s formatting incredibly accurate—spacing, headers, and all (as seen below).
Search features
I had read online that both Evernote and OneNote offer great optical character recognition (OCR)—essentially, the ability to see and capture text in images or other static documents, like PDFs. I gave the tool a try on both apps, and found Evernote’s OCR to be superior.
As you can see in the screenshot below, Evernote was able to identify the word “matcha,” despite it being written in a cursive font that mimics handwriting.
Evernote has also rolled out its new AI Search feature this year, which lets you type in questions and get answers straight from your notes. (More on that below.)
In contrast, OneNote was unable to identify the word “matcha” in the same image (shown below). I tried to search for “scratch,” another word in the image that uses a simpler font, and OneNote was still unable to find the word in the image.
That said, OneNote was able to identify text from the same web clip used earlier (shown below).
Overall, Evernote’s ability to detect image text written in a unique font gave it the win.
Evernote’s AI tools are useful but limited, while OneNote’s let you dig deeper
Every productivity app is jumping on the AI bandwagon, and Evernote and OneNote are no exceptions. If you’re deciding between them, their AI features might tip the scales, depending on what you need.
Evernote has introduced two AI tools to its Professional plan: AI Edit and AI-Powered Search. AI Edit, tucked into the editing bar, offers a simple dropdown with options that help you polish your content without feeling overwhelmed by too many choices. These tools aim to enhance your note-taking experience by offering features like summarization, typo fixing, translation, introduction/conclusion generation, and a yet-to-be-released tone adjustment.
Was I blown away by AI Edit? Not exactly. The tool is fairly basic compared to some standalone AI editors out there, but it gets the job done. I can see its appeal for those who want a quick AI assist without needing to switch to a different app.
Evernote also enhances search with AI, pulling results from your notes, PDFs, images, and even handwritten content to surface relevant information. And since Evernote also supports tasks and events, you can ask questions about those, too, and get a summarized view of everything together. You’ll have a list of sources for the answer so you can jump straight to the original data and check that the AI isn’t making things up.
Meanwhile, over at OneNote, AI takes the form of Microsoft Copilot, available to users with a Copilot Pro license ($20/month) or a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license ($30/month). I haven’t had the chance to test this directly because I don’t have the required license, and—just a heads-up—it’s currently only available on Windows. But based on the experience of other Zapier app testers, Copilot in OneNote offers a more proactive AI assistant by providing a chat sidebar for asking questions and generating content. It can help you brainstorm ideas, draft project plans, create to-do lists, summarize or rephrase text, and organize information without ever leaving your notes.
Both tools connect to Zapier
If you want to get the most from your note-taking tool, it needs to talk to the rest of your tech stack. And with Zapier, you can connect OneNote or Evernote with thousands of other apps, so you can automatically create notes based on activity in other apps—or the other way around.
Learn more about how to automate OneNote and how to automate Evernote, or get started with one of these pre-built workflows.
Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with thousands of apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization’s technology stack. Learn more.
Evernote or OneNote: Which one is better?
Both Evernote and Microsoft OneNote will help you get and stay organized—that much is guaranteed. But each app has a unique audience for whom it’s more clearly designed.
If you have a budget for a note-taking app—even just $14.99 per month—Evernote is a solid choice. Not only is its interface more sleek and intuitive than OneNote (think Apple vs. Android and Zoom vs. Microsoft Teams), but its features also proved more powerful and helpful than OneNote’s.
Of course, some users love the interface of Microsoft Office apps, in which case, OneNote may be more aesthetically and practically attractive. The fact that OneNote offers all of its advanced features for free may also shift the tide in its favor.
Another factor that should go into your decision is which app your organization or team already uses. Will you make all text messages in the group chat green by choosing the other option? Consider how your choice will impact your teammates’ workflow and—for everyone’s sake—keep the group’s app preference in mind when making your decision.
Evernote vs. OneNote FAQ
Still struggling to decide? First, take a deep breath: we’re just taking notes here, and either one will do the trick. Learn more from these common questions.
Is Evernote better than Microsoft OneNote?
Your choice boils down to what you personally like and how much you’re willing to spend. If you feel strongly about your note-taking app boasting the elegance and charm of a celebrity at the Met Gala, Evernote may be the superior choice. But if you’re a Microsoft Office fan and you like the idea of getting advanced features without shelling out extra cash, OneNote might be more your jam.
Should I switch from Evernote to OneNote?
If you want to save money, making the switch to OneNote might be the move. But if you value Evernote’s power features, you may miss those.
How do I link Evernote to OneNote?
You can use the OneNote importer tool to migrate your Evernote files into OneNote. But if you want to truly link the two, you can use a Zap to automatically send information between the two apps.
Related reading:
This article was originally published in October 2018 by Jill Duffy and has also had contributions from Cecilia Gillen and Allisa Boulette. The most recent update was in October 2024.