When it comes to choosing the best note-taking app, there are two clear winners: Microsoft OneNote and Evernote. Both are PCMag Editors’ Choices, and both have pluses and minuses. OneNote is much better if you want a free app. Evernote has a different structure that makes it easier to organize, tag, find, and share information, as long as you’re willing to pay its steep price. While the following review of OneNote isn’t a head-to-head comparison with Evernote, it’s hard not to match them up in at least in a few respects. Overall, and compared with everything else on the market, OneNote is clearly one of the best note-taking apps. Whether you’ll prefer it to Evernote comes down to what you value in an app and how you use it.
How Much Does OneNote Cost?
To use OneNote, you need some kind of Microsoft account, but it doesn’t have to be paid. Merely having a free Outlook.com login will do.
OneNote is available to download for free on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. There’s also a web app. You can use it for free with almost no feature restrictions. You do get a handful of extra features—such as Sticker and Math—if you have a paid Microsoft account. Free OneNote users get 5GB of space. There’s also a free edition for education that includes 1TB online storage.
For everybody else, Microsoft 365 Personal also includes 1TB storage, though you share that space with other apps. Microsoft 365 Personal costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year and gives you a lot of benefits beyond OneNote, including the installable Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint applications. You can also get a Family account for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. The company also recently announced it would once again offer non-subscription purchases of Office applications sometime in 2021, though it’s not clear how much OneDrive storage that option would include for syncing OneNote notes.
Price Comparisons
Evernote accounts come in three tiers of service: Basic (free), Premium ($69.99 per year or $7.99 per month), and Business ($12 per person per month). With a free Evernote account, you can only sync between two devices, and you can only upload 60MB of data each month. Evernote Premium adds more storage and features, such as business card scanning and digitizing; OCR on all PDFs, documents, and images; suggestions for content related to the note you’re writing; and more.
Quip, which is owned by Salesforce, is another note-taking app that’s worth considering if you’re in search of something collaborative. It works something like Google Docs in the sense that multiple people can contribute to notes or documents, and everyone’s contributions and comments are neatly organized. Quip pricing starts at $30 per month for five people, or $12 per person per month for larger groups.
There are other note-taking apps on the market, many of them free, but none comes close to OneNote or Evernote in features, compatibility, and power. Zoho Notebook (free with unlimited storage) is the only one to keep an eye on. It looks more adept with every update, although it still falls short on collaboration.
Google Keep is free as well but severely limited in what it can do when you compare it to OneNote. Plus, its web clipper is disappointing. If all you need is a place to jot down ideas, it’s fine, as is Apple Notes. But you can’t effectively organize information and pull it up quickly no matter where you are, the way you can with OneNote. Simplenote is another option if you’re only interested in a stripped-down note-taking app.
OneNote’s Structure
OneNote shares a family resemblance with other Microsoft Office apps. As mentioned, you can download OneNote for Windows, and macOS, as well as Apple and Android mobile devices. There’s also a web app. The advanced features vary a little bit depending on where you’re using it. The Windows app is the strongest of the bunch, unsurprisingly.
The basic structure and terminology used in OneNote is Notebook > Section > Page. Pages can also have subpages. In other apps, a Page is usually called a Note, and we use the terms interchangeably here.
Let’s say we have a notebook called Recipes. Within it are sections for Sweet, Savory, and Cocktail recipes. Within the Cocktails section, we have pages for Negroni, Gin Fizz, and so forth. We can make subpages under Negroni for Grapefruit Negroni and Sparkling Negroni. So effectively, there are four levels for your categorization and organization needs.
Unlike in other note-taking apps, however, a OneNote page has more in common with a pasteboard than a word processing document. Every piece of content that’s added to a page comes in its own field or box. You can resize any box or drag and drop it to change its position on the page. For some types of content, this works well, but it can also lead to messy, ugly pages.
OneNote’s Design
OneNote has a familiar three-paneled layout. On the far left, you have a collapsible menu with three options: Notebooks, Search, and Recent Notes. When you click the first choice, a list of notebooks appears, and whichever one you select, its pages appear to the right. (A notebook and its pages are treated as one panel.) It’s similar to a standard tree folder structure. When you select a particular page, its contents appear in the main window.
When you first set up OneNote on a new device, you likely won’t see all your notebooks by default, because the app only shows recently used notebooks. To open a notebook that you haven’t seen in a while, you have to hunt it down on OneDrive and load it back into the app. Finding and selecting them doesn’t take long, but loading them can, depending on their size. It can be frustrating and slow down your productivity, depending on how many notes you have and how you need to organize them.
When you choose a notebook, the rest of the window reloads to display the sections and pages within that notebook. All the other notebooks disappear. To see them again, you have to back out and wait for it to reload. If you bounce between notebooks frequently, you’ll find that this structure slows you down, too.
If you jump between notebooks frequently, Evernote’s structure will be better for your productivity. At all times, you can see all your notebooks or stacks of notebooks (in other words, groups or folders containing several notebooks) in the far left panel. You can also collapse and expand notebook stacks to customize the view and see what you need. So in Evernote, you can view a complete list of all your notebooks at once, whereas that’s impossible in OneNote’s more hierarchical arrangement.
Features and Performance
Microsoft OneNote’s feature list impresses. Many of the features will be familiar to anyone who has used other Office apps. A few features don’t work as smoothly as you might hope, however.
The menu bar is a fine place to start. OneNote’s ribbon menu bar closely resembles the one in Word Online. They’re both loaded with options. You get all the formatting tools you could ever need. You can insert images, links, symbols, tables, and audio files, which you can record, not just upload. You can enlarge, shrink, and crop images that appear in notes. You can also send an image to the background and have text run on top of it. You cannot annotate images in OneNote, though, which you can do in Evernote Premium, though you can add Alt Text and descriptions.
OneNote lets you edit embedded files such as text documents. You can also pull text from an image and paste it right into the note with no special processing—one of the app’s strongest features. As long as you have a good image with clear print on it to start with, it works fairly well.
A feature called Digital Ink lets you draw diagrams and images using a stylus on a supported device such as a Surface tablet. If you have a Microsoft business account, you can view upcoming meetings listed in Outlook Calendar while taking notes about them in OneNote.
When it comes to more-routine features, OneNote sometimes misses the mark. For example, you can sort pages alphabetically, by creation date, or by modification date, but not in the mobile app. The app’s web clipper doesn’t always work smoothly either, and it has fewer options for which sections of a page you want to clip compared with Evernote’s web clipper.
If you’re unfamiliar with them, web clippers are browser extensions that let you copy content from a webpage into another app, in this case, OneNote. They eliminate the need to cut and paste. OneNote lets you clip just the main content if you want, stripping out the ads and other page elements that aren’t important. Another option lets you clip the whole page, while a third allows you to draw a box around a section and save just that screenshot.
OneNote can clip videos, which sounds impressive, but it’s very slow. Worse, the clipper has trouble with mundane tasks such as formatting bullet points and numbered lists and preserving line breaks in poems. It doesn’t suggest an appropriate notebook where you might save the clip, which Evernote does. While testing the feature, we clipped one recipe page where OneNote simply missed the last two ingredients in the ingredients list (see the image). In other test runs, the final notes had overlapping text, sloppy image placement on the page, and other problems.
OneNote has a few other neat features, such as an Accessibility Checker. It flags potential accessibility problems with notes, such as whether text has low contrast against a background or if images are missing alt text. Funnily enough, most of the accessibility warnings we saw while testing were in reference to default header fonts that OneNote applied to web-clipped pages.
Earlier we mentioned that Math is a feature limited to paying users. Math, sometimes also called Math Assistant, allows you to write mathematical equations by hand and have OneNote convert them to typed text and even solve equations. In this way, you don’t need to know how to type superscript, subscript, or mathematical operators. You can write them by hand and let OneNote tidy them into typed equations.
Search, Tags, and Sticky Notes
The search tool in OneNote has improved recently. Formerly, when you looked for a keyword or tag, OneNote only searched notebooks that were downloaded to the device you were using. Now, it searches all your notes, even if they aren’t stored locally, and lets you know if it finds a match. It then downloads the notebook and opens the matching note.
Speaking of tags, OneNote has a unique approach to them. In some websites and apps, you turn any word into a tag by adding # in front of it, as is the case on Twitter. In other apps, such as Evernote and email, you create tags first and then apply them to notes (or email messages) as you see fit. The app remembers all the tags you’ve made and auto-suggests them when you start typing so that you don’t create near duplicates (like “tax” and “taxes”). OneNote handles this all differently.
In OneNote, you get a bunch of premade tags to start; a few examples are “definition,” “question,” “to-do.” These tags aren’t grand themes for the content. They’re more like flags you put on the page to draw attention to something specific. If you want other thematic tags, you make them by putting # before any word on the page, like #marketing or #data. The problem there is you can very easily create near duplicates. It’s all very unusual for a note-taking app.
When reading notes, you can create a more focused experience using Reading View. A similar feature, Immersive Reader, hides all the toolbars from view and puts only the note on screen and then reads it aloud, a nice feature for cooking recipes or for people with vision impairment.
Managing and Collaborating With OneNote
How OneNote lets you share and collaborate with others could and should influence how you set up your OneNote account.
The Notebook > Section > Page > Subpage schema is of the utmost importance here. The reason is you can only share at the notebook level. You can share a link to a section or a page, but the person you send it to must have permission to the whole notebook to access it. You can choose whether the access will be edit or view only.
You do have one other option to share only a page and not your whole notebook, but it involves sending the recipients a PDF. So that’s not ideal if you want to collaborate with people.
When you share a notebook, you can give people permission to edit notes, in what’s sometimes called co-authoring. That way, multiple people can edit a single file simultaneously, in much the same way they can in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. The same ability to only share a whole notebook, rather than any subsection of it, applies to co-authoring; co-authors can see everything in the notebook, even if you just want them to work on a single page.
OneNote Takes Silver
Note-taking app OneNote isn’t short on features. It offers a lot for free, and you get a heck of a lot more space with a paid Microsoft 365 account. OneNote is much more advanced than almost all other note-taking apps on the market, except Evernote.
OneNote is reliable, but depending on which features you need, it could be hit or miss. It has some neat tools for students, for example, and the Immersive Reader is pretty great when your hands are full and you want to listen to your notes read aloud. Sharing can get messy, however, and the web clipper could use some work. When you look at the whole landscape of options for note-taking apps, it’s clearly in the top ranks. Evernote edges it out slightly for features and functionality, but you really need to pay for Evernote to get the most out of it, whereas the free version of OneNote is more than adequate for many use cases.
OneNote is the only app that comes close to Evernote at this time, and for certain use cases, it’s definitely better. Both are PCMag Editors’ Choice award-winners for note-taking apps.
