OneNote vs Evernote

OneNote vs Evernote: Which is best for your business?

Are you someone who likes to jot down things to keep their thoughts organized? Does your work demand taking notes or making to-do lists regularly? Do you like to list down short and crisp points to elaborate on in project meetings? Then you must have come across two of the most popular note-taking apps available today – Ms OneNote and Evernote. Both these apps have free versions and come with some very useful features, but each has some pros and cons that set them apart. While some users swear by using Ms OneNote, others prefer to use Evernote. Let’s discuss both according to their features to help you decide which one is better for your business.

OneNote vs Evernote: Notes creation

Ms OneNote has the traditional MS Office Ribbon that provides you with many features to create, edit, view and organize notes. While creating notes, you can add text, images, tables, video and audio files, spreadsheets, links, etc. into your notes. This helps in creating content rich notes and keeping all the media objects associated with them in one place.

You can take freehand notes and draw freehand images using a touch-capable device or a Microsoft Surface device. The usual MS office formatting and reviewing options help to create more appealing and accurate notes.

Evernote includes most of these notes-creation features, drawing and editing tools, but doesn’t provide some OneNote features like reviewing the edits of others. Finding information or notes can be a little overwhelming here if you don’t tag them properly. Unless you tag your notes, they will keep piling up in a messy way and will be difficult to look for later.

OneNote vs Evernote: Organization of Notes

OneNote helps you to organise content just like you would do in a real-world notebook, in the hierarchy of notebooks, section groups, sections and pages. This provides you with simple and broad cabinets to save your notes in. Pages in a section are displayed in a list on the right-side panel, that helps you keep a track of topics that you have created. OneNote also helps you to organise content within your page by creating sub-paragraphs. You can create multiple paragraphs under the top one and collapse and display them as required.

Evernote organizes notes is a linear way. Evernote displays all the existing notebooks on the extreme left side of the screen. While scrolling through these notebooks you can see the list of notes in it and image clippings from those notes. As the name suggests, the All notes section displays the entire collection of notes taken till date, irrespective of the notebooks they are in. Evernote provides a Tags options under the listed notebooks where you can search for notes according to their tags.

OneNote vs Evernote: Clipping from the web

OneNote has a clipper add-in that has very basic functionality and that can only be used from a Microsoft account. Using this clipper, you can grab a screenshot of the webpage or a region. You can choose to capture an article from a webpage, excluding the advertisements. You can also capture its bookmark.

The clipping gets embedded as an image. It allows you to include this clipping only inside an existing notebook. If there are any multimedia components on the clipping or any link, you will not be able to use them in OneNote. It also doesn’t not allow you to copy a saved clipping to other applications, such as Ms Word.

With Evernote, you can do all this and choose to exclude the original format of the article and copy just the text and images from it. You can create a new notebook to add this clipped information and use it markup tools to include comments or note down questions. You can also play around with the content from the clipped page by editing or changing its appearance. You can add text to it, highlight it and even draw on it. Unlike OneNote, the links of the clipped page remain clickable in Evernote. You can also view videos embedded in it by clicking them and visiting the original webpage from where it was clipped.

OneNote vs Evernote: Usage on different devices

Both OneNote and Evernote can be used across devices, but the overall look and feel many vary from device to device.

Being a part of Ms Office, OneNote works the best on Windows. It provides you the entire range of note-creation and formatting options in this version. You may find a few of these features missing in the Web version, iPad and the Mac versions of OneNote. Though the Mac version has all the formatting features just like the Windows version, it doesn’t provide you with as many Insert features. The iPad version also has its limitations though it provides an extra feature of taking a picture from its camera and inserting it in your notes. The iPhone and Android versions are also simplified versions and give some features a miss. They allow you to scroll through notes easily and take quick notes on the go.

Out of all the different devices, Evernote also seems to look and work the best on Windows. It is easier to organise your notes on Windows as existing notebooks are displayed vertically. This task becomes a little tricky while using an iPad or Mac. If you use the Android or the iPhone version, Evernote displays notes in rectangular boxes with the note title and image displayed on it. While using the web version, you need to click the Notebook icon to see the list of existing notebooks. You can then click on a notebook to see the notes in it.

OneNote vs Evernote: Using third-party apps

When it comes to using third party apps to import content, both OneNote and Evernote work well. Applications such as Onetastic, Genius Scan, IFTTT and Zapier help you to easily bring information on to OneNote, where you can edit and organize it according to your needs. In case you want to export your notes to other apps, OneNote allows you to do so easily with Ms office products, specially Ms Word. You can also export your notes to a spreadsheet or a PDF documents.

Evernote is very versatile in this regard as it supports many apps across different platforms over different devices. For example, if you need to convert recorded audio notes into text on Evernote, you can use the Dragon Anywhere app with it. Evernote also supports other useful apps like TaskClone and Cloudmagic. But, if you export your notes to other apps, Evernote doesn’t provide you with as many options as OneNote does.

OneNote vs Evernote: Pricing

The notes that you create using OneNote are synced with all the devices and the Web using Ms OneDrive. When you purchase an on-premise version of Ms Office, you get 5GB of storage on OneDrive. Whereas, if you subscribe to Ms Office 365, depending on the version you select, you get 1TB to 5TB of storage space. Here are the different prices for OneDrive and Office 365 subscriptions.

OneDrive for Business Plan 1	OneDrive for Business Plan 2	Office 365 Business Premium
$5.00 user/month	$10.00 user/month	$12.50 user/month
1 TB of OneDrive storage per user Create and edit Word, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Excel documents from a browser with Office Online	Unlimited OneDrive storage Enables real-time co-authoring in desktop apps like Word and PowerPoint, etc.	Includes email, Office applications, and services like OneDrive Includes all OneDrive for Business Plan 1 benefits and more

The free version of Evernote provides you with limited storage space of 60 MB every month and doesn’t include all its features. Advanced features that help you convert your notes to presentations, search for content in inserted attachments and PDF files in notes, etc are available in the Premium and Evernote Business versions. You can checkout the pricing for these versions here.

Free	Premium	Evernote Business
Free	$69.99 per year	$120 per user per year
Upload 60MB of new notes a month with limited features	Upload 10GB of new notes per month	Upload 20GB per user + Shared 2GB per user

Conclusion

Deciding on whether to use OneNote or Evernote while taking notes thus depends on which features are you looking for. While OneNote is very handy to use to jot down notes from scratch, Evernote comes across as a better choice when you need to grab content from a website and analyse and organize it.

Users who prefer to keep their notes clearly organised in different sections rather than in a linear format would find OneNote more helpful over Evernote.

As far as pricing is concerned, you may want to go with the Windows version of OneNote that comes bundled with Ms Office, rather than spend on Evernote that provides you the entire range of features only in its paid versions.

In case you work on different projects like writing minutes of meetings, blogs, books, research, etc, where your needs keep changing, it is handy to keep both with you and take advantage of both worlds.