Evernote OneNote Comparison

Onenote Evernote One of the great debates of our time is not Sammy vs. David in Van Halen or Ozzy vs. Dio in Black Sabbath. It is Evernote vs. OneNote. There are fans on both sides of the debate, and both are sure they have the best solution.

I personally don’t believe in “best” applications. I think that different applications can serve different purposes for different people, and what might work well for me might not work well for you.

As you can probably tell by a Google search, I am a heavy Evernote user, but this comparison with OneNote has always fascinated me.

I came across this rundown by Lifehacker which compares the two as note-taking apps.

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 as a web clipper, Optical Character Recognition (or OCR, which interprets images or scanned information as text), instant syncing of notes to all your devices, and integration with third-party services

Focusing specifically on the web apps of each service, Arafat over at Ergonotes does a side-by-side comparison of the two applications.

Recently I’ve tried Evernote & OneNote web version and made a comparison table for you. Hope it will give you more understanding regarding these two products and help you make a right choice.

How about you? Are you an Evernote or a OneNote person? If you use both, I’d love to hear about that too.





About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 4 comments

David - February 7, 2015 Reply

I use both. OneNote at work and Evernote for personal. They are the same but very different.

I am not a power user of either and love the simplicity of Evernote an how easy the browser version (no separate program to open and web clipping is a browser extension and not a separate app) is to use and love the iPhone app. I use the free version of Evernote.

In typical Microsoft fashion, OneNote has tons of features making it very powerful but also more complicated. Syncing with Office 365 and Sharepoint is nice.

FWIW, David and Ozzy

Elizabeth Adams - December 22, 2014 Reply

Hi, Brooks… Just A Note To Say…

This article helped me decide which program would be best for me, so thank you for putting it together.

I especially appreciate the link to Arafat’s side-by-side comparison of OneNote and EverNote. http://ergonotes.com/evernote-vs-onenote/

It reminded me that I’m probably best advised to go with what I already know and have (Office 2013) rather than to try and tackle an unknown program with my barely-adequate techie skills.

Merry Christmas!

Elizabeth

🙂

will - November 26, 2014 Reply

OneNote came before Evernote; accordingly, some firms established OneNote as the collaborative tool and will never change. They paid good money for Onenote and by gosh and by golly they are going to use it.

I do not know much about “Evernote business” its collaborative ability…although evernote is pushing it vigorously.

Still, evernote is free and “you own your notes” which is/may not be totally true with Onenote.

j-lon - November 20, 2014 Reply

In my experience, the OneNote Web Clipper is much faster than Evernote’s. Not sure if it’s as powerful though. Suspect the OneNote desktop client is also more powerful, although perhaps not quite as approachable right out of the shoot. The free-formness off OneNote took a little getting used to for me. Evernote definitely looks a bit better out of the box.

But can you record a lecture in Evernote and then have any notes you take timestamped to the audio as you take them? It’s that sort of stuff in OneNote that is really cool. The Onetastic add-on bringing some cool stuff to the fore as well.

Another worthwhile thing to do in the desktop client is to add the forward and back buttons to the ribbon. This make it much easier to navigate amongst a bunch of different notes or note books, by giving you a web-browser sort of experience.

Great that there’s finally a Mac version of the client too (at least for people with newer versions of OSX). It’s really cool that MS is embracing cross-platform parity with Office 365. Finally, they are focusing on the one thing they make that most people can’t live without, their office products.