Evernote vs. OneNote Which is best? [2025]

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:

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.
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
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:

Include several note formats—text, images, audio, drawings, files, and more
Have a file storage hierarchy, allowing you to store documents in folders
Allow you to add tags to notes and use those tags to locate them
Enable collaboration with other teammates
Allow you to seamlessly sync your data across multiple devices
Allow you to clip content from the web
Integrate well with other apps, including Zapier
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).

Screenshot showing how when using OneNote, wherever you click on the interface, your cursor creates a text box for your note

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).

Screenshot of the author finding the tagging feature in OneNote by clicking a tiny arrow on the app's home tab

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.

Screenshot showing how Evernote's user experience makes note-taking and organization feel natural and comfortable

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.

Screenshot of Evernote's interface for setting task due dates (available with the Personal plan)

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).

Screenshot showing Evernote's ability to interact with text—highlighting it, copying it, and navigating to all links that were on the page

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.

A screenshot showing how when tested Evernote was able to identify the word

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.