Note-taking is intensely personal, and no application will work for everyone, but Microsoft OneNote comes close. It offers every feature you could want, including cross-platform syncing, free-form sketching, straightforward organization tools, and voice notes. The app's web clipper works exceptionally well, too. Better yet, it offers a highly capable free version. Although its optical character recognition (OCR) tools could be better, OneNote is still the first app most people who want to take digital notes should try, and an Editors' Choice winner.
A Microsoft account is necessary to use OneNote, but not a paid one. You get almost all of OneNote's features, except a few stickers and the ability to store files locally on Windows, for free. A free account includes 5GB of OneDrive storage to share across online versions of Excel, OneDrive, Outlook (ad-supported), PowerPoint, and Word.
OneNote's free version compares favorably with the competition. Apple's Notes app gives you 5GB of free iCloud storage if you have an eligible device. Evernote, once a leading competitor, offers a free version but restricts you to just 50 notes in a single notebook. As such, it's functionally useless for long-term note-taking. OneNote has no such limitations. The free versions of Joplin, another Editors' Choice winner, and Obsidian don't support online file storage but are otherwise feature-complete. Both of those apps can store files locally and sync using third-party software.
You can get more storage for OneNote via a Microsoft 365 Basic subscription, which costs $19.99 per year (billed annually). This tier includes 100GB of storage and an ad-free version of Outlook in addition to the web Office apps. It's a great value, as is the $99.99-per-year Personal plan, which gives you desktop versions of the Office apps and 1TB of storage.
Similar Products
Paid Apple iCloud+ plans start at $0.99 per month for 50GB of storage. Premium Evernote plans start at a hefty $129.99 per year; the service doesn’t have an overall storage cap but limits each note to 200MB and monthly uploads to 10GB at this tier. For $48 per year, Obsidian can sync files between your devices (this is a direct sync process without cloud storage). A Joplin subscription starts at 28.69 euros (roughly $30) per year and gets you 2GB of online storage, less than what Microsoft offers for free.
OneNote offers desktop (macOS and Windows), mobile (Android and iOS), and web apps. The only missing platform is linux, though OneNote's web version works in a pinch. As I discuss later, OneNote's web clipper works on Chromium browsers.
Each version of OneNote works similarly—with the exception of local-only storage. Only the Windows version of OneNote can store notebooks without syncing to OneDrive. If you access OneNote on anything more than a single Windows PC, you must use OneDrive for storage.
Windows 10 included a simplified version of OneNote called OneNote for Windows 10, but Microsoft recommends that users move on from it because the app will reach end-of-life in October 2025. The standard OneNote app is available to download on Windows from the Microsoft Store or the OneNote website.
Before you start taking notes with OneNote, know that it uses paper as a metaphor. The first step is to create a new Notebook (there's no limit on how many you can add). Notebooks break down into Sections, which appear in the left-hand sidebar as colorful tabs. Each Section breaks down into Pages, which are your notes. You can organize things a little further, if you like, by using Sub-Pages. OneNote offers one of the most complete organizational structures I've encountered. Apple Notes offers multiple notebooks with no sections. Evernote and Joplin both use a system of notebook stacks that can house multiple notebooks, but they don't have sections or subsections per se.
OneNote should feel familiar if you've used any other Microsoft Office app—the Ribbon at the top of the screen offers formatting options and more, just like in Microsoft Word. Unlike Word, though, you can click anywhere on a Page to start writing. This free-form formatting can take a little getting used to, though it proves a powerful design choice once you acclimate.
Another bit of flexibility comes from tags. Tagging any line of text in OneNote adds an icon in the left margin. Default tags include an unchecked checkbox, a checked checkbox, and a question mark—you can also add custom tags. The app's search tool lets you see every tagged line in one place. You might use this feature to mark the points you want to follow up on while taking notes or as a sort of to-do list.
OneNote lets you draw over and around your text notes. This works best on a tablet with a dedicated stylus, but you can also use your mouse for passable results. The app can convert handwriting into typed text, and a virtual highlighter helps with reviewing documents.
Quick sketches are perfect for marking up documents or adding anything that's tricky to do with text, such as a graph or a math equation. OneNote's Math Assistant can interpret handwritten math equations and solve them for you, though this is available only for Enterprise and Education subscribers to Microsoft 365. Evernote and Bear also have sketching features, but they separate drawings from the rest of a note.
All the Latest Tech, Tested by Our Experts
By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
You can drag some types of attachments, including images and PDFs, to any part of a Page. This makes it possible to leave comments and context about these files above and below them. Most other files end up as attachments, which you can double-click to open in the default application on your system.
How OneNote lets you share and collaborate with others should influence how you set up your OneNote account. The Notebook > Section > Page > Sub-Page schema is of the utmost importance here. The reason is that you can share only at the Notebook level. You can share a link to a specific Section or a Page, but the person you send it to still gets access to the whole Notebook. You can always export and send recipients a PDF of a single page, but that's not ideal for collaboration. When you share a Notebook, you can choose to give someone edit or view-only access.
OneNote also supports co-authoring, which means multiple people can edit a single file simultaneously, much like in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. With co-authoring, access again pertains to a whole Notebook.
OneNote's web clipper is available as a browser extension for Edge, Chrome, and other Chromium browsers. If you use Firefox or Safari, Obsidian and Evernote are better bets for web clipping. Web clippers let you grab information from the web for future reference. OneNote's clipper can grab an entire website, a portion of a website, or just the content of an article. The article feature works particularly well. In testing, I had less trouble parsing articles with OneNote than Evernote.
The clipper also helpfully lets you preview how a clipped article will look. You can even customize the font and choose a destination Notebook. For comparison, Joplin's web clipper doesn't give you much of an idea about how a clipped article will look.
One unique feature of OneNote's web clipper is a highlighter. You can mark up a page before clipping it to help you later remember why you saved it.
The mobile version of OneNote provides most of the features of the desktop version. You can browse and create notes, edit them, and generally just use OneNote the way you expect. The user interface emphasizes drawing. You can tap a pen icon in the top-right corner to mark up any note with a highlighter, pen, or shape drawing tool. Drawing is particularly compelling with a stylus but works well enough with a finger.
Start typing, and a toolbar pops up above the keyboard with all the standard formatting options. You also get buttons for quickly adding a photo or a voice note. The voice note feature is neat; if you record audio while taking notes, OneNote can later sync them up so that you can easily review your notes and hear the related audio at the same time.
Notes sync to your device, meaning you can view and edit them when you are offline. You can disable syncing attachments if you want to save space on your device. The mobile app can also sync with the Windows Sticky Notes app, which could come in handy for quicker notes.
OneNote automatically scans all images and PDFs using OCR technology. You can copy text from an image if you want—just right-click on an image and click "Copy text from image." You can even copy the entire text from a multipage PDF. In testing, the feature wasn't flawless, but it did generate a block of text from a recipe that was easy enough to clean up manually.
Searching for words that appear in images, PDFs, and handwritten notes—a common use case for OCR—isn't very seamless in OneNote. It's possible to make the text in static images searchable, but you have to enable it first, and the option to do so isn't in every version of OneNote. If you need to be able to assuredly search the text of PDFs and images, your best bet may be to subscribe to Evernote, expensive as it is, which handles this function impressively.
OneNote doesn't have a geotagging feature. With the right settings, Evernote and Joplin can automatically create a tag of where you were in the world when you made the note, which can be handy for organization.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft OneNote
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
OneNote is arguably older than the note-taking app category itself, but it hasn't remained stagnant. Microsoft continually adds new capabilities and keeps the user interface fresh. Among its top features are a clear hierarchical structure, extremely flexible pages, and an easy-to-use web clipper. The free version also gives you access to the vast majority of the app's features. We would like to see geotagging functionality, but OneNote is nonetheless an Editors' Choice for note-taking apps and the best bet for most people. If you want to store notebooks locally or sync them to something other than OneDrive, we recommend Joplin, another Editors' Choice winner.
STILL ON THE FENCE?
About Justin Pot
Contributor
