Evernote vs OneNote: Which Note App Should You Pick?

How they differ in practice

The table above lists features. The difference you feel day to day is simpler: Evernote is a filing cabinet with a very good search, and OneNote is a stack of paper you can write anywhere on.

In Evernote you capture something (a page, a PDF, a photo of a receipt), give it a notebook and some tags, and forget it. Later you search, and the search reads inside the attachment. The app is organized around retrieval. Its weaknesses follow from that: the free plan is a 50-note trial, the editor is a document editor, and you pay every month for the archive to stay useful.

In OneNote you open a page and put things on it. Typed text, a drawing, a pasted table, a photo of the whiteboard, all on one canvas. It is free, there is no note cap, and it works offline on the desktop. Its weaknesses also follow from the design: tags are per paragraph rather than per note, pages can get messy, and getting content out means PDF or Word with the ink flattened to pictures.

Who should pick Evernote

• You clip more than you write. Articles, papers, receipts, scans.
• You find things by searching for words you remember were inside a document.
• You use tags as your main structure and want saved searches that combine them.
• You will pay. The free plan is not a plan.

Who should pick OneNote

• You write or draw with a stylus, or you learn by sketching.
• You already have Microsoft 365 through work, school or a family plan.
• You want a free app with no note cap and real offline access.
• Your notes are pages you revisit rather than documents you search for.

The question most comparisons skip: who owns the notebook

Both apps store your notes in an account. The difference is whose. Evernote accounts are personal by default. OneNote notebooks often live in a work or school Microsoft 365 tenant, which means your access ends when the job or the enrollment does. The third and fourth examples above are the two sides of this: a student who should move notebooks out before graduation, and a project manager with six years of notes in an employer's tenant.

The habit that fixes it is dull: keep notes about your own career, health and family in an account you control, in whichever app, and export a copy on a schedule. Evernote gives you ENEX, which many apps read. OneNote gives you PDF or Word from the desktop app. Neither gives you Markdown, which matters if you ever want to move to an app built around plain text. The Evernote to Markdown and OneNote to Markdown guides cover both routes.

Moving from one to the other

Evernote to OneNote is the harder direction. There is no ENEX import in OneNote, so at 50 notes you paste, and at 5,000 you use a third-party converter and accept some loss. OneNote to Evernote is easier because Evernote ships an importer for OneNote notebooks, though ink arrives as images.

Whichever way you move, do it in three steps. Export first and keep the file. Import a single notebook and search for ten things you know are in it. Only then move the rest. Most migrations fail at the search step, not the import step.

When neither is the right answer

If you want notes that are plain text, that you can export in full at any time, and an AI that answers from your own notes rather than drafting new text, neither app is built for that. Evernote's AI features are tied to paid plans and its export is ENEX. OneNote's Copilot needs a Microsoft 365 or Copilot license and today works on the current page and your Microsoft 365 files rather than across a whole notebook.

Scribelet is one option in that category. Notes are Markdown, it imports ENEX, exports everything to Markdown, encrypts at rest with per-desk keys, and the AI chat answers from your notes with citations on the free plan. It does not have an ink canvas, so if you are Lena from the second example, OneNote remains the right call. The Notion vs OneNote comparison covers the other common fork for people who have outgrown a binder.