OneNote is Microsoft's answer to Evernote and other note-taking software. It's available for iOS and OS X (along with Android and Windows Phone), but I'm going to focus my attention on the Mac version. Is it a viable alternative to Evernote? Let's take a look.

OneNote requires you to use a (free) Microsoft account to create and maintain your notes. The notes are stored online, which makes synchronization and collaboration easy, as long as you (and anyone else you're working with) are connected. The notebooks themselves are stored on your OneDrive account — both good and bad, depending on how much you need to work offline.

OneNote is free to download and use, provided you have a Microsoft account. You get a free 15 GB repository on your Microsoft OneDrive to hold your OneNote contents (this is up from 7 GB when OneNote debuted for the Mac in 2014). You can buy more storage either a la carte as a monthly fee or by subscribing to Office 365, which includes 1 terabyte of OneDrive storage (and nets you the latest copies of Microsoft Office for Mac, still the now-ancient 2011 version as of this writing). For $9.99 a month, Office 365 for Home isn't a bad deal, especially considering you can install the complete suite of Office apps on up to five computers (Macs or Windows PCs). Get an iPhone SE with Mint Mobile service for $30/mo OneNote's interface is modern and clean, evocative of the Metro user interface that Microsoft has employed in Windows 8 and newer applications. Microsoft's a very active iOS app developer, and OneNote for Mac follows many of the user interface conventions employed in its iOS counterpart. That creates a consistent look and feel that, while not entirely native to OS X Yosemite, isn't too far off the mark either.