I’ve been evaluating note taking apps, both for personal and work needs and since Evernote and OneNote are the most popular ones, I focused on them. I’ve experienced Evernote for a total of 5 years and OneNote for about a year. My main unhappy conclusion from this experience is that both of them could be a lot better.

I’d like to make a list of what didn’t work for me with each of these apps and let you make an educated decision on which app is better for you.

Note: I am using the note applications mainly on desktop Windows and when I am mobile, on Android, which is what my comments refer to.

Evernote

Evernote has been with us since 2008 on, almost, every platform, and it is the most popular note-taking service.

Formatting and editing

The editing experience in Evernote feels wrong, clunky and plenty of times it just doesn’t do what you expect. There are no headers or styles of any kind — the main formatting options are fonts and sizes but I found them to be more trouble than they’re worth.

Formatting text in Evernote like it is 1997

Since anything beyond the most basic bold/italic/underline would put my notes into a world of pain, I eventually gave up and just kept to the basics.

Meanwhile in OneNote: Formatting and general text input is like a breeze of fresh air. Everything is natural and works as expected, in a way, it is even better than the formatting experience in Microsoft Word.

Bullets

Bullets are broken which is especially painful for me in a note-taking app. I had bullets that wouldn’t disappear, bullets that inserted a blank-space underneath that wouldn’t go away and if I tried to copy/paste a bullet, then all hell would break loose. I still use them, but I do it very carefully and constantly afraid to stumble on yet another bullet bug.

Additionally, there is no option to collapse bullets, so if you do have a lot of them, getting an outline view is going to be difficult.

Meanwhile in OneNote: The bullets are excellent and even collapsible (by mouse or keyboard).

Note-linking

Linking notes together in Evernote is possible, however, it is again implemented rather poorly. To link a new note, it first has to be created, synced (5–10 seconds) and its link copied. That is not a process that inspires you to create link between notes.

I would love a true, wiki-like link creation: Typing [[New content]] would create a page titled “New content” and then make a link to it.

Meanwhile in OneNote: Linking works as you would expect, including wiki-like linking.

Lack of focus and lack of improvements

Evernote sometimes feels like an abandoned project. The forums are old and unsuitable for consumer-relation. Year-long threads remain unanswered or with an answer hidden somewhere in page 4 (out of 7) which makes you wonder about the state of the product.

Formatting doesn’t work? Why not buy some socks!

Meanwhile, the only visible updates on the site are mostly questionable partnerships that have very little effect on my usage of Evernote. You can buy Post-It notes, commuter bags and even socks. The relevance of it all to the project eludes me.

The actual product updates seem unconnected to what the users actually request or want. I’d expected to see improvement in the core business — sync improvements, main client enhancements and fixes. Instead, they seem to be busy with over-the-top products like “Evernote Hello” or “Evernote Food” which bring very little value to their main project users.

Meanwhile in OneNote: UserVoice (and similar modern software) is a much better choice for user communication — one can actually see what the users want and the official reply to these requests. Other than that, OneNote does seem much more focused and updated, especially in the recent 2 years.

No client plugins

Evernote has a great API that lets you manipulate notes in various ways. However, if you actually want to improve the Windows client in some way, you’re out of luck. It is a real shame, because a lot of the issues I’ve described could’ve been solved by the community, especially if Evernote’s client was cross-platform.

Meanwhile in OneNote: For the longest time, there was no API to OneNote, however, that was fixed during the last year. Besides that, the client, while not cross-platform, does allow developers to expand the client. The amount of plugin choice isn’t amazing, but at least it exists.

Sync could be better

Compared to the immediate-nature sync of most web apps today, Evernote feels old. While Google docs sync every character you write immediately, Evernote would sync at the maximum rate of “every 5 minutes”.

Hardly useful for a shared document editing.

Meanwhile in OneNote: Better in some ways, worse in others. I’ve elaborated on that later on.

OneNote

OneNote, for the longest time, was strictly desktop Windows application. During the last years, however, it went through major metamorphosis, adding web client, mobile applications and cloud APIs.

Even though it has improved greatly during the last years, I still have quite a few issues with it.

Poor search results interface

How do I sort the results?!

There are two different “Search results” windows in OneNote.

The “Quick” search result provides immediate access to results. However, the results can’t be sorted, which can be quite daunting with a lot of results.

How do I change the search string?!

You do have an option do “Pin” the results, which causes them to expand into much nicer interface, one you can sort and even group the results in a nice way. In this mode, however, you can no longer change your search string.

This leads to quite a frustrating experience in which I constantly had to jump between these UIs to find what I needed.

Meanwhile in Evernote: The single search UI that exists in Evernote is much more to my taste. It is sortable and even shows various additional metadata on the results.

Unreliable search results

There is a general unreliability feeling of search I got with OneNote and I was never sure whether the results I am getting really do have all my notes. One time it was a note I just wrote, that perhaps wasn’t indexed just yet, another time it was a note I wrote a long time ago that I just couldn’t find.

You can see a manifestation of the search issues in the pictures above — note how the “Quick” result window only returns 2 results while the bigger, pinned view, returns all the 3 results — “Disk load 100%” note doesn’t appear in the quick result for reasons unknown (it didn’t appear later on as well).

Meanwhile in Evernote: After using Evernote for 5 years, I never encountered any issues with the search — it was always quick and exact for me.

No advanced search syntax

The search query you can input is very limited, you can’t filter your queries by metadata, tags or create any search with boolean logic. If you have a lot of notes or you’d like to rely heavily on tags, finding them would be complicated.

Meanwhile in Evernote: The query syntax is as powerful as you want it to be.

OneNote Android — No background sync

OneNote sync in android is a weird one — it only syncs once you open a note. It is especially harmful with search since without a complete sync you may easily miss the notes you made at work.

Meanwhile in Evernote: The Android client happily syncs in the background, most of the time. It did get stuck for me now and then and required me to start a manual sync, but most of the time it works fine.

Unable to protect pages/text

It is only possible to protect whole sections. If you have a single page you’d like to protect, or even just a single password in a note — you are out of luck.

Meanwhile in Evernote: Select text and press “Encrypt” — much better.

Inconsistent clients

The fact that OneNote was originally for Windows shows too well — the rest of platforms either didn’t catch up or were simply developed differently. Some features work only on Windows, some on Mac and some on mobile. Password protection, for example, doesn’t work on Android clients, multiple windows on desktop can only be opened on Windows but not on the Mac, etc., etc.

Meanwhile in Evernote: While the client itself isn’t cross-platform, the focus on maintaining compatibility is strongly felt and most features work exactly the same on all the platforms.

TL;DR version

Evernote is a great tool for storing notes. Lots of notes. Don’t expect to write too much in them because the lack of proper editing will force you to make it short. Luckily, you will be able to search and filter your notes later on blazingly fast.

OneNote document editing is a breeze, you can create tables, headers, collapsible bullets and a lot more. It is truly an enjoyable writing experience. The search of your beautiful notes, however, is lacking, annoying and untrustworthy. If you do use OneNote, you’d better be organizing your notes in a consistent way.

Personally, after spending the last half a year with OneNote, I am going back to use Evernote again. I enjoyed OneNote editing experience greatly, but I value the ability to find my data a lot more. I’ll be happy to revise my points in the future, as soon as some of these are taken care of.

Please go ahead and comment your additions, corrections and disagreements.