Evernote vs OneNote: Which is best?

Sharing and collaboration

Evernote You can share notebooks via email or a URL link. A single note can be shared via email or URL link and also can be shared to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Only Premium users can allow others to modify notes.

With Evernote Business, notes and notebooks can be shared among co-workers within your group or business. You can also select appropriate permissions as to what they can see or edit.

OneNote Notebooks can be shared with others via email or by sending URL links to others (handy for Skype or IMs). Links can be disabled if necessary for security reasons. These can be accessed either via OneDrive or OneDrive Pro or a business's SharePoint site.

Another way of sharing is the "Share with Meeting" feature. This links to Outlook 2013 to let users create share notebooks for use by invited participants of a scheduled meeting. Meeting times and location details are pulled into the notes as well as a checklist of attendees. Edits can be made by anyone in the meeting in real-time.

Business features

Evernote The business version of Evernote allows administrators to set up users, either manually or by using a third-party app such as onelogin to connect to an LDAP or AD store. Administrators can invite new users and manage existing users, as well as view and manage all the Business Notebooks from one place. Personal content remains private to individual users.

OneNote - Business already using Active Directory, SharePoint of SkyDrive Pro will find OneNote integrates easily into existing systems to control who can access which notebooks as well as who can create, edit or delete notes. Administrators can also allow users to create and manage individual notes.

Pricing

Evernote - It's free to use for up to 60MB of data per month. With the Premium upgrade of 4 per month or 35 per year, users get 1GB of a monthly upload capacity and an increased maximum note size of 100MB.

Evernote for Business costs 8 per user per month and data upload caps rise to 4GB per month. There are also a host of admin tools thrown in and additional functionality is unlocked. Premium users can take notebooks offline, allows others to edit notebooks and protect the Evernote app with a PIN.

OneNote Microsoft offers free Android, iOS, Windows Phone Mac and Windows applications. It stores its data on OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), so users have 7GB of free storage (which has to be shared with anything stored on the cloud storage service).

When purchased as part of Office 365 this storage is increased by another 20GB. For business version of Office 365 (Small Business and Midsize) this increases to 25GB and is priced at 8.40 per user for up to 25 users. When you subscribe features such as audio and video recording and the ability to insert spreadsheets are unlocked on the Windows desktop program.

Overall

Evernote is better all-round note-taking application but to get the best out of it you'll need the premium version. Businesses may be reluctant to pay 8 per month just for this service when Microsoft is offering access to the entire Office suite with a 365 subscription.

OneNote is the more likely to be used in enterprises where Microsoft products are entrenched. But if not tied to legacy products Evernote is well worth a try.

Rene Millman

Rene Millman is a freelance writer and broadcaster who covers cybersecurity, AI, IoT, and the cloud. He also works as a contributing analyst at GigaOm and has previously worked as an analyst for Gartner covering the infrastructure market. He has made numerous television appearances to give his views and expertise on technology trends and companies that affect and shape our lives. You can follow Rene Millman on Twitter.