I’d been a OneNote user since it was first released in 2010, using the application in conjunction with a tablet PC to take handwritten notes, share notes with colleagues, and quickly retrieve past notes. Microsoft has also integrated current versions of the software into its cloud storage, offering OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive).

Evernote was also licensed on a “freemium” basis, allowing users to start using the application for free and paying for a subscription to access premium features or additional storage.Īfter a long silence, Microsoft has fired back at Evernote, launching mobile clients on the iOS platform, and most recently releasing a full-featured Mac OS desktop client and now making the product free of charge. Evernote soon supported most desktop and mobile operating systems and offered relatively seamless synchronization between all of them. Into this gaping hole in the market came Evernote, designed from the ground up as a multiplatform, cloud-based note-taking application that quickly exploited the growing prevalence of mobile devices. As tablet computing experienced a huge resurgence due to the iPad, Microsoft stubbornly limited OneNote to the Windows platform, which was missing a compelling tablet offering at the time. Despite a conceptually sound product and some novel and compelling features, the application was rarely promoted and updated by Microsoft and languished after its introduction. For reasons I’ve never been able to uncover, OneNote became the poor stepchild of the Office suite. However, note taking on digital devices has remained a somewhat clunky affair, made difficult due to everything from a sub-optimal interface to difficulty sharing and organizing notes.Ī decade ago, Microsoft attempted to solve this problem with OneNote, a note-taking application that let users capture free form and handwritten text and promised more natural use than a word processor for taking notes. One of the original applications for computers was creating and manipulating documents, and once computers became portable, replacing the paper notebook seemed like an obvious application for technology. Which is better? Evernote or Microsoft's OneNote? This review compares and contrasts both note-taking applications in the first of a two-part series.

Onenote and evernote