Evernote or OneNote?

Electronic notebooks are becoming more popular as people learn more about them and how they can be used effectively. I have used Microsoft’s product called OneNote at my previous work and found it to be moderately useful. Looking forward, I believe this type of product will be very useful for my current education program and possibly even more useful once I’m teaching.

Electronic notebooks allow for some really interesting ways to take advantage of medium. All sorts of documents, photos, emails, and other kinds of data and files are held in one central file or database, based on a general topic. Secondly, the notebook can be searched for keywords to help quickly find relevent notes. Thirdly, the notes can be tagged, which helps eliminate the need for hierarchical folder or file structures.

As far as I can tell, there are two main players for electronic notebooks for the PC. There is Microsoft OneNote and Evernote. They both have some strong pros and cons. OneNote is nice because it allows for some sub-sections to be created in a notebook if desired; its search engine is very well integrated; it can usually be purchased inexpensively by itself or as part of MS Office Student Edition. On the con side of things, OneNote’s tagging capabilities are horrible and essentially useless. Evernote has a few very good features that set it apart. First, all of the user’s notebooks are stored both locally and online, and they are kept synced. This helps with sharing files with multiple computers and working while traveling. Another great feature is full tagging capability. On the downside, Evernote requires a $5/month cost (or $45/year) for its full functionality and its search capabilities are really poor: Evernote cannot parse word documents, although pdf files are supposed to work ok.

One example of how might use Evernote would be for searching math topics. I may insert notes, quotes, emails, documents and websites that pertain to math education. Each one of these notes would be tagged with the word “math.” A year later I may be looking for info on math subjects, and I can quickly search my notebook for notes with the math tag. This kind of use would certainly be an improvement of flipping through a couple hundred pages of notes kept in an actual paper notebook. The same thing would be done using OneNote except that a search would not be done using tags. Instead, I would rely on OneNote’s comprehensive search engine.

When choosing between these two products, there are two issues I need to decide upon. First, I think Evernote’s tag functionality is more useful than OneNote’s keyword searching. In my example above, OneNote would return a hit for every note that has the word “math” in it. However, it’s possible that many of those notes, while containing the work “math”, do not actually have much relevancy on that topic. Evernote’s tags would ensure that hits will only be returned on notes identified as being significant for math (ie I would purposely tag the note with the word “tag”). The second big issue that I’m dealing with is that I already own a copy of OneNote. If I want to continue with Evernote, I need to pay $45 every year.

Here is another person’s look at the OneNote vs Evernote debate, and here is another one.