One Note is your one stop shop for note taking!
Updated October 22, 2019

One Note is your one stop shop for note taking!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with OneNote

OneNote is being used on an individual basis throughout the organization. Because it is now freely available, many users use it as their preferred note-taking platform for jotting down notes, action items, and capturing other content for later consumption. OneNote enjoys integration with the Microsoft Office suite of tools and as a result, users enjoy integration with OneDrive for Cloud syncing and other benefits.
  • OneNote handles cloud sync across multiple devices extremely well. It syncs my notes between my Home computer, my work computer, my iPad, and my iPhone all without issue.
  • OneNote's system for organizing notes is very hierarchical which is beneficial if you think that way. Personally, I find it easy to organize my notes by Notebook, Section, and the headings for each entry, enabling a simple yet very well organized note taking system.
  • OneNote is also good at capturing multiple sources of input - drawings, web clippings, graphics, and others. This enables you to enrich your notes with any and all relevant content, without necessarily needing to remember where it came from.
  • OneNote could improve on its web clipping features. Evernote still beats it in terms of robustness, but OneNote is sufficient for most purposes.
  • OneNote could also improve on its tagging system. Its the other major way of categorizing notes, which Evernote uses to great effect, but OneNote de-emphasizes this in favor of a hierarchical ordering.
  • This is a silly point, but it drives me mad. OneNote's free-form editing on pages, meaning you can click anywhere and start editing makes for sloppier notes that aren't as well aligned. This could be an enjoyable feature for some, but for me, I like my pages orderly.
  • OneNote has become our organizational standard method of taking electronic notes (though some still prefer pen and paper.) It has been a zero cost outlay due to its freely available nature.
  • Its integration with other Microsoft Office products makes it easy to share notes and content between products, allowing for easy collaboration where needed.
  • OneNote's integration with OneDrive ensures that individual's notes are always safe and secure, taking away the tedious responsibility of backup from the user, and makes it happen seamlessly in the background.
The only real product that I can directly hold in juxtaposition to OneNote is Evernote. OneNote ultimately wins that battle because of its zero cost. It compares like for like in most other ways to Evernote, with the exception of its organizational system. If you intend to organize items into more than 10 topics of interest, Evernote may be better suited to your needs, as it's tagging system is more robust for larger categories of organization. If, however, like most users, you're limiting your categorization into 10 or fewer categories, OneNote is excellent, and it excels at helping you find information that falls into a smaller number of buckets than Evernote.

Both applications have excellent mobile apps that will handle document scanning, pictures, and the like for you, so it's largely the same there. Overall, I'll continue to use OneNote because it is free.
OneNote is extremely well suited if you have Notes that generally fall into less than, say, 10 categories. That makes it easy to set up 10 different notebooks, or 10 different sections within a single notebook for those topics. Any more than that, and the hierarchical model starts to break down, and that's where tag-based organization becomes stronger. However, if you have a small number of categories, I prefer the hierarchical way that OneNote organizes, making it generally pretty easy to find the content you were looking for.

OneNote Feature Ratings