Microsoft OneNote vs Evernote: Free with Office or $249 (2026)
OneNote wins on price and it is not close. The app is free with generous functionality and no note limit, while Evernote's 2026 tiers run to $249.99 a year with free cut to roughly 50 notes in one notebook. Evernote earns its money in two places: OCR that finds text inside scans, and a web clipper still better than anyone else's. If your archive is mostly typed and handwritten notes you make yourself, take the free one. If it is mostly captured material you search later, Evernote's bill buys something real.
Quick verdict
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You take lecture or meeting notes with a stylus and paste diagrams around them
Pick OneNote
The freeform canvas with ink anywhere on the page has no Evernote equivalent.
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Your archive is thousands of scanned documents you search by their contents
Pick Evernote
OCR and document search are the capability you are actually paying for.
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Your notes are prose on a Mac and you want them as files that link to each other
Pick Valutorio
Neither .one sections nor ENML give you markdown files, backlinks, or a graph.
| Microsoft OneNote | Evernote | Valutorio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Web | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Web | macOS 14+ |
| Engine | native | Electron | native Swift + Rust |
| Data format | proprietary .one sections stored in OneDrive | proprietary cloud notes (ENML); export to ENEX/HTML | plain markdown folder |
| Pricing | free; advanced/AI features via Microsoft 365 (~$5-15/user/mo, 2026 price increases announced) | Free (limited to ~50 notes / 1 notebook); Starter ~$99/yr; Advanced ~$249.99/yr (2026 tiers) | paid app, Mac App Store (pricing at launch) |
| Sync | OneDrive cloud sync (required on Mac/mobile) | cloud-native, included in paid plans; free tier device-limited | Valutorio Sync (subscription): automatic, encrypted, conflict-free; personal MCP endpoint for AI assistants included |
| Offline | yes | yes | yes |
| Wikilinks | yes | no | yes |
| Backlinks | no | no | yes |
| Graph view | no | no | yes |
| Open source | no | no | no |
Competitor rows come from public vendor documentation and pricing pages, checked August 2026. Valutorio rows describe the shipping macOS app.
The price gap is the headline
OneNote is free, with no note limit and no notebook limit, which is unusual enough in 2026 that it deserves saying plainly. Advanced and AI features come through a Microsoft 365 subscription at roughly $5 to $15 per user per month, with 2026 increases to that packaging already announced. Basic note-taking requires paying nothing at all, and a very large share of OneNote's users already have Microsoft 365 through work or school.
Evernote under Bending Spoons charges about $99 a year for Starter and $249.99 for Advanced, with the free plan restricted to around 50 notes in a single notebook. That restriction caused a large public backlash, and the layoffs following the acquisition eroded trust separately from the pricing.
Ten years of Evernote Starter is close to a thousand dollars. Ten years of OneNote is nothing, or nothing extra if your employer already pays for Microsoft 365.
Winner OneNote Free with no note cap against $99-249.99 a year with note 51 behind a paywall.
A canvas or a filing cabinet
OneNote's page has no document flow. Text boxes go where you click, ink goes over the top, a screenshot lands beside a table, and nothing reflows to accommodate anything. For lecture notes, marked-up diagrams, and anything involving a stylus, that model is better than a linear document and the gap is wide. Handwriting and mixed media are first-class rather than attachments.
Evernote's page is a document. You type, you paste, you attach files. What Evernote does far better is the arrival of material from outside: the web clipper captures a page properly, and OCR then makes the text inside images and scans findable. Those two features are why people who dislike Evernote's pricing still keep the subscription.
So the split is capture against composition. Evernote is the better inbox. OneNote is the better page to think on.
Winner either OneNote wins the page you write on, Evernote wins everything arriving from a browser or camera.
Sync, and the conflicts each one produces
OneNote syncs through OneDrive, which is required on Mac and mobile. This is OneNote's oldest and best-documented wound: concurrent edits produce sync conflicts, and user reports include losing content. The merge happens inside Microsoft's service against a format you cannot inspect, so recovery depends on whatever version history OneDrive kept.
Evernote's sync is included in paid plans and device-limited on the free tier. Its documented weakness is persistent sync performance complaints stretching across two ownership eras, which is slowness rather than loss. Slow is annoying. Losing a page you wrote is worse.
Neither app gives you a log you can read or a merge you control. Both of them make the reconciliation decision on a server, in a format that is theirs.
Winner Evernote Slow sync beats conflicting sync, and OneNote's conflict complaints include data loss.
Two proprietary formats and two bad exits
OneNote stores content as .one sections in OneDrive, with no markdown support anywhere in the product. Getting out means exporting to PDF or copying pages into another app by hand, and both routes lose the arrangement that made the canvas worth using. Third-party converters work against the OneNote API or an .onepkg file, and ink and freely placed text boxes have nowhere sensible to go in a linear document.
Evernote keeps ENML in its cloud and hands you ENEX or HTML on the way out. ENEX at least travels: Joplin's importer reads it well, and most destination apps have some story for it. Neither format is markdown, so both moves are conversion projects with a cleanup phase, and both get larger every year you postpone them.
The important asymmetry is that Evernote's export produces one file per note that other software actively supports. OneNote's produces PDFs, which are an ending rather than a migration.
Winner Evernote ENEX is a format other apps import; a folder of exported PDFs is a dead end.
Where each one runs, and how well
OneNote covers Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and the web, and is deeply tied into Microsoft 365 and Teams. The documented catch is that the Mac version is the weaker sibling of the Windows one, which matters a lot if the Mac is your main machine. Its notebook, section, and page hierarchy also scales poorly once you are past a course notebook and into a real knowledge base, and there are no backlinks and no graph to help you navigate it.
Evernote covers the same five platforms with mature apps on each after many years of work. Its organisation is notebooks, tags, and search, with no wikilinks, no backlinks, and no graph either. Both of these apps are filing systems, and neither will ever show you which notes point at the one you are reading.
Winner either Same five platforms; OneNote is stronger on Windows and weaker on the Mac.
A third option
The option both sides overlook
These two are the reason a whole generation distrusts note apps. One keeps your work as .one blobs in OneDrive, the other as ENML in a cloud whose prices tripled. Both organise by container and neither can tell you which of your notes reference the one on screen. Valutorio takes the opposite bet: the vault is a folder of markdown files, one per note, that Spotlight and any editor read the same way the app does. Two brackets and a name resolve in under 0.5 ms, the backlinks pane brings the sentence each mention sat in, and the graph filters. Sync between Macs is an optional subscription, and its merge happens in files you can open: a three-way merge first, then keep-both blocks written into the markdown, which is the specific thing OneNote's opaque conflict handling never gave you.
It is macOS 14 or later only, with no ink, no OCR, no clipper, and no Microsoft integration. For handwritten or scanned archives, stay where you are.
What each one costs
OneNote is free with no note limit, and the Microsoft 365 subscription that adds advanced and AI features runs roughly $5 to $15 per user per month with 2026 increases announced. Evernote is about $99 a year for Starter and $249.99 for Advanced, with free restricted to around 50 notes in one notebook. Over five years that is up to $1,250 on Evernote against zero on OneNote, or around $300 to $900 if you were buying Microsoft 365 anyway for Word and Excel. Valutorio costs a Mac App Store purchase, plus an optional subscription if you want it syncing between Macs. On money OneNote wins this page outright.
Who should choose which
Choose Microsoft OneNote if
- Handwriting, ink, or a freeform page layout is central to how you take notes.
- You already pay for Microsoft 365 and share notebooks through Teams.
- You want zero cost with no note limit and no notebook limit.
Choose Evernote if
- OCR inside scanned documents and photos is why you keep an archive at all.
- Saving pages out of a browser is the habit your notes are built around.
- You want a polished Mac app rather than the weaker half of a Windows product.
Choose Valutorio if
- Your notes are text and you want them as markdown files rather than .one or ENML.
- You want a merge you can inspect in a text file instead of a server deciding your conflicts.
- Backlinks and a graph matter to you, and neither of these apps has them.
Questions people ask
Should I move from Evernote to OneNote in 2026?
On price, obviously yes, since OneNote is free with no note limit. Check two things first. Microsoft has a OneNote importer for Evernote, and the results vary with note complexity. More importantly, your OCR searchability does not survive the move, so if you rely on finding words inside scans, budget for losing that.
Which one is better for handwritten notes?
OneNote, clearly. Its freeform canvas takes ink anywhere on the page, mixes handwriting with typed text and images, and that has been its strongest feature for years. Evernote handles attachments and photographs, and it has no drawing layer to compete with.
Does OneNote support markdown?
No. Content is stored as .one sections in OneDrive with no markdown support in the app, so your notes are not plain text files on disk. Export routes to PDF, and third-party converters go through the OneNote API or an .onepkg file with imperfect results. If markdown is a requirement, neither app on this page is your answer.
Why does OneNote sometimes lose my edits?
The long-standing documented complaint is sync conflicts when two devices edit the same page at once, with some reports including data loss. The reconciliation happens server-side in a format you cannot open, so recovery depends on OneDrive's version history rather than anything you control. Plain-file apps handle this differently, because a merge that goes wrong leaves you a text file you can read and fix.
Is Evernote's free plan usable at all?
Barely, and that is deliberate. It is limited to roughly 50 notes in a single notebook, which makes it a trial rather than a tier, and the change produced a significant backlash when it landed. OneNote's free version has no such cap, which is the practical reason most people comparing these two in 2026 end up on OneNote.
Related comparisons
This comparison is published by the Valutorio team. Competitor details verified August 2026 from public sources; corrections welcome. All comparisons · What Valutorio is