EverNote vs. OneNote
UPDATE July 2008: Since writing this post in October 2007, some important things have changed on the EverNote side. I’m currently evaluating the EverNote 3 beta and will let you know how things turn out. The original post is below…
Okay, let’s have it out! What tool is best for capturing and organizing notes? For a long time I used nothing but Notepad, plus some hand-crafted AutoHotkey scripts. As I got further into my GTD implementation, I wanted something that fit that methodology better and also integrated well with Microsoft Outlook. By the way, this post probably reeks of Procrastivity, but let’s indulge for a bit.
I canvassed the field multiple multiple times. I installed and uninstalled many a tool on my poor tired laptop, probably making a mess of my registry. There were two tools that I kept coming back to: EverNote and OneNote. Eventually those were the only tools left. For several months I used both tools simultaneously, going back and forth between the two trying to find that one reason that would tip the scales. That one reason never came. Both tools had some great features, and each tool also had several painful shortcomings. To help force the decision, I did what any self-respecting anal-retentive manager would do: I made a list!
The list below represents those features that were important to me for my system along with Low/Medium/High priorities. Where there were major shortcomings, I tried my best to find a work-around as if I had already decided to select that tool and make it work.
|
Feature |
Pri |
EverNote 2.1 |
OneNote 2007 |
| Text Recognition |
H |
Yes, but doesn’t allow you to copy/select text | Yes, and text can be easily extracted |
| Handwriting Recognition (image, not digital ink) |
H |
Yes, but uses a “shotgun” word approach and doesn’t allow you to copy/extract text. | No. |
| Auto Import |
H |
Very nice import of text and images just by dropping to folder. | No. I wish OneNote had this. I even tried some of the currently available “PowerToys” and no such luck. There are some command line tricks you can do, but these are very awkward. |
| PDF Import/ Export |
M |
No, EverNote basically doesn’t handle PDFs. You have to just add a link to the file (as an icon). I got around this somewhat with a Ghostscript command file I wrote to extract JPEGs from the PDF and automatically send them to EverNote. | Yes. You have to install the iFilter from Adobe, but after that you have options to import, export, email, etc. |
| Web Clipping from IE and Firefox |
H |
Yes - fast and accurate with links to original; clip and forget. | Poor - Formats somewhat mangled, Firefox is via 3rd party extension, slow & distracting (you have to watch OneNote open, splash screen and all) |
| Easily create Outlook tasks from Notes |
H |
No, manual process | Yes, very easy to create. Some issues where tasks get out of sync (if you move task to another folder) |
| Send note via email |
L |
Yes, although notes are more of a screen shot (not editable) format | Yes, but included function is weak (sends as OneNote attachment). Can get add-on that sends via PDF. |
| On-Screen editing of notes |
H |
Very limited. Cannot draw or float text over images. When inserting something everything else moves around. | Yes, excellent capability here. Also includes a lot of the standard editing & drawing tools ala Microsoft Word. |
| Easy to learn & use GUI |
M |
I know that scroll tape is their “thing”, but it’s awkward. The notes list is nice for quickly jumping to notes. You can only view one note at a time in full screen, and usually the link/source info is not available in that view. | Editor and layout is very easy if you’re familiar with Office products. The layers of notebooks and sections and tabs and pages feel a bit cluttered. |
| Tagging/ Categories |
M |
Yes, Excellent - ability to tag notes, define rules for automatic tags, and search via tag intersection panel | Very weak and poorly implemented. Only manual tags, no good tag hierarchy. The search function doesn’t filter, instead creates awkward page with copy of tagged items not linked back to original items. |
| Cost |
H |
FREE! As long as you don’t want handwriting recognition (which isn’t ready for primetime anyway) or sync multiple databases. | Fairly expensive… $75 (standard license) on Amazon.com. I saw some better deals on eBay ($55-60) if you’re willing to deal with smaller companies or individuals. Microsoft does, however, offer a free 60-day trial. |
| Built in Search |
H |
Yes, also like the fact that it starts to filter as soon as you type | Yes |
| Support for Desktop Search |
H |
No. Big minus here. No way to quickly get to all that useful data. I think they are adding Google Desktop Search capability in v2.2 however. | Yes - Works well with Windows Desktop Search. Should support Google Desktop Search too but I haven’t tested it. |
| Ability to link to notes from other places |
M |
Yes | Yes |
| Speed |
H |
Generally not an issue - fairly lightweight and fast. Occasional hangs, but pretty rare. | This was a big problem on my Dell Latitude D610. By the time it opened and loaded the page, I almost forgot what I was going to jot down. Not really an issue on my shiny new D630. |
So which one did I finally pick? Well, I broke down and bought a copy of OneNote 2007. One of the biggest reasons was desktop search capability. Even though EverNote has some very nice tagging capability, which trumps filing, search trumps tagging. It’s like rock-paper-scissors but without the circular relationship.
I also started to realize that I wasn’t going to get anything (short of buying a tablet PC) that did highly reliable hand-writing recognition. I was occasionally impressed by that function in EverNote, and I have to give them credit since they are the only ones to have something like this in product, but it’s just not good enough yet to be useful. You can’t extract the text, and if you peek at the XML content, you’ll see what I meant by “shotgun” approach above. For a given hand-written word, any word that is reasonably close gets entered into the database as a match. It’s a one-to-many relationship, so you think it’s working because you get positive hits. When you search on what you expect to match, it matches fairly often. What’s not so obvious at first is that lots of other stuff (incorrect words) will match too. This one-to-many structure is probably why EverNote doesn’t let you copy the recognized text from a hand-written paragraph. There is no cohesive translation per se.
The final nails in the coffin were the editing capability (GUI) and the ability to make synchronized tasks in Outlook with a single click. There are some short-comings to this feature which I will discuss in a future post, but still pretty handy.
So that’s where I am today. It would be great to hear from you as to what tools you prefer and what you think of my assessments. Please post your comments below!
Friday, October 12th, 2007 : EverNote, OneNote : 28 Comments
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28 Responses to “EverNote vs. OneNote”
October 13th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Hi!
As a user of both Evernote and OneNote 2007, I think you made the right choice. I use Evernote in my job to help keep myself organized and as a place to store all of my phone call logs, significant emails, notes, etc. I throw everything in it and it works very well. However, I would much prefer to use OneNote. I have a copy of OneNote that came in my Office 2007 Home edition and use it at home to keep track of things like my son’s medical issues (meds, dr appt, etc) as well as my own medical issues, financial data, recipes(!), urls, etc. OneNote’s ability to include embedded media and files as well as it’s ease of use throw it over the top for me. The search capability is icing on the cake. OneNote is a fantastic application and one that just blows my mind as to why Microsoft does not promote the heck out of. In case you are wondering, I use Evernote at work since I did not want to purchase another copy of OneNote and my company would not spring for it (I work for a larg utility company…) So I set out looking for a clone and Evernote was the closest thing I found. It is a terrific application and very extensible. There is a nice support community and tons of custom templates. They are both great tools. Hmmm…you would have done well no matter what you picked.
October 13th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
George - Thanks for the words of encouragement! I still have a bit of buyer’s remorse, so glad to hear that you agree. I guess the best news for consumers is that there are two very competitive tools battling it out. Both continue to improve and pick up features. It will be interesting to see who comes out on top a year from now.
November 17th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
[…] I am now using Microsoft OneNote 2007 as part of my GTD (Getting Things Done) system. I talked about this a bit before in my post on EverNote vs. OneNote. […]
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:51 pm
[…] actually one of the best features that was added in OneNote 2007, as I noted in my post on “EverNote vs. OneNote“. The task synchronization feature, however, is still pretty new and can be easily broken. If […]
December 18th, 2007 at 4:07 am
I’m new to OneNote and loving it. However, I am having trouble getting it to search and find words in scanned images. No success with scanning my (legible) handwriting but it did scan printed matter just fine and could copy and paste the text…but it couldn’t find any of the words through a search. I’m perplexed as to why it can’t search and find a word in scanned text when it can clearly copy and paste the same text. Any ideas?
December 18th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Pardes,
Sometimes OneNote isn’t set up to search images by default. Try right clicking on the picture/image in OneNote, then select “Make Text in Image Searchable”, then from the sub-menu select the language. As a quick test, I pasted a screen shot of your comments above and was able to search and hit all the words I searched on.
If that doesn’t work, you might be able to get more in depth technical help (or at least report a bug) on the Microsoft OneNote forum. Here is the link.
-Carl
December 31st, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Has anyone looked at theBrain.com ?
theBrain comes free with the Personal version and has a good full feature set. I like the inter-connectivity of notes and ideas. The main downside is it does not index and search content that is linked to the file system such as other documents or folders.
I’ve seen in the EverNote forum some users are talking about how it would work well to integrate with the Brain. I mentioned this to the folks at theBrain but have not heard back.
One plus to EverNote, by the way, is that is can be run on other operating systems.
January 1st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Thanks SpiderDog. I did take a look at “The Brain” a while back. It looked interesting at first, but to get the features I would want (search, Outlook integration, multiple file attachments, export capability, etc) it seems I would have to buy the Pro edition. The price tag on that is $249! Outrageous! Even stepping down to the core edition at $149 is still well above my threshold of pain. I didn’t bother downloading the free version since it lacks those key features.
-Carl
February 27th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Hi, I have both and only use evernote (2.2) … my solution with the hand-writing was to purchase the cyberpad from adesso ($150) and import the bitmaps into evernote - works great although my hand writing is very poor.
Philippe
February 27th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
PS: would you share your ghostscript script ?
Philippe
February 29th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Philippe - Thanks for the tip.
My script simply took PDFs, converted them page by page into JPG format using GhostScript, then auto-imported them into EverNote. I will try to find it and get it posted shortly (in the next week or so).
-Carl
March 14th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
[…] I mentioned in my EverNote vs. OneNote post, one of the key weaknesses of EverNote is its inability to handle PDF files. To get around that, I […]
March 14th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Philippe - I just posted the details of the script for sending PDF files to EverNote here. Hope that helps.
-Carl
March 29th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
[…] my post on EverNote vs. OneNote, I mentioned handwriting recognition as one of the shortcomings in OneNote. I also mentioned that […]
May 14th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Thanks for the post. However, months after you made this post, in mid-May 2008, Evernote added PDF support.
See http://blog.evernote.com/2008/05/11/evernote-for-mac-just-got-better/
May 17th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Interesting article. After reading the list carefully I fully expected evernote to win. In fact, I’d say evernote did win, you simply ignored the results because editing and being connected to outlook was important to you. I despise outlooks, so that’s not a criteria for me.
I chose evernote. The price is great, and as noted, now has pdf support.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Al - I heard, that’s great news. Right now I think PDF is only available on the Mac version of EverNote, but reading the forums it should be on the PC client very soon.
Mark - I agree… Each person will put a different priority/value on those rows above. Depending on what’s important to you, you could draw a different conclusion. With PDF support, and with Google Desktop Search support (even more important for me), I may be switching back. I have the EverNote 3 beta installed and am playing with it now.
May 25th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Very interesting review. Thanks very much.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:08 am
I’m confused about the windows functionality. Evernote does handle online pdf files but it screws up on local hard drive files. Adding a link to the file gives rise to error code 31 on the first click and crashes evernote with a memory write error the second time I open the link. So it handles http:// urls ok but not file:/// urls.
So at present I can only create a link to the directory and then find the file in it which rather deflates its effectiveness. Or else I just link to online pdfs where they occur and keep downloads as backups.
However there is far better workaround - set up a local webserver and set up a http localost url to the document directory. I’ve just done that with an apache webserver and it works fine!
That’s probably a better solution all around if you are linking to a collection of documents since it means the document urls don’t depend on their absolute location on the hard drive and the links so can be used on a copy of the document directory on any machine and operating system with a local webserver
May 30th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Er I may have misunderstood that you were referring to embedded files not links
May 31st, 2008 at 9:33 am
Nick - Yes, I was talking about local files, although from the comments above that will soon be fully supported in the new EverNote. Your idea of setting up a local web server is interesting. There are lots of free installs of Apache that run on Windows, such as WAMPServer.
June 7th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Excellent articlet. I too went for OneNote - integration with MS office and Windows Desktop Search, and I too would like handwriting recognition from Logitech IO pen (ie convert to text, not just find all notebook pages) but since neither do this it isn’t an issue.
Comment on TheBrain - I use MindJet and that has a link to OneNote (advantage of using MS software - everyone builds links to it) which creates a mind map of the notebooks.
Keep up the fresh ideas
HugoM
June 13th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Here’s another feature in OneNote: You can record audio while you take notes in real time–and the notes will be linked to the section of audio that was recording while you typed! You can also play back a recording made in OneNote (or anywhere else) and take notes while you listen–again temporally linking the notes to the audio.
I have used this functionality to great effect while doing field research. While other researchers struggle with endless hours of field recordings, I have instant access to any section of audio I want–searchable by keywords I added while listening. In fact, all of my MA research was done in OneNote, making things very easy to move over to Word.
I am totally sick of Microsoft and will soon be switching to a Mac. Unfortunately, this brilliant program will force me to put a copy of XP on my new MBP. I wish something else matched its functionality and searchability.
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I finally got around to framing the question for myself…found this post…voila! I’m satisfied with the opinions above for guidance. I guess I’ll knuckle down and figure out how to make best use of OneNote. I’ve already got it, I’ve played with it some, I’ll take it to the next level or more.
October 5th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Scott - Glad this was helpful. Some additional tips on OneNote setup and usage can be found in these posts:
Bending OneNote and Outlook to Fit my GTD System
Setting up OneNote 2007 for GTD
DROE Tool (Downloads page)
Handwriting Recognition in OneNote 2007? Well, kinda…
OneNote and Outlook Task Synchronization
-Carl
October 16th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I trialed OneNote ~April, 2008 along with the (at that time) current version of Evernote. At that time, I disliked the “paper tape” approach of EN and preferred the visual of OneNote. But I still wasn’t set to buy ON, b/c everything still seemed kind of kluged together. IE, your desk drawer has several compartments & each compartment contains like items…but that doesn’t mean you can quickly find the item you’re looking for, b/c you still have to look through 40 things to find it.
BUT…about a month ago, I dl’d EN Beta 3.x & am really loving it, eventhough I’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do. One neato thing is that I have a Livescribe pen. When I take some really important notes with the LS pen, I’m then able to add the audio to Evernote, along with a visual of the page, if I like.
I would have to say, in my short time with being “committed” (STS) to EN, I’ve mostly been adding notes. The true test, of course, will most likely be many months from now, when I have the need to actually FIND something quickly! LOL!
October 16th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Susie -
Thanks for your detailed comments! I’ve been using Evernote 3 for the past few months. There are still a few things I’d like to see added, but many of the shortcomings I noted above are now addressed. If I make it to six months, maybe I’ll put my copy of OneNote on eBay
BTW, if you’d like to help kill “the tape”, you can contribute to this post on the Evernote forums.
-Carl
October 28th, 2008 at 9:04 am
[…] Evernote/OneNote - отличные программы, однако для Evernote нужен доступ в Интернет, причем довольно скоростной если Вы работаете с большими файлами, т.к. файлы постоянно подгружаются на сервера EverNote. EverNote может работать и в оффлайне, но большинство преимуществ исчезают с невозможностью синхронизировать данные через Интернет. OneNote более приспособлен к оффлайн работе, но, увы, программа стоит немало. […]