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Microsoft’s OneNote for Mac is a tool designed to help you quickly and easily collect, organize, and share notes, random (or not so random) thoughts, images, and other information.

• Pros

  • Syncs multimedia notes across numerous devices.
  • Rich with features.
  • Reliable.
  • Version history.
  • Ability to password-protect content.
  • Collaboration features included.
  • Free.

• Cons

  • Structure and design could use work.
  • Tags not customizable.
  • Notebook access tools slow down productivity.

• Bottom Line

  Microsoft OneNote is a free note-taking and syncing app that works on a variety of devices, including Macs. It's not the North Star of note-taking apps, but it squarely takes second place.

Microsoft OneNote is a note-taking and syncing program that works across a wide range of devices, for free, with a decent array of features. In terms of its functionality and ease of use, it's the clear number-two choice, second to Evernote. However, recent changes to Evernote, including a stiff price hike, have left many customers bitter and looking for an alternative. Microsoft OneNote is the only other service at the moment that comes close to Evernote, but depending on your needs, close might not be good enough. OneNote is available on mobile devices, Windows and Mac, and the Web. It provides many of the same concepts as Evernote, but in a different structure. It's free, includes heaps of storage space, and carries the familiar interface of other Microsoft apps.

OneNote is pretty good if you've never used any other service before, but if you're switching from Evernote and are used to the Evernote way, the transition is rough. Evernote remains faster, more capable, and quite frankly better, but at a cost that's hard to swallow. Because nothing else can top it, Evernote still holds PCMag's Editors' Choice. Microsoft OneNote is the second best note-taking service available at this time, which will be reason enough for many people to adopt it. Just be aware of its shortcomings before you sink all your notes into it.

This review focuses on the Microsoft OneNote Mac app. For a deeper dive into the service in general, including a more comprehensive price comparison between OneNote and other note-taking services, see PCMag's review of OneNote (Web).

Price and Plan
All the OneNote apps are free to download and install, with no feature restrictions on the free service. It does require a Microsoft account to use, however. A Hotmail, Windows Live, or Outlook.com email address is all you need.

If you have a subscription to Office and use those credentials to sign in, you'll get more storage space. Free users get 5GB of space, whereas Office 365 subscribers get 1TB all told, shared among other Office Online apps.

Office 365 Personal costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. The annual price is the same as Evernote's Premium subscription, and the monthly price is less (Evernote charges $7.99 per month). An Office subscription gives you Office apps plus more storage space, but nothing else in the way of OneNote. An Evernote Premium subscription adds space, note-taking features, live chat support, and more.

A few other note-taking and syncing apps are entirely free, including Google Keep and Zoho Notebook, but they pale in comparison to Evernote and OneNote's capabilities. In terms of storage, Google Keep works similarly to OneNote, using Google Drive the way OneNote uses OneDrive. Google Drive gives everyone 15GB of storage for free. Zoho Notebook offers unlimited storage with a 50MB max file size for any single upload.

Design and Setup
OneNote conforms to the general look of other Microsoft Office apps. As mentioned, there are OneNote apps for Windows, Mac, mobile devices (iOS, Android, Windows Phone), as well as a Web app. Here I focus on the Mac app.

The basic structure and terminology used in OneNote is Notebook > Section > Page. For example, I have a notebook called Recipes, with sections for Sweet, Savory, and Cocktail recipes. Within the Cocktails section, I have pages for Negroni, Gin Fizz, and so forth. The nomenclature roughly maps to Evernote's Notebook Stack > Notebook > Note.

The OneNote Web app puts editing tools and other functional buttons at the top of the window, while reserving the right side for previews of pages.

A page is more like a pasteboard than a word processing document. Every piece of content that's added to a page comes in its own field or box. All images that are added are contained in a box pasted to the page, and the same goes for text and other elements. An Evernote note, conversely, is more like a word processing page or email text field, where you can type text freely, but you can also add other page elements or attachments, too. In OneNote, you can resize any box, including boxes with text, or drag and drop boxes to change their position.

Along the top of the window, below the main editing tools, are tabs. These are for sections. Sections help you organize notes within a notebook. I find the visual placement of sections confusing because they are separated from the pages that they comprise. Visually, it looks as if the page or note that you have selected to read or edit at the moment is the entire content of that tab (or section). Evernote's three panel display (which shows left to right a tree-like display of Notebook Stacks and Notebooks, Notes in preview, and the selected note in the main window) makes a whole lot more sense.

To do anything in the OneNote Mac app, you start by choosing a notebook, but only the four most recent notebooks will appear the dropdown list when you go to select one. To find others, you have to hit a plus sign (which makes it seem like you're creating a new notebook, even though you aren't) to find the notebook you want. This structural design absolutely slows down productivity because it takes unnecessarily long to switch between notebooks.

After choosing a notebook, all the pages associated with it appear on the left in a preview list. You can change the view to either show more of a preview, including an image thumbnail, or less.

Features and Performance
Microsoft OneNote is well endowed with features, and most of the core ones will be familiar to anyone who has used other Office apps before. Toolbar selections for Home, Insert, View will all seem standard, and you'll easily find all the formatting options and whatnot. Compared with the OneNote Web app, the Mac app is quicker and ever so slightly more refined in its looks.

Into any note, you can insert, images, links, symbols, tables, and more. You can record audio right into a note, too. You can enlarge, shrink, and crop images that appear in notes, although you can't annotate them, as you can with an Evernote Premium account. There's a new Digital Ink feature that lets you draw images and diagrams in OneNote, but it's only available to those who work on a Surface Pro, so Mac users don't get it.

There are some neat things you can do with audio memos. For example, you can place bookmarks throughout any recording. If you type notes while recording audio, the app links them so that later, when you listen to the recording, you can jump to the notes you wrote at different moments. It's a feature that's easy to miss because it requires that you know the feature is hidden in a control-click accessed menu.

If you have a very important or sensitive notes, you can lock the section in which it lives with a password. There's also a button that shows version history, letting you restore an old version of a note. You can share notebooks with collaborators, and you can restrict their access to read-only or edit. But be aware that you can't share a single note with others while restricting the rest of their access to whatever else is in the notebook. Sharing occurs at the notebook level only.

You can drag and drop pages from one section to another, although I wish there were indicators, like icons, to show that the move was in progress and then successful. Other features include the ability to choose the paper you want for your pages, such as blank or grid, as well as a search tool that highlights your keywords when it finds them.

Tags are handled unusually in OneNote. There is a list of pre-made tags that you can add to any note, but you can't change what's in the list or add a custom tag. You can, however, use a hashtag before a word in your note for custom tags, but they're treated differently. Evernote, however, lets you create whatever tags you want, and you can easily sort or filter your notes while including tags in your search criteria.

OneNote has a web clipping tool that I used avidly in testing, and it's decent. The Web clipper is a plugin that copies content from a Web page into your OneNote account with two clicks, rather than doing a cut-and-paste job. Evernote's Web clipper has a few additional options for clipping, and it suggests a notebook intelligently, based on the content, whereas OneNote suggests saving the note to the last used notebook.

OneNote Takes Silver
Note-taking and syncing service OneNote isn't short on features, and it gives away a lot for free. It also adds a heck of a lot of space to anyone who has an Office 365 account. It's more advanced than almost all other note-taking and syncing apps on the market, except Evernote.

OneNote is reliable, but still needs work to be great. It has some problems in its structure and design that make it slow to use and inelegant. Tags should be customizable. The Web clipper tool could be more sophisticated. But all in all, considering the other note-taking apps on the market, OneNote is clearly no. 2. Evernote earns gold, and OneNote deserves silver.

If you're dead-set on ditching Evernote, sure, switch to OneNote, although I recommend waiting for transfer tools to improve first. OneNote is the only other app that comes close to Evernote at this time. But it can't beat Evernote yet, and thus Evernote remains PCMag's Editors' Choice for now.

Microsoft OneNote (Web)

• Pros

  • Rich with features.
  • Can extract editable text from an image.
  • Great free service tier.
  • Familiar interface for Office users.
  • Plenty of storage space.

• Cons

  • Can be slow and clunky.
  • Search needs improvements.
  • Can only share at the notebook level.

• Bottom Line

  OneNote is a feature-rich, note-taking app, and it gives away a lot for free. The question is whether its best features are the ones you need.

When it comes to choosing the best note-taking app, there are two clear winners: Microsoft OneNote and Evernote. Both are PCMag Editors' Choices. While the following review of OneNote isn't a head-to-head comparison, it's hard not to match Microsoft's app up against Evernote in at least in a few respects. OneNote provides many of the same services as Evernote, but it has a different structure. It's also free, whereas you really need to pay for Evernote to get all its best features. Because OneNote is cut from Microsoft's cloth, it has deep ties to OneDrive and other Microsoft apps. Sometimes that's useful and sometimes it just becomes confusing. OneNote is one of the best note-taking apps available. Whether you'll prefer it to Evernote comes down to what you value in an app and how you use it.

How Much Does Microsoft OneNote Cost?

Microsoft OneNote is available to download for free on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. There's also a web app. You can use it for free with almost no feature restrictions. There are a handful of extra features you get with the app if you have a paid Office account and use the app on Windows. These extra OneNote features include Ink replay, Researcher, Math Assistant, and Stickers. You also get more storage space for your notes if you have a paid subscription to Office. Free OneNote users get 5GB of space, whereas Office 365 users get 1TB, which is shared across all Office Online apps.

If space is what you're after, an Office 365 Personal comes at a good price—$6.99 per month or $69.99 per year—with a lot of benefits beyond OneNote to boot. For an Evernote Premium account, the annual price is the same and the monthly price is more ($7.99 per month). With Office 365, you get half a dozen apps, 1TB of OneDrive space, and some perks for Skype.

To use the app at all, you need some kind of Microsoft account, but it doesn't have to be a paid account, which you would need for some other business apps. For OneNote, merely having an Outlook.com login will do.

Price Comparisons

Evernote accounts come in three tiers of service: Basic (free), Premium ($69.99 per year or $7.99 per month), and Business ($12 per person per month). There used to be a mid-grade account called Plus; existing accounts have been grandfathered forward, but the option no longer exists for others. With a free Evernote account, you can only sync between two devices, and you can only upload 60MB of data each month.

When you upgrade a free Evernote account to Evernote Premium, you get added features, such as business card scanning and digitizing; OCR on all PDFs, documents, and images; suggestions for content related to the note you're writing; live chat support; and more space. Comparing the two is less about which one offers a better value and more about what you need. Do you need Office apps, or do you need rich features in a note-taking app?

There are other note-taking apps on the market, many of them free, but none comes close to OneNote or Evernote in features, compatibility, and power. Zoho Notebook (free with unlimited storage) is the only one to keep an eye on. It looks more adept every time I pick it up, although it still falls short on collaboration. How to torrent on a mac.

Google Keep is also free but limited in what it can do, and its web clipper is extremely disappointing. Simplenote is another option, but only if you're interested in a very stripped-down note-taking app.

Design and Setup

OneNote shares a family resemblance with other Microsoft Office apps. As mentioned, there are apps for Windows, macOS, and mobile devices (iOS, Android, Windows Phone), as well as a web app. The advanced features vary a little bit across devices. The Windows app is the strongest of the bunch. I tested on Windows, macOS, iOS, and web.

The basic structure and terminology used in OneNote is Notebook > Section > Page. Pages can also have subpages. In any other app, a 'page' would be called a 'note,' so I use the words interchangeably here. Let me give an example of how the schematics work. I have a notebook called Recipes. Within it are sections for Sweet, Savory, and Cocktail recipes. Within the Cocktails section, I have pages for Negroni, Gin Fizz, and so forth. I could make subpages under Negroni for Grapefruit Negroni and Sparkling Negroni (but I haven't because I'm not really into the hard stuff).

Unlike in other note-taking apps, however, a page here has more in common with a pasteboard than a word processing document. Every piece of content that's added to a page comes in its own field or box. You can resize any box or drag and drop it to change its position on the page.

OneNote has a familiar three-paneled layout. On the far left, you have a collapsible menu with three options: notebooks, search, and recent notes. When you click the first choice, a list of notebooks appears, and whichever one you select, its pages appear to the right. (A notebook and its pages are treated as one panel.) It's just like any other tree folder structure you'd expect from Microsoft. When you select a particular page, its contents appear in the main window.

I hadn't used OneNote in a few weeks, and so when I fired up the app, I was surprised that a bunch of my notebooks were missing. After some poking around, I remembered that the app only shows recently used notebooks. If you want to open a notebook that you haven't seen in a while, you have to hunt it down on OneDrive and load it back into the app. Finding and selecting them took only a minute, but loading them took longer, regrettably.

Whenever you choose a notebook you want, the page reloads to display the sections and pages within that notebook. All the other notebooks disappear. To get them again, you have to back out to the notebook page and wait for it to reload. As someone who bounces between notebooks frequently while I work, I found that the structure of OneNote slows down my productivity. Evernote instead shows your notebook stacks (such as your parent notebook) in listview with an option to reveal all the notebooks (children) contained within it using a drop-down arrow. In that way, you can view a complete list of all your notebooks at once. That's impossible in OneNote.

Features and Performance

Microsoft OneNote's feature list impresses. Many of them will be familiar to anyone who has used other Office apps. A few features don't work as smoothly as one would hope, however.

OneNote's menu bar closely resembles the one in Word Online, which is loaded with options. You get all the formatting tools you could ever need for text in notes. You can insert images, links, symbols, tables, audio files (which you can record using the app), and more. You can enlarge, shrink, and crop images that appear in notes. You can also send an image to the background and have the text run on top of it. You cannot annotate images, however, which you can do with an Evernote Premium account.

You can, however, edit embedded files, such as text documents. You can also pull text from an image and paste it into the note with no special processing, which is one of the app's strongest features. As long as you have a good image with clear print on it to start, it works fairly well.

A feature called Digital Ink lets you draw diagrams and images using a stylus on supported device. If you have a Microsoft business account, you can use a special feature in OneNote to see upcoming meetings listed in Outlook and take notes about them.

The search tool in OneNote could and should be improved. It only looks through pages that are downloaded to the device you're currently using. This feels like a miss. A benefit of using any note-taking app is that you can find notes easily by searching them for words or tags. If the app doesn't search all your notes, what's the point?

Speaking of tags, OneNote has a unique approach to tags. In many apps, you turn any word into a tag by adding # in front of it. In other apps, such as Evernote, you create whatever tags you want and the app keeps track of them so you don't create near duplicates. In OneNote, you get a bunch of premade tags to start and then you can add more if you want. The ones you get to start out are 'definition,' 'question,' 'to-do,' and such. They aren't grand themes for the content. They're more like categories for specific lines of text or page elements. When I rely on the tags in my note-taking apps, it's usually to pull a theme, such as all notes tagged both 'chocolate' and 'cake,' or all notes tagged 'productivity.' It would never even occur to me to pull up a list of all the 'definitions' I've written down in a note-taking app, although that sounds like it might have some application in the education sector. No matter how you slice it, OneNote takes tags in an unusual direction.

When reading your notes, you can create a more focused experience using Reading View. A similar feature, Immersive Reader, hides all the toolbars from view and puts only the note on screen and then reads it aloud, a nice feature for cooking recipes or for people with vision impairment.

In testing the app, I used OneNote's web-clipping tool extensively. Web clippers are browser extensions that let you copy content from a webpage into another app, in this case, OneNote. Web clippers eliminate the need to cut and paste. For articles and recipes with the appropriate HTML tags, OneNote lets you clip just the main content if you want, stripping out the ads and other page elements that aren't important. Another option lets you clip the whole page, while a third allows you to draw a box around a section and save just that screenshot. The web clipper works pretty well. I was impressed that it can handle video clips, though it had trouble with easier tasks, such as preserving the correct line breaks in poems.

When you make a new note or clip something new into OneNote, the resulting page by default goes to the bottom of the assigned notebook section. You can change a setting to have it appear at the top, which would then list your notes in reverse-chronological order. Shockingly, there isn't a way to simply sort your notes chronologically, reverse-chronologically, or alphabetically by note title. I strongly dislike, too, that I cannot see the page create date when I look at a list of my pages.

OneNote has a few other neat features that may be useful in certain circumstances. For example, an Accessibility Checker flags potential accessibility problems with notes, such as whether text has low contrast against a background or if images are missing alt text. Funnily enough, most of the accessibility warnings I got were in reference to default header fonts that OneNote applied to web-clipped pages.

Managing and Collaborating With OneNote

The Notebook > Section > Page > Subpage schema is of the utmost important when it comes time to collaborate. The reason: You can only share at the notebook level. You can't share an individual page while keeping other pages of a notebook private. Knowing this information could greatly influence how you set up your OneNote account. You can generate and copy a link to a section or a page, although the person you send it to must have permission to the whole notebook to see it.

A Share button at the top right of the interface opens a panel where you can type someone's email address to give them access to the notebook in question. You can choose whether the access will be edit or view only.

OneNote Takes Silver

Note-taking app OneNote isn't short on features. It offers a lot for free, and it adds a heck of a lot more space for anyone who has an Office 365 account. It's much more advanced than almost all other note-taking and syncing apps on the market, except Evernote.

OneNote is reliable, and depending on which features you need, it could be hit or miss. It has some neat tools for students, for example, and the Immersive Reader is pretty great when your hands are full and you want to listen to your notes read aloud. The search is less than ideal, however, and sharing can get messy. When you look at the whole landscape of options for note-taking and syncing services, it's clearly number two. Evernote wins gold, and OneNote takes silver.

OneNote is the only app that comes close to Evernote at this time, and for certain uses, it's better. Both are PCMag Editors' Choices.

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