Evernote vs OneNote: Is a Free Notes App Worth Paying to Replace?

Here is the tradeoff nobody puts on a pricing page: one of these apps is free because you already pay for something bigger, and the other one asks you to pay for the app itself. Evernote and OneNote are still the two names most Android users try first, but they arrived at "free" (or not) in completely different ways, and that difference decides which one actually costs you less. Evernote's direction changed sharply after Bending Spoons acquired the company and set about rebuilding its subscription business, which is how a free plan that once held everything ended up capped at 50 notes.

A free Microsoft account includes just 5 GB of OneDrive storage, the same pool that backs your free OneNote notebooks, while a $99.99-a-year Microsoft 365 Personal subscription bundles that up to 1 TB. Evernote, meanwhile, has spent the last two years narrowing its free tier until it barely functions as daily driver, forcing the pricing conversation into the open. This comparison is about that conversation: what you get for free, what you are really buying when you pay, and which lock-in (Microsoft's software bundle or Evernote's subscription) is the one you can live with.

Three real problems show up once you actually try to pick between them on a phone. A single-notebook, single-device free plan is unusable the moment you own two devices. A "free" app that quietly runs on your OneDrive storage is not free once your photos fill that 5 GB. And an interface built around a flat searchable note list works differently in daily use than one built around notebooks, sections, and pages, no matter what either pricing page promises. Both apps ship a full Android version alongside their Windows, Mac, and iOS releases, so the comparison below assumes you are choosing primarily for the phone in your pocket, not a desktop-only workflow.

Quick Comparison

The table below lines up what each app actually costs and includes as of the 2026 pricing pages, not the plan names either company used a year ago.

Evernote's Free Plan Is Now a Trial, Not a Tier

According to Evernote's own pricing page, the Free plan allows just 50 notes total, held in a single notebook, synced to a single device, with 1 GB of monthly upload allowance, a 200 MB per-note ceiling, 5 spaces, and 20 tags. That is enough to test the app for a week, not enough to run a life on. Hit any of those ceilings (which most active users do within days) and the next step is a paid plan, not a bigger free tier.

OneNote carries no equivalent free-tier note or device cap. Sign in with a Microsoft account and you get unlimited notebooks, sections, and pages, an Android app that syncs across every device you own, and no forced upgrade path just to keep taking notes.

Evernote's Real Prices: Starter and Advanced

Evernote's paid structure now has two consumer tiers plus Enterprise, and the naming changed recently, so ignore any "Personal" or "Professional" plan mentioned in older reviews. Per Evernote's pricing page, Starter costs $99.00 a year (shown as $8.25 a month equivalent) and raises the ceiling to 1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, 3 devices, and 5 GB of storage. Advanced costs $249.99 a year (shown as $20.83 a month equivalent) and removes the note, notebook, device, and storage caps entirely, while adding Evernote's AI search and transcription features plus Slack and Microsoft Teams integration.

Neither figure is small next to a note-taking app that used to be free for most practical purposes. Starter is a reasonable ask for someone who genuinely outgrew 50 notes. Advanced only earns its price if you need unlimited storage across many devices or actually use the AI tools, not just because the ceiling exists. Either way, the billing is annual: Evernote's own pricing page does not publish a monthly-billing option for these figures, so budget for one upfront charge a year rather than a smaller recurring line item.

OneNote's Price Is the Microsoft 365 Bundle

OneNote does not have its own subscription. Instead, per Microsoft's own plan comparison page, Microsoft 365 Personal runs $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year and folds in 1 TB of OneDrive storage plus Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook alongside OneNote. Microsoft 365 Family runs $12.99 a month or $129.99 a year for up to six people, each getting 1 TB (up to 6 TB shared), and Microsoft 365 Premium runs $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year, adding Copilot AI features on top. Prefer to own software outright? Office Home 2024 is a one-time $179.99 purchase for one PC or Mac, covering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote with no ongoing subscription.

Here is the catch worth saying plainly: none of those prices are for OneNote. They are the price of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Copilot, and a mountain of OneDrive storage, with OneNote riding along, exactly how Microsoft's own OneNote product page frames it, as one app inside a bigger subscription rather than a standalone purchase. If all you want is a notes app, paying for Microsoft 365 to "upgrade" OneNote makes little sense; you are buying an entire office suite you may never open.

The Real Cost of "Free": OneDrive Storage

OneNote's free tier is not storage-independent. Per Microsoft's OneDrive plan comparison, a free Microsoft account includes 5 GB of cloud storage, and every OneNote notebook, embedded image, and file attachment counts against that same pool as your photo backups and documents. Fill that 5 GB with camera uploads and your notes are competing for space, not sitting in a dedicated notes allowance.

That is the honest tradeoff behind OneNote's "free" label: it is free because Microsoft already gives every account holder a small storage grant, not because OneNote carries no cost structure at all. Heavy users of OneDrive for other things will hit that ceiling well before a text-heavy OneNote habit does, and the fix is the same Microsoft 365 subscription discussed above.

Text-only notes rarely stress a 5 GB allowance on their own; a notebook full of typed pages weighs almost nothing. The pressure comes from everything else sharing that pool on Android, phone camera backups, screenshots pasted into notes, and any file attachments, which can burn through a single-digit gigabyte allowance in weeks rather than years. Anyone who plans to lean on OneNote heavily for photos of whiteboards or scanned pages should treat that 5 GB figure as a shared budget, not a notes-only reserve.

Notebooks and Pages vs a Search-First Note List

The two apps do not just differ on price, they organize your thinking differently. Per Microsoft's own OneNote documentation, a notebook holds sections, sections hold pages, and pages can hold sub-pages, with content placed anywhere on a freeform canvas rather than a fixed top-to-bottom document. That structure rewards people who think in folders and want a spot for everything, and it is genuinely good for messy handwritten sketches or mixed text-and-image pages on a tablet.

Evernote dropped that hierarchy years ago in favor of a flatter model: notes live in a single searchable list, organized by notebooks, tags, and Evernote's newer "spaces" grouping, with a search bar built to be the primary way you find anything, not a fallback. If you already know roughly what a note said, Evernote gets you to it faster. If you organize by browsing a folder tree, OneNote's structure will feel more natural. Both approaches translate reasonably well to Android, though a freeform canvas asks more of a small touchscreen than a scrolling list does, since dragging content around a page that was designed for a stylus or a mouse takes more thumb work on a phone than simply scrolling and tapping a search result.

Note-taking overlaps with another everyday Android habit worth mentioning: scanning paper into digital form. Both Evernote and OneNote include a basic document camera scanner, but if that is the actual job you need done, our roundup of document scanner apps with no subscription covers dedicated tools built specifically for that task rather than as a notes-app add-on.

Green Flags / Red Flags

Evernote green flags:

• Search-first note list that surfaces old notes fast without browsing a folder tree
• Advanced plan removes every cap: unlimited notes, notebooks, devices, and storage
• AI search and transcription tools built directly into the paid tiers

Evernote red flags:

• Free plan is capped at 50 notes, 1 notebook, and 1 device, unworkable for daily use
• Starter and Advanced are real annual costs, $99.00 and $249.99, with no lifetime option
• No storage safety net; hit the free upload limit and syncing simply stops

OneNote green flags:

• Completely free with any Microsoft account, no note count or device limit
• Freeform notebook, section, page structure suits handwriting, sketches, and mixed media
• Upgrading brings a whole office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Copilot), not just more notes storage

OneNote red flags:

• Free storage is shared OneDrive space (5 GB), not a dedicated notes allowance
• Meaningfully more storage means buying into the wider Microsoft 365 bundle, whether you want the rest of it or not
• Notebook-and-page browsing can feel slower than a flat list when you just want to search one line

How to Pick Between Evernote and OneNote

Pick OneNote if you want a genuinely free notes app on Android and do not mind that "free" means "backed by your 5 GB of OneDrive." For most casual note takers, that price (zero dollars, no note cap) is close to impossible for Evernote to compete with on cost alone.

Pick Evernote's Starter plan if you have already outgrown OneNote's freeform sprawl and want a fast, search-first note list with a real (if capped) storage allowance for $99 a year, and you are not interested in the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite.

Pick Evernote Advanced only if you are hitting Starter's ceilings often, sync across more than three devices, or would actually use its AI search and transcription tools; otherwise $249.99 a year is a lot to pay past what most people ever touch.

Pick Microsoft 365 Personal over standalone OneNote only if you also want Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and 1 TB of storage; buying the bundle purely to fix a OneNote storage problem is rarely the cheapest fix. If open, plain-text notes with no vendor storage tie-in matter more to you than either of these, our Joplin vs Obsidian comparison covers that alternative path in full.