Evernote vs OneNote for Personal Knowledge Bases

Table of Contents

Setting up my personal note system

When I decided to stop dumping notes into random Google Docs and half finished Trello boards, I tried to actually build a personal knowledge base. The choice came down to Evernote or OneNote. Both look similar on the surface — infinite pages of notes, tags, searching — but the second you start really pushing them, all the quirks appear. My problem is I usually don’t use these tools like they’re meant to be used. I’ll paste blocks of code, insert screenshots from random Discord chats, and then try to find those things two weeks later when a Zap breaks. 😛

In Evernote, the process of creating a “vault” of my automation failures was straightforward enough: notebooks, stacks of notebooks, and then tags. But I ran into something small but annoying. If I tagged a note with multiple labels, Evernote search sometimes ignored the second one until I synced everything twice. I literally thought I was losing notes. A support thread I found had a guy saying, “Search isn’t broken, it’s just laggy, give it a minute,” but waiting around breaks my workflow. OneNote did not have this lag, but its tags are more like stickers for visual browsing, not real database filters.

Finding old notes without wasting an hour

In real usage, the deal breaker for me wasn’t how fast I could take new notes. It was all about whether I could find my old ones. Picture this: I’m mid crisis because a webhook fired twice (again) and Zapier won’t let me replay it, and I *know* I solved this exact bug three months ago. I opened Evernote, typed in “double webhook trigger Zapier” and only pulled up one note about something unrelated. After swearing at the screen for five minutes, I checked OneNote. The search there drills down into page bodies way more reliably. It actually brought up my messy note with two screenshots of redundant task runs. So for hunting through piles of chaotic rambling, OneNote felt more trustworthy.

I noticed a pattern — Evernote is tidy until your dataset grows, then the tag system starts to feel like quicksand. OneNote is chaos upfront (hierarchies inside hierarchies, tabs everywhere), but when you search it’s more forgiving. Someone new to this might assume tagging is automatically better. From my own day to day use, keyword search that reads inside everything is more practical.

Saving random clips from the browser

Here’s where Evernote really shines: the Web Clipper. I can snap a whole article, simplified or full layout, then throw it in the right notebook. The formatting holds together most of the time. OneNote’s Clipper feels clunkier. Images often come in broken, paragraphs scrambled. I tried clipping a blog post about Make webhooks, and in OneNote the code snippets dissolved into bland text boxes with no spacing. In Evernote, at least it looked like what I copied. The problem, though, is sync speed. With Evernote, the clipped note sometimes doesn’t appear in the app until a refresh. In a crunch, that delay is frustrating when you want to drop something into your knowledge base instantly.

A handwritten comparison I made on paper almost looked like a bad classroom graph:

Sometimes just seeing it in a table makes the tradeoff obvious.

Capturing handwritten notes and sketches

I don’t sketch flowcharts all the time, but when I do, OneNote feels like it was built for that. The tablet ink input is smoother. Evernote technically supports handwriting, but it feels like an afterthought. I did an experiment where I wrote down a crude flow of “Webhook → Zapier → Google Sheet → Slack,” and in OneNote that actually stayed readable. The same thing in Evernote looked like I’d scribbled with a marker on damp cardboard. 🙂

The handwriting is searchable in OneNote too, which blew my mind the first time. I had scribbled “retry” in my own messy scrawl, and when I typed retry in the search, OneNote actually pulled the page up. Evernote couldn’t detect that at all in my test.

Organizing automation build logs

One friction point I noticed: Evernote forces you to sort notes into predefined containers. This is great if you like neat boxes, but terrible for me since I keep changing how I group stuff. I ended up with half built notebooks called “Broken Zaps” and another called “Zap Fails” — basically the same thing twice because I forgot which I used first. In OneNote, the structure is spacious enough that I can make a section group and drag pages around freely. There’s less panic about committing to one structure.

That said, if you overdo it on OneNote, you will lose notes. I’ve legit had pages vanish into a sub section three levels deep, then weeks later forgotten where I put them. It feels like losing socks in a dryer. To survive in OneNote, I taught myself to ignore most hierarchy and just dump everything in a few wide buckets, then count on search.

Backing up and exporting long term

This might bore the average beginner, but trust me: the day will come you want to copy your notes somewhere else. Evernote lets you export entire notebooks into one file you could theoretically reimport. Not perfect, but doable. OneNote likes to keep everything tied to a Microsoft account and syncing system. The export option is limited. I once tried to migrate a bunch of notes about Airtable automations from OneNote, but the export forced them into rigid formats that chopped my tables apart.

I looked online and a Microsoft forum thread literally had someone write: “There’s no straightforward way to bulk move OneNote notebooks out.” That’s the key headache. If you’re planning a knowledge base that you may want to move five years from now, Evernote at least gives you more of a path.

Integrations with other apps I use daily

Evernote is decent with integrations. Zapier connects right in, so I set up an automation where starred emails in Gmail became notes instantly. It worked, until the day it randomly stopped and I had to rebuild the Zap because the schema changed. Still, it was an option. OneNote is stingier. To push data into OneNote automatically, I had to rely on Microsoft Power Automate. I knew what I was doing (sort of), but found it much less flexible than Zapier.

For a beginner who just wants new notes generated from daily inputs — clipped articles, tweets saved, or Slack messages — Evernote plugs in far easier. If you’re already living inside Microsoft Teams though, OneNote may integrate more closely with your workflow. I just personally hit more dead ends.

Making the choice without overthinking

Every time I start writing about these tools, I realize I’ve switched between them too many times. Currently, I keep my actual knowledge base in OneNote for the stronger search, but my quick capture inbox is still Evernote because the Web Clipper is smoother. I tried forcing myself into just one of them, but then I’d waste half an hour digging for something lost. The mix seems weird, but it works for now ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re deciding what to use, think less about features and more about which friction you want to deal with daily — missing tags, slower clipping sync, export nightmares, or hidden subpages. That’s the real question no comparison chart ever says out loud. If you want to explore integrations yourself, the domains evernote.com and onenote.com are safe places to start looking for what you can build onto each system.