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Box Notes vs OneNote
March 11, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
2★
Box Notes is a lightweight editing tool. Create documents, take notes and share ideas in real-time with anyone. Ideas get stronger with teamwork. Box Notes is designed to make that happen. Your business ideas should live with the rest of your business content. Now they can.
27★
OneNote allows to capture thoughts, ideas and to-do's. Your stuff travels with you on your computers, tablets and phones. Share your notebooks with others for viewing or editing. Integrates with Outlook for task management and meeting notes.
See also:
Top 10 Office suites
Top 10 Office suites
Box Notes and OneNote are, at first glance, very similar creatures. Both exist in the nebulous realm of cloud-based note-taking, both allow humans (and, presumably, sufficiently intelligent dolphins) to collaborate in real time and both provide a way to haphazardly insert images, links and other digital detritus into one’s notes. They also both have version history, which is a wonderfully optimistic feature suggesting that, at some point, someone might actually want to revisit past mistakes rather than bury them under an avalanche of newer, shinier ones. And, of course, they are both available on web, desktop and mobile, which means you can access your half-written grocery list from literally anywhere, including the precise moment you no longer need it.
Box Notes is the younger of the two, having been unleashed upon the unsuspecting public in 2014 by Box, Inc., a company that believes fervently in storing everything in the cloud, including, apparently, the last vestiges of free disk space. It is built for businesses, because businesses love things that sound like productivity but aren’t quite and it integrates seamlessly with Box Drive, because forcing people to use your ecosystem is a time-honored corporate tradition. It is also delightfully minimalist, which is a polite way of saying that it lacks advanced organization tools and wouldn’t know what to do with a drawing feature if it stumbled over one in a dark alley.
OneNote, on the other hand, is an ancient and powerful beast, forged in 2003 by Microsoft, which has been very enthusiastic about making software since roughly the dawn of recorded time. Unlike its younger, sleeker cousin, OneNote believes in complexity and abundance, offering notebooks within sections within pages within the existential despair of trying to find something you swear you wrote down last week. It allows for handwriting, doodling, and, if you have a touchscreen, a series of increasingly frustrated scribbles. Most crucially, it integrates with Microsoft 365, because everything must ultimately serve the great and terrible Office Suite, in whose shadow we all must toil.
See also: Top 10 Office suites
Box Notes is the younger of the two, having been unleashed upon the unsuspecting public in 2014 by Box, Inc., a company that believes fervently in storing everything in the cloud, including, apparently, the last vestiges of free disk space. It is built for businesses, because businesses love things that sound like productivity but aren’t quite and it integrates seamlessly with Box Drive, because forcing people to use your ecosystem is a time-honored corporate tradition. It is also delightfully minimalist, which is a polite way of saying that it lacks advanced organization tools and wouldn’t know what to do with a drawing feature if it stumbled over one in a dark alley.
OneNote, on the other hand, is an ancient and powerful beast, forged in 2003 by Microsoft, which has been very enthusiastic about making software since roughly the dawn of recorded time. Unlike its younger, sleeker cousin, OneNote believes in complexity and abundance, offering notebooks within sections within pages within the existential despair of trying to find something you swear you wrote down last week. It allows for handwriting, doodling, and, if you have a touchscreen, a series of increasingly frustrated scribbles. Most crucially, it integrates with Microsoft 365, because everything must ultimately serve the great and terrible Office Suite, in whose shadow we all must toil.
See also: Top 10 Office suites
