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Notion vs OneNote
March 17, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
51★
All-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. Allows real-time collaboration with comments and mentions for teams.
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.
Notion and OneNote, at first glance, appear to be two eerily similar entities, much like two parallel universes where everything is nearly identical, except in one, people wear hats slightly tilted to the left. Both allow users to take notes, add images and collaborate with others, all while pretending they’ll actually go back and read what they wrote. They function across multiple devices, store everything in some mystical cloud, and, crucially, are both free—at least until you realize you need that one extra feature that requires a subscription, at which point they are very much not free.
Notion, a relatively young upstart from 2016, was built for people who like to pretend their lives are a perfectly structured database. It lets users move blocks of text around like an omnipotent librarian rearranging reality itself. You can create wikis, task lists and dashboards that look fantastic but, if left unchecked, may become so complex they collapse under the weight of their own organizational ambition. However, if you want to scrawl illegible notes with a stylus, you’re out of luck—Notion is strictly a place for those who prefer typing over writing and it looks at your fancy touchscreen pen with the same disinterest a cat reserves for an expensive toy when there’s a perfectly good box nearby.
OneNote, the elder statesman from 2003, comes from the house of Microsoft and behaves accordingly—deeply integrated with Word, Outlook and all the other office tools that haunt productivity enthusiasts. It thrives on the chaos of freeform notes, allowing users to scribble wildly across the screen like an over-caffeinated student in a last-minute study session. Unlike Notion, which aspires to be an elegantly structured digital fortress, OneNote is a glorious mess, a bottomless notebook where ideas go to hide, never to be seen again. It embraces the stylus, celebrates handwriting and is particularly fond of people who enjoy the illusion of organization without actually having to do much organizing.
See also: Top 10 Wiki software
Notion, a relatively young upstart from 2016, was built for people who like to pretend their lives are a perfectly structured database. It lets users move blocks of text around like an omnipotent librarian rearranging reality itself. You can create wikis, task lists and dashboards that look fantastic but, if left unchecked, may become so complex they collapse under the weight of their own organizational ambition. However, if you want to scrawl illegible notes with a stylus, you’re out of luck—Notion is strictly a place for those who prefer typing over writing and it looks at your fancy touchscreen pen with the same disinterest a cat reserves for an expensive toy when there’s a perfectly good box nearby.
OneNote, the elder statesman from 2003, comes from the house of Microsoft and behaves accordingly—deeply integrated with Word, Outlook and all the other office tools that haunt productivity enthusiasts. It thrives on the chaos of freeform notes, allowing users to scribble wildly across the screen like an over-caffeinated student in a last-minute study session. Unlike Notion, which aspires to be an elegantly structured digital fortress, OneNote is a glorious mess, a bottomless notebook where ideas go to hide, never to be seen again. It embraces the stylus, celebrates handwriting and is particularly fond of people who enjoy the illusion of organization without actually having to do much organizing.
See also: Top 10 Wiki software
