Notion vs. OneNote: Which note-taking app should you use? [2026]

I can't think of many apps that inspire the kind of devotion that Notion does. Its fans organize meetups all around the world to chat about productivity systems, from Aruba to Poland to Pakistan. Heck, you can buy Notion onesies for your baby. My theory on Notion's popularity is this: because you can use it to organize pretty much anything, it's become the software equivalent of a self-help book. Whether you're struggling with school, work, or your personal life, there's a Notion template designed to get your problems under control.

But for straightforward note-taking, it can sometimes feel over-engineered. You don't have to look far to find people who say things like, "Never figured out how to use Notion. It's more complicated than the work I need it to manage."

OneNote, on the other hand, is designed entirely around taking notes. There's nothing to figure out: you just start typing, talking, or writing by hand with a stylus. If you're a Microsoft user, using OneNote is even simpler, because it's probably already installed on your computer.

I use Notion every day to store research, take notes, and draft articles, and I've spent plenty of time testing its newer AI agent features. For this comparison, I spun up a fresh OneNote account and tested how each app handles capturing notes, organizing them, building productivity systems, and using AI. I'll explain what each app does best so you can decide which one makes the most sense for you.

Table of contents:

• Notion vs. OneNote at a glance

• OneNote is for beginners, Notion is for power users

• OneNote is for freeform note-taking; Notion is designed for productivity systems and collaboration

• OneNote has password-protected notes and simpler offline access

• Notion is pricier, but both apps have generous free plans

• Notion's AI is more capable; OneNote's is cheaper

• Both apps integrate with Zapier

• OneNote vs. Notion: Which should you choose?

Notion vs. OneNote at a glance

Here's a quick overview of the differences between each app, but keep reading for the full story.

OneNote is for beginners; Notion is for power users

When you think of Microsoft Office, the apps that come to mind first are probably Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. OneNote isn't usually on that list, but it should be. It's a solid note-taking app, it's free, and if you already pay for Microsoft 365, there's a good chance you already have access to it.

It's also one of the easiest note-taking apps to learn, because it follows the same logic as physical notebooks. You create a notebook, divide it into sections, and add pages to each section. There's no need to fiddle with templates or organizational systems (which tends to be a time-suck for Notion users). Instead, you can just quickly get to the business of taking notes.

If you've used Word or PowerPoint, the interface will feel familiar. OneNote's desktop app opens to the last page you were working on, with the standard Microsoft Office menu at the top, and your notebooks, sections, and pages down the side.

Notion is easy to start using, too, but unlocking its full potential takes more time. On the simplest level, if you're just using it for notes, you'll have basically the same straightforward experience you'd get with OneNote.

But even if you're just taking notes, Notion gives you way more freedom to organize things—and all that freedom can get a little messy. For example, the haphazard note-taking process I've adopted is to create a project page, then add a bunch of subpages, callouts, and other assorted details whenever and wherever I want. It works fine for me because I'm just taking notes for myself, but it's not something I would impose on anyone else.

Notion also goes far beyond notes:

• You can create databases that work as project trackers, complete with tasks, subtasks, dependencies, and timeline views. Notion Calendar syncs with your workspace, so any dates you add to a database show up on your calendar.

• Notion Forms send responses straight into your database. From there, you can visualize the data with charts, or combine them into dashboards on the Business plan.

• Notion formulas calculate values and can pull linked info from elsewhere in your workspace. Database automations (available on paid plans) can update properties or send a Slack notification when something changes.

• Teams use Notion as a wiki or knowledge base for onboarding docs and standard operating procedures, and you can also publish any Notion page as a website.

If you need a place to take notes and you also want to use the same app to manage projects, store data, and run other aspects of your business, Notion gives you tons of flexibility. But if you're just looking for the most efficient way to take notes, OneNote is a simpler app with fewer distractions.

OneNote is best for freeform note-taking; Notion is designed for productivity systems and collaboration

One important aspect of a note-taking tool is being able to capture your ideas, no matter what form they come in. Not everyone thinks in sentences: sketches, audio recordings, and even mathematical equations are all valid ways to express what you're thinking.

OneNote's desktop app, available for both Windows and Mac, is impressive in the options it offers:

• Rich text notes, letting you choose fonts, colors, and heading styles

• Audio and video recording

• Drawing tools, including free draw with thickness and color controls, shapes, and lasso select (making it almost a mini MS Paint)

• Version history for your notes, including edits from multiple authors collaborating on the same note

• Spell check, thesaurus, translation, proofreading languages, and an accessibility checker

• Built-in equations and calculation tools, plus Math Assistant (with a Microsoft 365 subscription), which coaches you with step-by-step instructions

• Dictation that turns anything you say into text (it's surprisingly accurate)

I like how you can paste anything into a page, including images and videos, and position them wherever you want on the freeform canvas. And whenever you paste content from a website, OneNote includes the source link so you don't lose track of your references.

If you prefer to take notes by writing with your stylus on a tablet, OneNote's handwriting-to-text feature lets you convert your scribblings into typed text.

Notion isn't as agile for note-taking. You can't put your thoughts on the page via drawing or handwriting, and your page designs are more constrained because Notion's content blocks snap together into a grid. It's great for building richer, more structured notes, but it gives you less flexibility than OneNote.

Notion's strength is organization. When you have too many notes to keep track of, you can put them in a database and add properties that make each note filterable and searchable. Let's say you have 100 notes, and 40 of those are about email marketing. Rather than scrolling aimlessly to find what you need, you can create a property, label your notes accordingly, and set up two filtered views: one for your email marketing notes, and another for everything else. You can also link notes to related pages, so when you open a project, you see every note connected to it.

When you're ready to bring your team into Notion, you can leave comments and mentions on any page or block and see everyone's edits in real time. OneNote lets you share notebooks and edit together in real time, but it doesn't have comments or @mentions.

If you decide to use Notion for your note-taking, try this Notion note-taking template to get you started.

OneNote has password-protected notes and simpler offline access

Both Notion and OneNote do a good job of securing your account. But if you want to be absolutely sure that certain notes stay entirely private, only OneNote lets you add a second layer of password protection to individual sections of your notebook. Even if someone gains access to your device while you're already logged in to OneNote, they'd still be blocked from accessing your password-protected notes. (Keep in mind: you can set passwords on OneNote desktop and on the iPhone and iPad apps, but not on the web or Android.)

With Notion, you can set up permissions that control who sees each page. But you can't put a password on an individual page or database, which means that someone who gets into your Notion account can see everything.

OneNote and Notion both have offline mode, but OneNote's is easier to work with. OneNote's desktop app stores everything locally, so your notebooks are always on your device and they sync to the cloud when you have a connection. Notion works a bit more like Netflix: if you've got a flight coming up, you'll need to download the pages you plan to work on ahead of time. Paid plans automatically download your recent and favorite pages, but if you forget to download anything else, you're out of luck.

Notion is pricier, but both apps have generous free plans

OneNote is free to use. Nearly all of its note-taking features are available at no charge, including multi-device syncing, handwriting tools, and audio notes. Most integrations are free, but if you want to embed Excel spreadsheets, integrate with Outlook, export to Word, or use Microsoft Copilot, you'll need a paid plan.

Storage is a more pressing limitation for most people on OneNote's free plan. You only get 5 GB, and it's shared with other Microsoft apps. If all your notes are text, that's not a big deal, but if you're storing video, audio, and PDFs, you'll bump up against that limitation eventually.

When that happens, you can upgrade to Microsoft 365 Basic ($1.67/month, billed annually) for 100 GB of storage. Microsoft 365 Personal ($8.33/month, billed annually) gets you 1 TB of storage, the Office suite of desktop apps, and access to AI features through Copilot.

Notion's free plan for individuals gives you unlimited storage, as long as the files you upload are under 5 MB each. It's a pretty decent trade-off: I've used Notion's free plan for years, and when I occasionally hit the file size upload limit, I just use a compression service to shrink the file. Just know that if you add a second member to your free workspace, the unlimited storage benefit goes away and you'll be limited to 1,000 "blocks" of Notion content.

If you upgrade to Notion Plus, at $10/month per user (billed annually), you'll be able to upload file sizes up to 5 GB. You also get unlimited external guests, 30 days of version history, custom database automations, and unlimited charts and data visualizations.

Notion Business, at $20/month per user (billed annually), gives you access to Notion Agents, advanced permissions, meeting notes, dashboards, and enterprise search features.

Notion's AI is more capable; OneNote's is cheaper

Notion launched the first iteration of its AI tool in February 2023, just a few months after the release of ChatGPT, which made it one of the first productivity apps to add AI features. Since then, Notion AI has evolved from a writing assistant into an agent that can do multi-step tasks across your workspace. Notion's Pringles-esque AI avatar follows you wherever you go in the app, ready to create charts, build databases, and answer random questions.

Notion Agent is most useful when you're working with content that's already within your workspace. You can ask it to convert your notes into a task database, for example, or to update a whole series of pages with the same formatting style. It can also autofill database properties, so each new note gets a summary or tags automatically (a bit like Airtable's field agents).

To put it to the test, I asked Notion Agent to turn this set of messy notes into an organized content pipeline.

It did a surprisingly accurate job of turning a jumble of text into a clear project tracker. Notion Agent extracted every task from my notes and turned each one into an easy-to-read task card, complete with tags, a due date, and an owner. It also built a range of views into the database, including Pipeline, Calendar, and Ready to Publish.

Notion AI also makes everyday work easier by quickly surfacing the right information via AI search. For example, let's say you know the answers you're looking for are somewhere in your SOPs, but you don't quite know where. Just tell Notion something like "Check the @SOPs for what to tell customers who lose their password," and it'll source the answer you need, along with links pointing back to the original documents.

Free and Plus users only get a limited trial of Notion AI. On the Business plan ($20/user/month, billed annually), you get full access, and Notion AI can also reference data outside your workspace in connected apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and GitHub. You also get access to AI Meeting Notes, an AI meeting assistant, and Custom Agents, which can run on recurring triggers and handle things like morning briefs, email triage, social media planning, and other personal assistant-style tasks.

With OneNote, as long as you're on the Microsoft 365 Personal plan or higher ($8.33/month, billed annually), you'll get AI features via Copilot. On a work account, you'll need a separate Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

You can click the Copilot button in OneNote to write and summarize text, create to-do lists from your notes, or use certain notebooks as the source for AI-generated answers. And if you've activated Copilot across your other Microsoft products too, it can also pull information into OneNote from your Teams chats, emails, and Word documents.

In addition to the standard Copilot experience, you'll also find a feature called Copilot Notebooks built into OneNote. It's an AI-powered workspace that's intended to be fully grounded in whatever source documents you upload into it. But when I tested it, Copilot Notebooks failed hard at its primary purpose: it couldn't read my source doc, but instead of telling me, it just pulled a generic answer from its training data.

Copilot's other OneNote features are more niche. You can generate mind maps directly from your notebooks, for example, or create structured study guides and quizzes. It also understands handwritten notes. There's a lot to like if you're a student or educator, or if you already use Microsoft 365 for everything and you want a hassle-free way to access it all.

OneNote's AI features are much less ambitious than Notion's. That said, OneNote is less than half the price of Notion's Business plan, and you get access to lots of other Microsoft 365 apps too. So if all you need is a little AI help to write to-do lists and summarize notes, it's probably enough.

Both apps integrate with Zapier

Both Notion and OneNote have deep integrations with Zapier, which means you can connect them to thousands of other apps. You can use either app as a hub that pushes and pulls information to and from the rest of your tech stack, letting you build workflows that turn meeting recordings into notes, send notes to your to-do list, or automatically update your project management app.

Read more about how to automate Notion or how to automate OneNote.

OneNote vs. Notion: Which should you choose?

If you're still not quite sure which app makes sense for you, here are some final thoughts to help you decide.

Use OneNote if:

• You mainly want to take notes without getting overwhelmed by options

• You capture ideas in lots of formats, including handwriting, sketches, audio, and equations

• You want password-protected notes and foolproof offline access

• You already pay for Microsoft 365 with Copilot, and you want to easily reference data that's sitting in Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft apps

Use Notion if:

• You want to build your own system for organizing notes, projects, and docs

• You work with a team and need comments, mentions, and a knowledge base

• You want agents that can build pages, fill out database fields, and handle tasks and workflows autonomously

• You want a free plan with no limit on the number of pages or files you can add

Related reading:

• Automate your note-taking to turn ideas into action

• Notion vs. Evernote: Which app should you use?

• Notion vs. Roam: Which note-taking app should you use?

• How to create a new note in OneNote from a Notion database

• Craft vs. Notion: Which is best?

• How to export OneNote

This article was originally published in December 2022 by Miguel Rebelo. The most recent update was in November 2026.