I use both for different purposes after trying to make either one handle every type of note I process. Both of them can do most of the same things so by saying I use one for something doesn't mean I'm implying that the other can't do it. Personal note-taking is very subjective. Here is what I've arrived at after several years of trial and error.

Evernote is a quick-capture of information from wherever I am. Web, pc, smartphone. Usually, this is just 'reference' information and quick working lists. Like receipts, user manuals, reading lists, good beer, etc.

OneNote is used for deep-thinking and big projects. This is because the user interface, when you are actually working with the text, pics, outlines, drawings etc, is FAR superior to Evernote's. There simply is none of that klunky formatting frustration that you get from simple web-based interfaces. Outlining is much smoother and moving little snippets of data around within a note is incredibly smooth and intuitive. Basically what this means is you can choose to embed notes within notes and can link to individual parts of notes, not just a note itself. Evernote finally introduced direct note linking but it still just links to the note, not to a item within the note. ((http://www.quepublishing.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1684320&seqNum=2) Also, building fantastic one-note templates is quite nice, I'm pretty sure Evernote doesn't have templates. If I was in college, I'd definitely keep different types of templates for different type of lectures (like math vs history). Take a look at the one-note screenshot here http://www.techolar.com/windows/microsoft-office-2010-wordexcelaccessoutlook-screenshots/ ....yes, you can make Evernote have a screen full of grouped links like that in a note and be functionally identical, but it won't look nearly as nice and be as fun to mess with.

Now, for many people, it's overkill to need that luxury of beautiful formatting and advanced linking. I think a good analogy would be using a post-it note to jot a phone number down vs using a Moleskine notebook. You know about Moleskine notebooks right? They cost like $15 and don't do anything more than a $1 spiral notebook...but many people swear by them as personal notebooks simply because it feels much more refined to use. So they have a sense of seriousness and deep contemplation as they carefully choose what to write and look-up in that Moleskine vs the throw-away-but-convenient jot on the post-it.

Evernote is the pile of sticky notes and file cabinet full of reference info. OneNote is the collection of Moleskines organized by topic on your shelf.

OneNote's core purpose is to make the look and feel of your digital thinking space as elegant as possible and give you great hierarchical ordering options. Evernote's is to be able to quickly capture and retrieve everything, all the time, and not worry much about ordering. This is why it's hard for OneNote to be nice to deal with on a smartphone and for Evernote to feel nice on a computer. You have to give up something either way. I've chosen to not give up either!

I love that can snap a pic of a receipt or user manual and throw it into Evernote without having to think about what notebook/folder/tab/section to drop it in. I just know that one day I may need to return that crap to Target so a quick 'target' search will do. But for my notes on big projects and life's work....I don't want those in the same pile as 'pic of beer that I liked'.

It's true that most of our data can now not be 'filed' but just thrown into the same bin and be 'searched' for. In terms of effort to store and fetch, filing is better than a random pile (one to one vs random), tagging is better than filing (many to one), and search trumps tagging (everything to one). But some things are still nice to keep in a hierarchy. For me, that'd be things like a journal, life plans, research projects, novels (if I was a writer), etc. But if I need to look up a part number on that lawnmower I bought two years from the manual I scanned and threw away, Evernote will show it to me in like 5 seconds without me having to remember where I filed it. So would OneNote but it would have taken a bit longer to scan and forget.

Briefly on other features:

If you use outlook and want to link to-do's within your notes, OneNote rocks.

Evernote's ubiquity is much better, its mostly the same on pc, web, phone. I do sync OneNote to my Android via http://www.mobilenoter.com/ but it isn't quite as snappy as the native Evernote app. So with both, you can get to your notes from anywhere, the friction to hop into and out of OneNote is higher, but the niceness once you are in is better.

I use Keep for quick reminders that are time or location specific. Remember when I get home... It only works well on mobile devices. But it's sticky note look & feel, limits how much one can easily use of each note.
Evernote - I jokingly refer to it as My Brain - works everywhere and keeps detailed notes, clippings, etc. I can go from a browser on my computer, to the application on my computer, to my laptop, to my phone and tablet. I can email notes in from anywhere. I can also log in from anywhere on any browser and get my notes. It will even remind me, but by date & time. Not great for "When I get home".
If I lost Keep, I would only be mildly annoyed. If I lost Evernote, I would be losing my memory.

I’m a paying user of Evernote, and also something of a fanboy for Google products.

My rules of thumb for distinguishing between whether something belongs in Evernote or Keep hinge on a few factors:

• Is it important that I can get to this note quickly, like a grocery list? Keep.
• Is it important that I share this with someone else (again, a grocery list shared with my wife)? Keep.
• Do I know what I want to do with this or am I just grabbing it the way we used to bookmark things on the web? Evernote.
• Is this for a research project, including a household purchase or writing project? Evernote.
• Do I want to be reminded about this at a certain time — like a post-it note that grabs my attention intelligently? Keep (or a reminder in Google Inbox, which is about the same thing).

As you can see, the cases for Evernote could easily be overtaken by Keep, and as much as I like Evernote, I’m afraid the value of my subscription (though not the price) has been slightly declining.

UPDATED: Google removed location as a notification trigger for Keep. Bummer.

Thanks for asking! Let's see:

One of my favorite things about Evernote is that I never feel like I'm stuck in a particular organizational scheme. I change my mind about how to organize things every few months and it's easy to move things around.

Mostly, I don't rely on organization in Evernote; I just search for what I'm looking for. There are some new features coming out soonish that'll make that really nice.

As of the time of this answer, I have about 9,000 notes in my Evernote account divided among 45 notebooks. However, the majority of these notes are in my single, default notebook.

I use the other notebooks to control sharing. I have a "board" stack, for example, which has a notebook for each of the past few board meetings. Each notebook is shared with my board members and management team. I have a notebook called "The Things I Ate" (with about 700 notes) which I share more broadly. You'll never guess what's in it. I have a stack for conferences with a separate notebook for some of the major conferences I attend containing meeting notes, business cards, encounter entries from Hello, etc. I have an "autographs" notebook which has ebooks signed by authors I meet (take a screenshot of the front page in Kindle or iBooks, sign with Skitch). I have other shared notebooks for travel, presentation materials, etc.

In addition to my own notebooks, I have linked about 30 shared notebooks into my account. These are mostly from Evernote coworkers and have things like design assets, status reports, etc. We have an employee directory that's automatically generated as a shared notebook and stored in a Peek-friendly format so people can study up on new names and faces. There's a takeout-menu notebook that somebody keeps updated. The new Activity View on the Mac and Windows desktop clients really helps with shared notebooks by showing me when people update stuff. That's going to get a lot better soon as well.

I don't use many tags. I have a tag called "want" that I slap on things I want to buy; mostly webclips but sometimes pictures from the real world. I have a "travel" tag for quick access to itineraries, travel notes, etc. I had a "@todo" tag, but realized that was a hack and stopped using it. We're just going to make that functionality a first-level feature of the app instead. I have about 20 other tags which I use intermittently. We have users with thousands of tags, so I know I'm not really representative of tag use.

I'd estimate that about 30% of my notes are webclips, 30% are from Food, Hello, Skitch and Penultimate, 20% are typed in text notes, 15% are files and other stuff and 5% are forwarded emails. I think that adds up to 100%.

Hope that helps.

- p

I use both as both have their strengths and weaknesses.

On the Diigo side, what I really like is the easy way to store thousands of links and overall find them again when I need them. I have around 7000 links and I can find nearly all of them in few seconds. The tag cloud helps and the filtering options are neat, adding or removing tags is super easy. The administration of tags works very well even though the access to it could be improved, its localization is not obvious for new comers. I can also get an RSS feed for every search I do in my library or in some else's library (individual or group) so I can stay updated on subjects that matter to me. The overlay feature is also very handy, for personal use I don't have to read my articles twice, and for team work it is very nice to share important points with colleagues plus comment and/or coordinate using sticky notes. However, the multi-platforms experience should be improved. I combine iPhone, iPad and laptop and on the mobile devices, the apps and browser tagging bars reduce the quality of the experience I have on my laptop.

On the Evernote side, the multi-platforms experience is one of the best I experienced so far. It is very easy to capture new content from what ever device or browser, they even offer an app for your Mac or PC. It is the perfect tool when you are on the road. I also love the build-in caracter recognition feature for photos. But, I think the search by tag could be improved, the way tags are managed is less efficient than the way Diigo handle them and here I'm not talking about finding something when you have hundreds of items, I'm talking about thousands. Evernote is also less open to collaboration if you don't have a premium account.

Today, I really need both tools and use them everyday in combination with wiki websites in which I often integrate Diigo RSS feeds.

These two applications have different focuses. Which one is better depends on your actual need.

Simplenote is much easier and simpler to use in terms of writing, because it's plain text only with moderate formatting support by using Markdown syntax. You will not be distracted by formatting and thus can focus on writing itself.

Evernote on the other hand, supports more sophisticated formatting such as inserting pictures, attachments, etc. It also supports searching text in your attached pictures and pdf files. So it's very handy for you to collect, store and search your documents.

Personally, I think Simplenote is more suitable for writing whereas Evernote is more suitable for storing and reading web clips, personal scanned documents, etc.

I think the charme of Evernote is its flexibility - so what´s "better" may be entirely different for everybody. But I will share ways of using Evernote which I find incredibly useful:

​* Working Hub for Articles, Letters or Projects
When I have ideas for letters or articles I will note down the sentences in my mind and safe the note in the notebook assigned to the project or context. With the new reminders I can also remind myself to review the text and if possible finalize it. I used the same method also for bigger projects like to finetune a concept for a website over multiple iterations. What´s great: You have older versions at hand. You can work whereever you are. You can organize inspirations around the piece in progress (screenshots of websites, ideas for design and categorisation, ..) You can even let other people review or rework what you´ve done and showcase the finished project in a nice webinterface which is accessible with just a link.

​ * Archive of Travel Documents
I have notebooks assigned to everything I would need on travels: Copies of passport and drivers license, vaccination information and the results of my latest medical checkups. I will have there my travelinsurance, my flight itinary and tickets. And even the description of the sideeffects of the drugs I take with me on the trip. I will have another notebook with recommendations where to go and whom to meet and a third one for all information I encounter while travelling from other travellers or in the internet (which busses go from here to there, which guesthouses are well and bad, what to pay for a taxi from the airport, etc.).

​* Inspiration
I have a stack called inspiration for everything I would like to get back to later: Great books, movies, music, software,... Whenever I see a book quoted I like to read I´ll photograph the paragraph and send it by mail in the books-notebook. Over time I have accumulated a pretty good ideabase of what to read or see next - with the context why I thought so.

​* Bookmarks
When the founders of Youtube bought Delicous from Yahoo one could see what could happen to a reliable and loved service within weeks of bad management: People where not able to access bookmarks for days and they implemented a new layer of categorization which people used for weeks and then turned it off again with all categories made being lost. As a delicous user for many years with thousands of bookmarks I was quite irritated and looking for alternatives. There were none. I knew the new system should be open (speak: import, export), easy to use and to maintain, good to search, fast. None of the bookmark services in the market could deliver this at that time.
Evernote did. I found a way to transfer all bookmarks to evernote without a big hassle and have them now sorted in subject specific notebooks. Then I found out that with the Browser-Addon you can safe excerpts of websites with the bookmarks quite easy.

* One Place to Search
I try to put all reference I may want to use in Evernote (that was also a reason to choose Evernote as a bookmark agent so I will find bookmarks and accompanying notes with one single search). What less people know: You can use the Chrome Addon (perhaps other browsers will work too) to add Evernote results to Google Searches on your home computer. So when you search google you will find related notes and bookmarks. If that´s not fancy..

​* Business Cards
OK, that´s an easy one. But I have a lot of business cards of guesthouses, shops, restaurants, cafés, doctors or theaters I don´t need desperately, but it may come handy to remember the information later. I will just photograph them (with Snap FE for iOS) and they will be filled automatically in Evernote where the OCR ensures I will find the restaurant again when I visit Berlin.

That are a few of my best practices. Curious of what others have to share.

Is Evernote better than Anki?

I confess I don’t understand the question — the two apps serve quite different purposes. It would be like asking whether Word is better than Excel, or something.

Evernote, as I understand it, is for keeping notes that you may want to refer to. You could keep shopping lists, journal entries, minutes of a meeting, or whatever. Some notes are ephemeral (like the shopping list, which may be irrelevant after you’ve come back home), while some may be longer lasting.

Anki, on the other hand, is a spaced-repetition system for memorising and retaining information (whether that’s vocabulary in a foreign language, matching names to faces, or remembering the molecular weights of the various elements of the periodic table).

For the sort of think you would want to use Anki for, Evernote would be a bad substitute, and vice versa.

Disclaimer: I’ve only used Evernote to keep notes so far. Perhaps under its hood it also has a great spaced-repetition system that I haven’t uncovered yet because I haven’t needed it. I’m fairly sure Anki would be awful at handling your shopping list or meeting minutes, though — it would be round plug square hole.

I think you are right - over-tagging is a common problem with Evernote. I used to have hundreds of tags and subconsciously I used to wonder why. They, when I started using Evernote to implement Getting Things Done I took a deep breath and deleted nearly all of them. And it's been fine - because of the search feature.

Now, with GTD and Evernote, around 20 tags are essential plus one for each project and that's about it.

Well, relatively: I have 30 or so extra tags. And I am rigorous about deleting any I can.

The thing is, if you have a lot of them you can't remember if you tag pubs you want to remember in London: "Pubs: London", or "London Pubs". So you end up have different tags with the same purpose. Which somewhat defeats the object.

But it's worth having a tag for that. A search for "pub" will bring up many words containing pub, and London is in lots of notes.

Other tags I find useful are a general Travel tag; Film, and Music for movies and songs to watch/listen to: Brighton dining, London Dining, Sussex dining; Theatre. You can see how those types o fitems would be hard to pull up in a search and be sure you have everything.

But, as I say, I edit viciously, and get by with about 30.

The other thing I do is add extra words into a note that I might search on, when creating it. So I make sure I might make sure I have GTD in a note containing the phrase Getting Things Done. You could have a tag: but I prefer not to.

Cheers

Malc

For me, it’s OneNote. The only thing it doesn’t do that I would like is timed reminders. Other than that, all my daily todo items, poem and essay drafts, budgets, etc., are in OneNote. I can easily search for any note from the past. I can search for information in images and recordings - OneNote will easily find them.

The one thing in OneNote that saves me almost as much time as the ability to search everywhere? The ability to see at a glance which pages have things to do on them. (How? Add a todo box to front of the page title. It will show in the page list. Then you can find the things that need to be done immediately.

Another productivity hack in OneNote? Pasting content from the web includes the link to the page it came from. Makes it really easy to get back to the source information when writing papers, essays, letters, etc. For me personally, combining the todo box with this option let’s me quickly find any writing prompt response that isn’t finished yet.

Tags are a useful way of organizing a series of notes into a sub-topic, where each note in the sub-topic does not contain a word that would pop up in a notebook-wide search. They are also useful for tracking information that is spread across multiple notebooks.

A past Evernote podcast addressed this topic directly, and the hosts described tags as being useful for organizing information within topics that aren't broad enough to require their own notebook. Think 'vegetarian' for notes within a Recipes notebook, or 'Expenses' for documents you might use to put together an expense report from within a Work notebook.

If you were gathering information about tablet computers, your notes would have words like "iPad" and "Playbook" and "Galaxy Tab" in them -- but not necessarily a word like "tablet" that would ensure they all pop up in every search. A search for 'tablet' might also bring up false positives -- a doctor's note instructing you to take two tablets a day of a particular medication, for example.

Tags allow you to review all of your notes at on a given subject at once, or see them at a glance. In the above example, by adding the tag 'tablet' to your notes on the iPad and its competitors, you will then be able to click the tag in Evernote's sidebar and all your associated notes will materialize for easy scanning.

That said: There's no reason to create tags for topics you don't regularly return to, and creating a glut of them will clutter up your sidebar. As with most software, the fewer tags you can get away with using, the better.

Hey, thanks for R2A.

I have not used Evernote so I can’t comment on it, but I have used Notion for awhile, so I can say that it's a great app for note-taking, tracking habits, or anything for which you need to jot points down, do the planning, see your improvements, good integration across various devices and many more features.

Notion app has served all the features which I needed, and mostly I use “Toggles” in the pages as it looks less cluttered and we can adorn pages by adding different colors in different toggles.

Here is a Screenshot from my Notion app

To make the Notion simpler for you, I’m adding a link (8 minutes tutorial) created by Notion itself

I hope, I’ve answered your query.

Thanks. Have a great day :-)

If you find this article useful then upvote it, comment on it and share it with others.

What makes a note well-organized and readable is highly context sensitive, and at the same time it's not really any different from the kinds of rules you would follow when taking notes with any other application (or a paper notebook).

Above all, it's most important that the note is useful and readable to YOU (or those you share the notes with).

I'm curious about what your use case is with these notes. Most of my Evernote notes aren't so much notes as they are snippets of information, a file, or image (or sometimes some combination of all the above). I've got recipes in Evernote, I've got receipts, I've got funny images, canned email responses, header files, you name it!

Honestly, my best recommendation is to not let your notes get too big. Break them up into many small ones, and group multiple small groups into a notebook if need be. Now that we have notebook stacks, you can create tons of sub-notebooks without feeling too bad.

In terms of notebook layout, follow outlines. Here are a couple links to my own notes that I think are pretty good:
http://www.evernote.com/shard/s6/sh/dc870bb2-5f39-4534-9c29-0c2d73c88d03/1a1284c65f57b67c8ae160ee97b2a1a0

http://www.evernote.com/shard/s6/sh/edd0b9c4-2488-461f-b096-03c2bbe1e2e8/f7932e2a52cc2952293614f80d8054a2

It took me a long time to actually find notes that I sat down and wrote. I don't do a lot of meeting notes, and I'm largely just using Evernote as a place for me to dump information I know is important but I don't think I'll remember it on my own.

The best thing about using simplenote is the number of clients it supports. For example in PC , the desktop client ResophNote store your notes as plain text files in any of the folder you prefer, which gives you the option to use dropbox folders which will then further expand your note storing options plus numerous note taking applications that works with dropbox. Simplenote is fast to add notes and search is fast. I use it to store notes that contains mostly bits of text, like shopping list or phone number or warranty informations.

Evenote on other hand is what you make out of it. I use it to keep my journal, recipies, web clippings, photos of hand written notes, photos of my drawings, warranty informationa(just snap a photo), reciepts, pdfs and docs. It is the ultimate tool if you want to go paperless.

In short if you just take text notes and want a portable system then it's simplenote. But if you are anything like me , from clipping blog posts to read later to web templates you like, then no doubt , go for Evernote.

General agreement with the other answers here. I have both Simplenote and Evernote installed on my desktop. I have 22k Evernote notes, which aren't going anywhere else real soon.

Simple note is less resource-intensive if I want to make a quick note - and I can still save the content to Evernote later. Some stuff just stays in SN because it's scratchpad reminders and working notes that I'll discard in a couple of days. Because it's current, it's handy to have right under my nose, rather than have to click around or search for it - even though that only takes a second. SN is my quick go-to note-taker. Evernote is the archive and file store.

The best way to find out which better suits your needs is to start out with Simplenote - if you never have the need to search for anything, or the wish to lay out your notes with more style or media content, that will probably be fine. If you do need more, just add Evernote. :)

This is a really great question! As the author of both the bestselling Evernote and Springpad productivity eBooks, I can tell you that my inbox has been overloaded as of late with questions as to which service they should use - Evernote 5.0 or Springpad?

In particular, I've been getting a plethora of comments about how the new Evernote 5.0 for Mac and iPad took several cues from Springpad! Even a subtle glance at Twitter will show you that there are scores of people saying how the new Evernote looks just like the new Springpad; that Evernote has to appeal more to the masses who love the visual layouts of both Springpad and Pinterest. People like visual appeal and I believe Evernote is just now picking up on this one.

But, what's interesting - and what I hear so often now - is that there is lack of UI consistency across Windows, Android, BlackBerry and Mac/iOS devices, which therefore it makes it more difficult to use; another reason people are going to Springpad now as well.

The shortest answer is that it really depends on your personal taste. What works for me, may not work for you. You may decide to go all in with Evernote (the reason I wrote my first book) or find a hybrid approach between the two or any other service for your tasks, for that matter. For instance, you might love Evernote for its OCR capabilities, and integration with the Fujistsu ScanSnap Scanner, but want to use Springpad for everything else. The best part about productivity is that it is all very personal and that's what I enjoy so much about this space.

But, here's the best advice I can give you all: ask yourself what few things must go right & what must you have in order for you have an online repository to help you get things done? Start there at the 50' foot level.

Then, dig deeper:
1) Do I need notebooks and tags?
2) Do I like a visual layout or a WIndows Explorer hierarchy?
3) Do I like static notes or "smarter notes"?
4) Do I want a place to create tasks and once checked, you can hide them?
5) Do I want to be able to create checklists and then once items are checked off, I can hide them?
6) Do I want the tool to remind me of tasks and other reminders?
7) Do I want the ability to add events that'll integrate with Google Calendar?
8) Do I want to be able to go paperless and scan documents that'll go right into the app?
9) Do I need the ability to OCR scanned docs to search against what I've scanned?
10) Do I want an ecosystem of 3rd party integrations to make the tool more useful such as scanning apps, handwriting apps, drawing apps, QuickOffice, etc?
11) Do I want to share with team members, clients & family? Consider that Springpad is free and to edit notes in Evernote "sharee" must have a Premium membership when sharing.
12) Do you want to receive notifications about activity in shared notebooks?
13) Do I want the ability to just create a note and leave the app?

There's a good starting point for you. Once you've really analyzed what is most important to you, you can begin to make smart choices as to which tool is best for you. But once you decide - definitely stick with it!

Happy to help answer any other specifics as always.

I tried both Springpad and Evernote, and both have their pros and cons, but I didn't want to use both because I figured that would be redundant. So I sacrificed the beauty of Springpad for the more robust Evernote. I'd try SP every once in awhile because it was so darn cool looking (I'm an Art Director and manager of branding) so the aesthetics of SP far outpaced the blandness of Evernote, but EN had so much more of the cloud and a desktop version going for it. I FINALLY found how to use both without feeling torn. Because SP has a cool way to visually organize the 'visual' parts of my note collecting (books, movies, travel, clothes, design inspiration, photography) I use SP for these things and I keep Evernote for the more straightforward data and notekeeping (records, files, taxes, research, lists, articles, etc.) and I am now happy using both for their strengths. I like how I can customize the look and layout of my visual notes in Springpad; I like the robust capability of Evernote for just my more mundane notes and records. These don't need to look pretty.

Let me suggest using Evernote through a chatbot. If you’re used to using Facebook Messenger, I’ve created a free chatbot that lets you connect to your Evernote account, list your notes, create new ones and search your notes.

The reason this is a cool way to use Evernote is that it’s faster. If you already use Messenger, it’s probably already conveniently located on your home screen, and creating a note is as quick as sending a photo or text to the bot. The bot gives you options to add labels, a title, etc., but if you just send it something and then put your phone in your pocket, it will create a new note after a little while!

The search feature is also pretty cool - it uses Evernote’s search, but if (and only if) that comes up empty, this bot uses a cool semantic search to guess which notes you’re looking for, based on labels you’ve given your notes. So, if you have a note labeled “salmon recipe”, and you search for “fish”, Evernote won’t find it - but this bot will!

It’s free, so give it a try: Tags, and tap “Message” to start.

I am really interested in the answers here...

Here is my take.

Catch -
I love the nimbleness of the app and the ability to tag. I use it as my private lifeblog with the option to share to my social networks if I want.

It do doesn't do as much as springpad or evernote, but it is just darn quick and simple for capturing notes and quick photos.

The Android widget is great for adding a note and a quick photo.

Evernote -
I use Evernote as my note taking and file cabinet app. Meeting Notes, and important docuements or papers are stored in Evernote.

You can also do everything that you can do in Catch, but I find myself liking this app for more "busier" work. Meeting Notes, File Cabinet, etc...

Springpad -
Springad can do everything that Catch can do and Evernote. The visual appearance of the web app and mobile apps is the best by far. It handles movies, recipes, business, and some other things well. They just recently launched an improved Android widget, but it seems a bit slow. The Catch camera capture is much quicker than the Springpad capture and requires more steps in order to simply capture a picture.

Summary -
Evernote has it's place for me, as my file cabinet and note taker. The other two, I find myself going back and forth on for my more subtle uses of Life Blogging.