What can Evernote do that can't be done by OneNote? If anything, free OneNote (or some other equivalent) killed it.
I don't see what is special about Evernote that guarantees its viability.
I don't see what is special about Evernote that guarantees its viability.
Evernote is better for filing documents / archiving things - whether those are PDFs, web pages, business cards, physical mail, etc. OneNote is better for free-form notetaking and editing. Each page feels like an open canvas.
In particular: I can't drop a file directly onto the OneNote icon to archive a file - I have to make a "page" and drop it into the page's canvas. OneNote doesn't provide tagging. It enforces a certain organization that only makes sense for notes (notebooks > sections > pages). Attachments always feel like a second-class citizen inside of a page (which isn't to say OneNote's attachment handling is wrong, it's just designed for storing handouts in class alongside your handwriting, as opposed to archiving every piece of paper on your desk).
In my use case, I use Evernote (with a ScanSnap scanner) to archive every piece of physical mail I receive. It's great that I can just throw in a pile of mail, push one button, let the scanner bundle it into PDFs/JPEGs/contact cards as appropriate, apply metatadata, and OCR/index it. I tried to move this workflow to OneNote, and couldn't get anything as smooth.
I use both. I use OneNote for notes in class, and Evernote for long-term archival/recall of everything else.
(Personally, I think that DevonThink is a closer replacement to Evernote than OneNote is.)
I now store all my scans in Google Drive and use the OCR that comes with the ScanSnap. It works just as well, the search is Google fast and I can share them easily.
With OneNote, he’d have to have some sort of filing system to organize that. With Evernote, he knew it was there and he could search for it if he needed it. That’s not to say you can’t search in OneNote, just that the archiving model of Evernote works far better for his workflow.
Both are free. Both do about 90% of what Evernote Basic does.
OneNote syncs to OneDrive - so if you have O365 your storage space is quite large, whereas free users only have 5GB (though compared to Evernote's 25MB this is still plenty)
(I use OneNote anyway, since it's so much better then Evernote for me, it's just kind of annoying given that I switch between Mac and Windows a lot.)
Also, the free (non-Office) version of OneNote is missing some features, I think.
Is it? I've been using Excel cross-platform for a while and I haven't found a missing feature yet. (Although some keyboard shortcuts are annoyingly altered.) I don't use the rest of the Office suite as much, but OneNote is the only outlier I've seen personally.
For some reason only MS seems to create products that fall flat on their face so quickly.