Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft's free-form notebook, free with a Microsoft account and synced through OneDrive

As of 30 August 2026, Microsoft OneNote is free to use. A note application where you click anywhere on an infinite page and type, draw or paste. Softwr lists it under Productivity. Microsoft OneNote is made by Microsoft Corporation, launched in 1975, available on Web, iOS, Android, macOS.

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Overview

What Microsoft OneNote does

OneNote is Microsoft's free-form note application. Notebooks contain sections, sections contain pages, and a page is a canvas rather than a document: you click anywhere and type, draw, paste an image or drop a file. It is free with a Microsoft account and included in Microsoft 365. Notebooks are stored as files in OneDrive for personal accounts or SharePoint for work accounts, which is how sync and sharing happen. There are clients for Windows, macOS, iPad and iPhone, Android and the browser, and pen input is treated as a first-class kind of content rather than an afterthought. The combination of ink and canvas is what keeps people. On a pen tablet it is the closest thing to paper that still searches, because Microsoft indexes handwriting, so a note scribbled in a meeting six months ago turns up when you search a word you wrote by hand. Commercially, its position is stronger still: it costs nothing and is already licensed wherever Microsoft 365 is, so it enters an organisation without a purchase decision, without an evaluation and without an owner, and accumulates years of content nobody planned for. It is used by students, meeting note takers, anyone with a pen tablet, and organisations already inside Microsoft 365. The trade-off is the storage format, and it is a serious one. Notebooks are a proprietary structure tied to OneDrive or SharePoint, and export is a manual, section-by-section operation producing a OneNote file, a PDF or a Word document. There is no markdown export, no structured export, and nothing that reconstitutes a canvas in another tool. A notebook that has quietly absorbed five years of a team's thinking is, in practice, immovable, and that is the price of the tool that cost nothing.

What people use it for

Handwritten notes on a pen tablet that you still need to find months later by searching for a word you wrote.
Lecture or meeting notes where a recording needs to line up with what you were typing at the time.
A team already inside Microsoft 365 that needs a shared notebook without buying anything or seeking approval.
Collecting mixed material such as screenshots, clippings and sketches on one page, where a document editor would force a linear structure.

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Microsoft OneNote.

Notes live in a proprietary notebook format on OneDrive or SharePoint and the only exports are a OneNote file, a PDF or a Word document, produced section by section, so a large notebook is effectively unmovable to any other tool.
Personal notebooks consume OneDrive quota, which is 5 GB on a free Microsoft account, so a notebook full of scans, images and recordings quietly exhausts the whole account including the space Outlook needs for mail.
Sync happens at section level and conflicts are resolved by placing both versions on the page, so simultaneous edits to a large or media-heavy section produce duplicated content that somebody has to merge by hand.
Search behaves differently across clients, so what the Windows desktop app finds inside handwriting, images and attachments is not necessarily what the browser or mobile version finds, and the same query gives different answers on different devices.
There is no relational structure, no database and no properties, so anything that needs a table of records with fields has to be maintained by hand or moved elsewhere, and OneNote's own tables cannot be queried or filtered.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Microsoft OneNote

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

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Capabilities

Features

Free-form page canvas
Type, draw or paste anywhere on the page rather than in a linear flow
Notebook hierarchy
Notebooks divided into sections and pages, with sub-pages
Indexed handwriting
Ink is recognised and searchable alongside typed text
Audio recording
Recordings anchored to the position in your notes where they were made
Web clipper and Outlook capture
Send pages from the browser or emails from Outlook into a notebook
Shared notebooks
Collaborative access through OneDrive or SharePoint permissions
Cross-platform clients
Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and browser
Tags and cross-notebook search
Flag items and search across every notebook you have open
No licence cost
Free with a Microsoft account and included in Microsoft 365

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is OneNote really free?

Yes. The application is free with a Microsoft account, with no time limit and no feature gate. What you may end up paying for is the OneDrive storage the notebooks consume.

Can I keep notebooks off Microsoft's cloud?

The Windows desktop app can keep local notebooks, but they will not sync to other devices and any shared access requires OneDrive or SharePoint.

How do I get my notes out?

Section by section as a OneNote file, a PDF or a Word document. A OneNote package preserves a whole notebook but only for another copy of OneNote. Third-party converters exist and the page layout usually does not survive them.

Which version should I install?

Microsoft consolidated onto a single OneNote application on Windows after retiring the Store version, so install the one distributed with Microsoft 365 rather than looking for an alternative.

Behind it

Who makes Microsoft OneNote

Company: Microsoft Corporation
Based in: Redmond, WA

Timeline