Notion vs Evernote: Detailed Comparison
We take notes on many things — academics, building new skills, office meetings, cooking recipes, or just doodling around with different ideas.
So what if we have one great note-taking app that does it all for you?
Notion and Evernote are the two most popular note-taking apps today. Both come packed with a ton of features that make them helpful for different users.
In this article, we will compare the core note-taking features of Notion and Evernote so that you can decide what's best for you:
Notion takes a different spin on note-taking. It extends the regular note-taking abilities to manage projects, spreadsheets, databases, and so on. So it can be used by both teams and individuals. The app's focus seems to be on keeping all the work in one place like an information repository, similar to wikis.
Evernote on the other hand comes with a ton of text formatting and advanced note-taking options. It looks like a filing cabinet to organize your notebooks, upload all your important files, and keep them organized.
Curious to know more? Let’s do a one on one comparison based on your use case and look at a few essential features that help everyone:
Use Cases
For Students
Be it class or self-study, as a student, you need to take notes regularly. This is why we think organizing notes, text formatting, and to-do lists are important.
Notion has a few templates for things like reading list and course schedule to help you stay organized.
The tabular organization allows you to link notes and add customizations like a checklist, documents, time, and so on.
Notion also offers a simple folder organization compared to Evernote. You can create a page and add other pages under it. However, they don't behave same as folders.
You'll find the nested pages in the parent page. See the image below.
Evernote on the other hand allows you to add Notebooks as folders under which you can add your notes.
This type of folder organization is quite similar to that found on desktops. But on Evernote you cannot to create sub-folders under a Notebook folder. So unlike Notion where you can create many nested notebook folders, on Evernote you are limited with two levels of folder system.
Like Notion, Evernote also offers to-do, planners, and other scheduling lists to track you study. However, the templates on Notion are better than those on Evernote as they have more features for tracking, rating, and page linking.
Evernote stands apart with more options on its mobile application. You can scan notes, documents, or add audio notes in seconds.
Using Evernote you can add images and snippets from the web to your notes. Its Web Clipper is available for all major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc. On clicking on Evernote’s icon, you can choose the format: article, simplified article, full page, bookmark or screenshot to save with add tags and remarks, then save the clip.
Notion’s Web Clipper is currently available only for Chrome. And it is pretty basic with options only to save some text, images, and URL.
Both Notion and Evernote are great note-taking apps for students. If you need scheduling, tracking, and many subfolders, Notion is better for you. And incase you must clip content from web and scan documents for your learnings, Evernote is the better option for you.
For Teams
As a team, you need to collaboratively work on various assignments and projects. You would want to track progress, exchange messages, and share documents with your team members.
Let's compare some essential features of Notion and Evernote for teams. We’ll look particularly at project management, work chat, OKRs, and team wikis.
Notion takes inspiration from Kanban project management tool, wherein work is depicted at various stages of a process using cards. The assignment cards can be dragged and dropped across each column that represents a different stage of the work process. You can also add dates to any tasks to track them on a calendar.
Here a sample for application tracking on Notion:
There are five ways you can see information in Notion: Table, Board, Calendar, List and Gallery. Each view has its independent set of display advantages yet all work with the same information. In the navigation menu, the folders are arranged in tree structures, with each folder having a page which in turn can be nested into more folders and pages.
Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is a methodology that helps companies to align work goals with company goals and ensure everyone is working together on both goals in a systematic way. Notion offers a template to track OKRs that can be shared with all team members.
While technically you can build a project management or OKR tracking on Evernote, it would be more like force fitting because it lacks features.
The Work Chat on Evernote can be a useful feature to exchange documents and messages with the team members. This feature is also available on every platform like web, mobile, and tablet that. Evernote also offers out-of-the-box chat integration with some of the popular workplace chat applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Similar to Evernote, Notions also offers a native chat integration with Slack.
Both Notion and Evernote are good note-taking applications for teams. Notion offers a lot of flexibility in tracking, management, and document sharing. And Evernote supports a wide range of devices and browsers with features like web clipper, work chat, document scanning, and so on.
If you already have a project management application and need to share clipped and scanned documents, then Evernote is the right option. But in case you need a sort of all-in-one workspace that does more than documents then Notion is the best option.
Essential Features for Everyone
Tagging
Notion: Tags are colourful and local to each view or page.
Evernote: Tags are just of one grey color and are globally accessible in all notebooks.
Fun use case: In case you aren’t very specific with choosing your tag names and end up with numerous similar tags, Notion would make it look like this for you:
However the same thing if you try in Evernote, you will have to go five levels down in the notebook hierarchy (assuming ‘Angle>Desire to Collect’ is the topmost notebook) , to just to find the ‘Book of the Month Club’ from the above example.
Security
Evernote: would help you here with it’s additional security feature that enables you to encrypt individual notes with a passphrase.
Notion: doesn't offer this extra security layer of password protecting a page. You can just ‘lock a page’ to prevent accidental editing.
Naming
Notion: 2 pages or folder can have the same names and icons can be used to differentiate the two.
Evernote: 2 notes can have the same name but not two notebooks.
Table Formulas
A third-party integration at EATags can handle basic formulas in Evernote while Notion has the ability to create formulas with a familiar Excel-like format. To create a new formula in the latter, 4 options are available: Properties, Constants, Operators and Functions. But both applications lack advance features for table formulas.
Verdict
So if I ask which is a better note-taking app for you? Now you know there is no magic solution for all. It completely depends on what you want from it as both approach work and fulfill requirements differently to capture and prioritize ideas on the go while organizing your thoughts appropriately on revisiting.
Notion is a fast-growing note-taking app with refreshing graphics and easy-to-understand and flexible features. Evernote is a legend in the note-taking with its focus on text formatting, document scanning, clipping, and multi-device support.
ℹ️ This article was updated on January 8, 2021.
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