this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Having used both OneNote & Obsidian extensively, OneNote is like a children's colouring book in comparison IMO.
Not that it's bad, it serves plenty well for most people.
I think OneNote is potentially a good middle ground between something like Obsidian and something much simpler like Google Keep, but for me it adds complexity without adding enough functionality to justify it.
Not an unfair comparison, though I find Obsidian overly complex/convoluted. But I think that comes with the territory when your design philosophy is very open extensibility and using standard document types rather than a proprietary binary format like ON.
Plus OneNote is 20 years old now, was extended (after MS bought it) to integrate with SharePoint (maybe it was designed that way, I don't remember), so really is a 20th century piece of software. There are add-ons that greatly extend its capability (Onetastic, Gem, etc). So in a business environment the full desktop app with SharePoint is pretty impressive. To it's credit, I have 15+ years and gigabytes of data in it, and have never (knock on wood) lost anything, moving it across perhaps a dozen systems.
All that said... I'm moving to Joplin, lol. Trying to get away from dependence on apps I don't control (and I want a notebook that works on Linux too).
To sync to mobile devices, OneNote requires Onedrive (or setup your own SharePoint server, uggh). At least with Obsidian/Joplin, etc, I get to manage how things sync. And if I'm happy with the features in my current setup, I never have to change anything. Never know when MS will fuck up Onedrive sync, requiring a version of OneNote I can't run, or has issues.