BenchRank
#19 in Notes & Knowledge ManagementUpdated 2026-08

Microsoft OneNote

by Microsoft OneNote · Cross-device digital notebook included with Microsoft 365

BenchRank score

50.2 — BenchRank score out of 100

Screenshots of Microsoft OneNote

Homepage · Microsoft OneNote

Homepage of Microsoft OneNote

Overview

OneNote is Microsoft's digital notebook for capturing notes, organising projects and keeping them in one place across devices. It supports sketching, annotation and highlighting, voice transcription, and sharing for collaboration. Copilot in OneNote takes prompts to draft plans, generate ideas, create lists and organise information.

Best for
Microsoft 365 subscribers who want a cross-device notebook for notes, sketches and shared projects.
Pricing
No standalone price is shown; OneNote comes with Microsoft 365, from £8.49/month for Personal up to £18.99/month for Premium on the UK site.
Runs on
WebWindows

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

  • Works on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets
  • Copilot can draft plans, make lists and organise notes
  • Sketching, annotation and voice transcription are built in
  • Every plan bundles 1 TB of cloud storage per person

Trade-offs

  • No standalone price; sold only inside a Microsoft 365 subscription
  • On Family, AI features are for the subscription owner only
  • Free trial needs a card and rolls into a 12-month paid subscription
  • Mobile app and feature availability varies by country and market

Pricing

Published plans and prices from Microsoft OneNote’s own pricing page.

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

  • MCP support

    Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.

  • Documentation

    Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.

  • Agent friendliness

    How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.

  • Pricing transparency

    Whether real prices are published, self-serve signup exists, and usage costs are knowable without a sales call.

  • Customer sentiment

    Third-party ratings, shrunk toward the catalogue mean by review volume and corroborated across independent sources.

  • Changelog

    A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.

  • Marketing site structure

    Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.

  • Page speed

    How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.

  • Operational trust

    Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

  • Openness

    Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.

  • Maintenance

    Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.

This doesn’t look right — report a problem with Microsoft OneNote’s score

Where this comes from

The Microsoft OneNote pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.

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