After I destroyed what credibility I had left with the Open Source community last week, gushing over Office 2010 and, in particular, OneNote, a Mac user emailed me and asked if I knew of any cross-platform tools that were similar to OneNote. I figured it was worth taking a step back from my love of OneNote and poking around to see what I could find.
As it turns out, there are a lot of applications that work well across browsers or in the cloud for taking notes. Although none, in my opinion, work as well or as intuitively as OneNote, all of the applications listed below are either free and/or open source and will do the trick in many settings. In fact, if you're looking for a note-taking App, they're all worth a look. Just because OneNote works best with my little brain, others may find software devoted to mind-mapping or that follows more of a wiki format works better for their particular brains.
Type | Name | OS | Summary |
Text/Freestyle | Jarnal | Windows, Mac, Linux (it works and looks best on Windows and Linux) |
The Note Taking Tool Windows, Mac, Linux
Evernote Windows, Mac, and iPad/iPod
Mind-Mapping FreeMind Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
Compendium Windows, Mac OS X, Linux Based upon Freemind, but with significantly expanded collaboration capabilities and a steeper learning curve Freeplane Windows, Mac OS X, Linux A fork of Freemind that can run from a USB stick XMind Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
VUE Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
Wiki-style Wikidpad (this is a link to the Windows installer as other links appear to be broken) Cross-platform, but requires extensive setup outside Windows
ZuluPad Windows and Mac OS X
OneNote will remain my notetaking/life organization/brainstorming/thought-catcher application of choice, but I can get cheap academic licenses. Would I feel the same if I had to pay full retail? That might be a little tougher sell since the applications above, particularly Evernote and XMind, have a lot of value and achieve many of the same functions (as well as some new functions). However, I think that for most cases where I wasn't actively looking at a specific mind-mapping tool, OneNote, even at full retail, would still be the one for me. Evernote is a close second and I'll spend some more time with it for a more thorough comparison. Let me know if I've missed any important pieces of free software that should be included in the list.