Microsoft OneNote pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Microsoft OneNote (onenote.com) is a note-taking app. The app is free with a Microsoft account (5 GB OneDrive storage); Copilot AI and more storage come with Microsoft 365 Personal, Family or Premium subscriptions.. Free plan: Free app with unlimited notebooks, synced via 5 GB of free OneDrive storage; no Copilot in-app.
What Microsoft OneNote costs
- 1 user: free (OneNote is free; notebooks sync via OneDrive and the free 5 GB covers the ~1 GB scenario.)
- 1 user + AI: $19.99/mo (Microsoft 365 Personal ($9.99/mo) includes only 60 AI credits/month, below 100 requests; Microsoft 365 Premium ($19.99/mo monthly) has 'extensive' (fair-use) Copilot usage.)
Plan compared: Free (Microsoft account, 5 GB OneDrive). Prices are for one person on monthly billing (annual-only plans divided by 12): the cheapest plan that keeps about 2,000 notes synced between a computer and a phone with no caps, and the cheapest plan that also includes the app's own AI. A free plan counts as $0 only when it covers the scenario without note, device, upload or storage caps.
Microsoft OneNote price hikes
- Microsoft 365 Personal rose from $6.99 to $9.99/mo as Copilot was added · Jan 16, 2025
Microsoft raised Microsoft 365 Personal from $6.99/mo ($69.99/yr) to $9.99/mo ($99.99/yr) and Family from $9.99 to $12.99/mo, bundling Copilot (60 AI credits/month) into OneNote and other apps. The free OneNote app was unaffected.
Alternatives to Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft OneNote is the cheapest note-taking app we track at 1 user with synced notes. The others:
Microsoft OneNote alternatives: 2 note-taking apps compared, at every size.
Every change we logged
- Jan 16, 2025 · Price increase: Microsoft raised Microsoft 365 Personal from $6.99/mo ($69.99/yr) to $9.99/mo ($99.99/yr) and Family from $9.99 to $12.99/mo, bundling Copilot (60 AI credits/month) into OneNote and other apps. The free OneNote app was unaffected.
Sources
Pricing page: microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Prices are from Microsoft's US compare page. The 60 AI credits/month on Personal comes from Office Watch (March 2026), since Microsoft's page doesn't list the numbers. Microsoft 365 Basic has no AI and isn't needed for 1 GB.