Linwood Butterfly vs Microsoft OneNote
Price, platforms and features side by side. The table says where each price was read and when.
Linwood Butterfly
Open-source handwriting and sketching app with an infinite canvas
Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft's free digital notebook for typed, inked and audio notes
Where they differ
- Linwood Butterfly is free. Microsoft OneNote starts at $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year (Microsoft 365 Personal).
- Only Linwood Butterfly lists a Linux app.
- Only Microsoft OneNote lists an iOS app.
- Only Microsoft OneNote lists a browser extension.
- Linwood Butterfly is open source and self-hostable, according to its own site.
- Linwood Butterfly also covers whiteboard and templates.
- Microsoft OneNote also covers transcription, dictation and web clipper.
At a glance
| Linwood Butterfly | Microsoft OneNote | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free | Free plan |
| Starts at | Free | $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year (Microsoft 365 Personal) |
| Free plan | The whole app is free and open source under the GNU AGPL-3.0 license on every platform; the project's own comparison table lists its cost as Free. | OneNote is free to download and use on every supported platform. A free Microsoft account includes 5 GB of cloud storage, shared with OneDrive files and Outlook.com attachments. |
| Free trial | None listed | 1-month free trial of Microsoft 365. A credit card is required, and it converts to a paid subscription unless canceled. |
| Web | ||
| macOS | ||
| Windows | ||
| Linux | ||
| iOS | ||
| Android | ||
| Browser extension | ||
| Made by | Linwood | Microsoft |
| Price read from | butterfly.linwood.dev | microsoft.com |
| Checked | Oct 9, 2026 | Oct 5, 2026 |
Who each one suits
Linwood Butterfly
- Handwritten lecture notes and PDF markup with a stylus
- People who want a free, AGPL-licensed note app on Android and desktop
- Nextcloud users who want their notes synced over WebDAV
Microsoft OneNote
- People who already have a Microsoft account or a Microsoft 365 subscription
- Handwritten notes and sketches with a pen or stylus
- Teachers and students working in Class Notebooks
- Free note-taking across Windows, Mac, phones and the web
Worth knowing
Linwood Butterfly
- iOS is a preview only: an unsigned IPA that has to be sideloaded with AltStore or Sideloadly, and it is not on the App Store.
- There is no hosted sync service. Remote storage supports only WebDAV, and it is not available in the web version.
- Collaboration is experimental and has to be switched on with an experiment flag.
- The web app performs better in Chromium-based browsers; the docs say Firefox and Safari lack the WebAssembly features it uses.
Microsoft OneNote
- A free Microsoft account stops at 5 GB of cloud storage, shared with OneDrive files and Outlook.com attachments.
- Only the Windows desktop app can keep notebooks on a local hard drive; the other versions work with cloud notebooks.
- Microsoft 365 AI features are limited to the subscription owner, with usage limits, even on the Family plan.
- Microsoft lists apps for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android but none for Linux, where OneNote is browser-only.
Key features
Linwood Butterfly
- Infinite canvas with editable elements
- Handwriting, shapes and imported media sit on an unbounded canvas, and each element can be moved, resized, recolored and reorganized after it is placed.
- Pen and drawing tools
- Stroke width, color, smoothing and texture are adjustable, and the toolbox adds labels, shapes, polygons, tables, rulers, grids, stamps, a laser pointer and a presentation tool.
- Import and export
- Imports PDFs, images, SVG, Markdown, Xournal++ files and OneNote sections. Exports to PDF, SVG, image and Xournal++, plus its own documented .bfly and .tbfly formats.
- Templates and packs
- Templates bundle backgrounds, tools, layers, areas and pages for new documents, and packs hold reusable stamps, palettes and styles that are available across documents.
- Local storage with WebDAV sync
- Notes are saved to a folder on the device. The native apps can add a WebDAV connection such as Nextcloud and mark remote files for offline editing.
- Experimental collaboration
- Behind an experiment flag, several people can edit one document at once through an end-to-end encrypted Swamp relay or a WebSocket server run on one participant's computer.
Microsoft OneNote
- Typed, handwritten and scanned notes
- Pages hold typed text, digital ink from a pen or stylus, pictures and videos. The mobile app also scans documents and extracts their text.
- Voice transcription and dictation
- Voice transcription captures spoken notes for later review, and the iPhone and iPad app takes dictation in 27 languages, some of them in preview.
- Copilot in OneNote
- Copilot responds to prompts to draft plans, generate ideas, create lists and organize information. Microsoft 365 plans include the desktop apps with Copilot, subject to usage limits.
- Sharing and collaboration
- Notebooks are cloud-connected, so they can be shared with other people and opened on a PC, a Mac, a phone, a tablet or in a browser.
- Web Clipper
- A free browser add-on for Edge and Chrome captures web content into a notebook, where it can be edited, annotated and shared.
- Class and Staff Notebooks
- Class Notebook gives each student a personal workspace, a content library for handouts and a collaboration space. Staff Notebook does the same for school teams.
Plans
Linwood Butterfly
Butterfly$0
The full app for Android, Windows, macOS and Linux, a web app that installs for offline use, and a Docker image for hosting the web app yourself.
Microsoft OneNote
OneNote$0
The standalone app on Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and the web, used with a free Microsoft account and its 5 GB of cloud storage.
Microsoft 365 Personal$9.99
per month, or $99.99 per year
For 1 person: 1 TB of cloud storage and the OneNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook desktop apps with Copilot, on up to 5 devices at once.
Microsoft 365 Family$12.99
per month, or $129.99 per year
For 1 to 6 people, with 1 TB of storage per person (up to 6 TB). AI features are for the subscription owner only.
Microsoft 365 Premium$19.99
per month, or $199.99 per year
Everything in Family, plus extensive Copilot chat usage, agentic AI features for research and analytics, and more AI image creation.
Ways to pay less
Linwood Butterfly
No public discounts listed.
Microsoft OneNote
- Annual discount
About 17% lower cost with yearly billing
Microsoft 365 Personal is $99.99 per year against $9.99 per month ($119.88 over twelve months). Family and Premium show the same gap between yearly and monthly prices.
- Education
Free Office 365 Education for students and educators
Microsoft's education site says students and educators with a valid school email address are eligible for Office 365 Education, which includes OneNote, at no cost.
