Apple Notes, Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote (as at May2024)

 Apple Notes:

• iPhone Size unknown (built into iOS)
• Good layout:
  
  
  
  
  
• Good formatting options:
  
  
  
   
• Easy sharing of sheets:
  
  
  
  
  
• Tolerates large notes well
• OCR text in images fast and easy
• Very slow sync (NOT related to your connection speed i.e. due to slow Apple server response) - and I mean over an hour !!!
• Sync from iCloud Notes completely fails when there are a large number of notes or large notes.
• NO versioning of notes contents i.e. if you accidentally delete a slab from a note and close, there is no way of getting it back.  
• If you delete the whole note, you can go to recently deleted and get the note back for 30 days. 
• Note contents can be text, images and files.
• Note length limit: haven't found a limit BUT the sync updates seem to get slower the bigger the note.

Google Keep

• iPhone App size: 153 Mb
• Limited Layout options (esp. no simple list of note titles):
  
  
  
  
  
• nearly instantaneous sync between desktop and iPhone App
• Image OCR - fast and easy "Grab Image Text"
• Note versioning so that you can recover each past version of each note.
• Deleted notes can be recovered from the bin for 7 days
• Note content: text only
• Note length limit: seems to 19870 characters (about 200 average document lines)

OneNote

• iPhone App size: 222 Mb
• Layout - Multi screen navigation e.g. 
• List of Notebooks e.g. Stephen's Notebook 
• List of Sections within the Notebook e.g. Quick Notes
• List of Notes within the Section: e.g. To Do 
• Actual Notes
• Note content versioning??? Only on desktop version ??
• Deleted note recovery ??
• No OCR in iPhone App
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Conclusion

• I am going for Google Keep for the fast sync between online and iPhone App, AND the note contents versioning.