With CryptoNote you can make your coin anonymous, which can be good (it can indeed behave like cash) or bad (some exchanges/services may not accept it).
you are thinking about the coins using these algorithms not the algorithms themselves.
Cryptonote has nothing to do with anonymity, it is just like SHA256 and Scrypt. they are all cryptography functions used as proof of work (to hash the blocks/headers).
From what I know CryptoNote is a privacy-related protocol and CryptoNight is the Proof-of-Work algorithm like SHA256 and so on.
Since the names are pretty similar I had to check Bitcoin wiki pages too on it: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CryptoNight
