The Best Note-Taking Apps

The real value comes in being able to organize, share, and find the notes you need when you need them. The best note-taking apps have powerful search tools and various ways to organize and catalog your notes. Some use optical character recognition ( OCR ) to search text even when it’s in an image or PDF .

With the right note-taking app, you can make notes about anything and sync them to all your devices. You can keep a daily diary, snap pictures of whiteboards filled with meeting notes, save screenshots from virtual meetings, and record lectures while also writing down their most important ideas in the same place. You can make to-do lists, save and annotate recipes, keep a record of everyone to whom you should send a thank-you card, save copies of your kids’ vaccination records, and on and on. The use cases are endless.

Having a good note-taking app is like having your own personal internet where you can look up anything you might ever need to know about your work or personal life, no matter where you are. What movies and books did my friends recommend? In that meeting last month, when did the client say they needed approval by? Where’s a copy of my eyeglasses prescription? Note-taking apps can help you be more organized and more productive .

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Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

Evernote

Best For Business Use and Collaboration

4.0 Excellent

Bottom Line:

Evernote has long been one of the most impressive note-taking apps, but its high price leaves potential new users wondering if it’s worth it. For dedicated users, it is, but newcomers should take a close look at OneNote, too.

PROS

• Effortless note-taking and syncing
• Powerful search
• Excellent features
• Flexible access to your notes

CONS

• Free level of service too restrictive
• Expensive Premium plan

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Evernote Review

Microsoft OneNote

Best For Students; Free Feature-Rich Option

4.0 Excellent

Bottom Line:

OneNote is a feature-rich note-taking app, and it gives you a lot for free. It’s clearly among the very best in the space, but whether it’s best for you depends on what you plan to do with it.

PROS

• Rich with features
• Can extract text from images
• Generous free version
• Plenty of storage
• Equation solving

CONS

• Can be slow and clunky
• So-so sharing options
• Web clipper needs improvement

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Microsoft OneNote Review

Joplin

Best For Free and Open-Source Option

4.0 Excellent

Bottom Line:

Joplin is the best free and open-source note-taking app available, as long as you don’t mind managing storage yourself and forgoing a handful of features found in more powerful apps.

PROS

• Free and open source
• Downloadable apps for all major platforms
• Web clipper offered
• Excellent interface and importer tools
• Strong security

CONS

• No collaboration
• No email forwarding
• No mobile scanning, OCR, sketching or handwriting recognition
• Support limited to forums

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Joplin Review

Zoho Notebook

Best For Organizing With a Small Number of Notebooks

3.5 Good

Bottom Line:

Whether you take to Zoho Notebook may depend on the expectations you have for a note-taking app. It has a lot to offer, but not everything you will find in the top two competitors.

PROS

• Free
• Available on all major platforms
• Good range of features
• Can password-protect individual notes
• Easy to use
• Includes importer tool for Evernote content

CONS

• No OCR or email forwarding
• No list views of notebooks and notes in desktop or web apps
• Web clipper could be more intuitive

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Zoho Notebook Review

Bear (for Mac)

Best For Apple Users Who Like Markdown

3.0 Average

Bottom Line:

Bear is a lightweight among note-taking apps, though it could meet your needs if you only use Apple devices and enjoy writing in Markdown language.

PROS

• Supports Markdown for text formatting
• Good options for exporting and importing notes
• Inexpensive

CONS

• Extremely light on features
• For Apple users only
• Syncing requires a paid plan

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Bear (for Mac) Review

Google Keep

Best For Speed

3.0 Average

Bottom Line:

Keep is a free service that helps you jot down ideas fast. But to work with, organize, or sort the notes you make, you’ll need to move them into a more capable app. Additionally, its web clipper is far too basic to be truly useful.

PROS

• Fast
• Can extract text from images
• Works well with other Google apps
• Free

CONS

• Poor at organizing notes
• No rich text formatting or Markdown support
• No desktop apps
• Weak web clipper
• No access restrictions on shared notes

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Google Keep Review

Milanote

Best For Creatives

3.0 Average

Bottom Line:

Milanote is a web-based note-taking app that thinks of notebooks more like canvases than legal pads. It’s designed for visual people but leaves out too many features to truly satisfy them, for now.

PROS

• Scrapbook/pasteboard style notes
• Works well for images and notes related to design
• Commenting and real-time collaboration supported

CONS

• Expensive
• No tree structures showing where notes are stored

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Milanote Review

Simplenote

Best For Text Notes Only

3.0 Average

Bottom Line:

For a basic note-taking and syncing experience with collaboration support, Simplenote is a reliable but stripped-down choice. If extreme simplicity is what you’re after, this free service may be worth a try, but other apps offer more.

PROS

• Free
• Simple and straightforward
• Cross-platform compatibility
• Collaboration included
• Note version history
• Supports Markdown on some devices

CONS

• Only supports text notes
• No notebooks, folders, formatting tools, or web clipper

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$0.00 Automattic

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Simplenote Review

Notion

Best For Team Notes and Task Management Combined

2.5 Fair

Bottom Line:

Notion is a note-taking app with real potential. However, it goes overboard with visual icons and comes up too short on key features for us to recommend it, for now.

PROS

• Excellent importer tool for Evernote
• Supports collaboration
• Strong support for templates

CONS

• Disorganized structure
• No OCR, email forwarding, PDF annotation, sketching, scanning, or audio recording
• So-so web clipper
• Expensive for top-tier plan

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Notion Review

Buying Guide: The Best Note-Taking Apps

Many of the best note-taking apps also have email forwarding, meaning you can forward an email to a special address and have the message turn up in your note-taking app as a note.

Ultimately, the best note-taking app is the one that clicks for you and the type of notes you take.

Best Free Note-Taking Apps

Several of the best note-taking apps are free or at least have a decent free tier of service. Typically, if you want to use a note-taking app for free you can, as long as you don’t exceed the free storage limit.

Microsoft OneNote has the most features of any free note-taking app, and Joplin is our favorite free and open-source option. Both are Editors’ Choice winners. With OneNote, storage comes from OneDrive, where you get 5GB for free. You can pay $1.99 per month for 100GB of storage, which is a fantastic deal, or get 1TB of storage with a Microsoft 365 account, starting at $6.99 per month. With a Microsoft 365 account, you also get several Office apps, so it’s a lot of bang for your buck.

With Joplin, you have to bring your own storage, so the true cost of that app comes down to how much storage you need and where you get it. It works with Dropbox and OneDrive, among others.

Other totally free note-taking apps that we list among the best are Google Keep, Zoho Notebook, and Simplenote.

Best for Business Use and Collaboration

We have one more Editors’ Choice winner, and that’s Evernote Premium—which is not free. Although Evernote does technically have a free tier of service, we do not recommend it because it’s too restrictive to be worth using. Evernote Premium costs $7.99 per month or $69.99 per year. There’s also a Business version that runs $14.99 per person per month with a minimum of two people. 

Evernote has a multitude of impressive features, a generous storage allotment that renews monthly, and impressive collaboration features. You can share notes with others and co-edit notes. You can even get suggestions for related notes based on keywords and other metadata about the notes, which is helpful in business environments in particular.

Regardless, the price for Evernote Premium is high, and loyal Evernote users have been let down by the company more than once in the last few years, due to unexpected changes in the pricing and plans, plus an inexcusably buggy app update. Although Evernote remains an Editors’ Choice winner for its overall standing among note-taking apps, we’ve lowered its score to reflect these issues.

We have one other semi-related pick for business use, or rather, team notes and task management combined. Notion is a relative newcomer to the space that still has a lot of kinks to work out but is a promising app. To get into Notion, you have to clear a lot of setup hurdles. The app has a confusing structure. It’s all too easy to clutter the interface with needless junk. If you can manage, however, Notion can be a powerful tool for teams.

Best for Students

Note-taking apps are great for students, and our top pick for them is Microsoft OneNote. Not only do you get a lot for free, but also the app has a few features that students may want.

On touch-screens, for example, you can write by hand and make sketches for classes in biology, physics, and others. With a Microsoft 365 account (free for students(Opens in a new window) and educators), OneNote recognizes math equations written by hand and can solve them. OneNote is also one of very few note-taking apps to still offer in-app audio recording, letting you capture entire lectures to listen to again when it’s time to study. If you do go this route, be sure to check out our tips on How to Use OneNote to Take Notes for School.

Best for Creatives

The best note-taking app for designers and other creatives is Milanote. This app has the freeform feel of a diagramming or mind-mapping app, while still being a note-taking app.

It gives you boards (instead of pages) where you place images, text notes, to-do lists, color swatches, URLs with previews, and other material. You move the elements around however you like on the board. You can overlay arrows and emoji, or publish your boards to a public link to share them with others. Milanote also supports full coauthoring, so multiple people can work on a board simultaneously. Though unique, Milanote does have some room for improvement still. Even so, it’s the best note-taking app currently available for creatives.

Best for Text-Only Notes

If the only kind of notes you intend to make are text-based, then you don’t need a feature-rich app. Simplenote by Automattic (the same company behind WordPress) is a free note-taking app that syncs to all your devices and comes with no storage limit, but it only supports text.

It’s easy to use, lightweight, and totally reliable. If you don’t need an app that can save images, scanned documents, sketches, and other multimedia, then Simplenote is a very good option.

Take Notes, Sync, and Go

In past years, PCMag had only one Editors’ Choice winner among note-taking apps, so it’s a pleasant change of pace to now have three top contenders: Evernote, OneNote, and Joplin. These apps and the others on this list, let you capture your ideas and stick them somewhere useful. That way, no matter what you need to know and no matter where you are, you can pull up the information you need.

While you’re thinking about notes and note-taking, you might also check out our 10 Tips for Managing Your Digital Notes.