10 Best Note Taking Apps of 2026

OneNote is the strongest free pick for people who think with a pen. Microsoft describes it as one cross-functional notebook, and it combines digital ink with typed text, so you can sketch a diagram, annotate a slide and type beside it on the same page. Voice transcription helps when a lecture moves faster than your hand, and Copilot in OneNote can draft plans or lists from a prompt. Notebooks can be shared for group work, and mobile apps cover iOS and Android. Signing up is free; the paid route is Microsoft 365 Personal at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, which adds the desktop apps, Copilot features and 1 TB of storage for one person on 5 devices at once. That bundle is good value if you also need Word and Excel, but it is a lot to buy just for notes. OneNote's free-form pages also give you less structure than Notion if you like databases and linked pages.

Notion is less a notebook than a set of building blocks, and that is why it ranks first for people who organize a lot. A lecture page can link to a reading database, a thesis tracker can hold subtasks and dependencies, and a team can publish a page or simple site to the web from the same workspace. Its pricing page lists offline access on the desktop and mobile apps, where you pick pages to download and Recents and Favorites are saved automatically, which matters on trains and in lecture halls with poor Wi-Fi. Students get the best deal: the Plus plan, with a 1-member limit, is free with a school email and adds longer version history and larger uploads. The trade-offs are real. A new workspace starts empty, so you design your own system, and the free plan limits uploads to 5 MB per file. The newest AI features, such as AI Meeting Notes and Notion Agent, are reserved for the Business plan.

Apple Notes earns its place by being already there. On a Mac, iPhone or iPad there is nothing to install, and notes sync through iCloud, which gives every account 5 GB of storage for free. Apple's user guide shows how far it has come: you can record audio inside a note and get a live transcript you can search later, draw with the Markup palette, and type a sum that solves itself when you add an equals sign. Tags and Smart Folders keep a semester or a client list organized, notes can be locked with a password, and shared notes and folders let a group edit together. If storage runs short, iCloud+ costs $0.99 a month for 50 GB in the US. The limits come from the same design. Notes is built for Apple hardware, so anyone who also uses a Windows laptop or Android phone will want a cross-platform app, and there are no databases or linked pages for larger projects.

Obsidian is the app for people who want their notes to last longer than any company. It stores notes privately on your device, works offline and uses open file formats, so a decade of notes stays readable even without the app. Its core idea is linking: you connect notes about people, books and ideas, then see the connections in an interactive graph, and Canvas gives you an open space for diagrams and research boards. Thousands of plugins and themes let you add task lists, calendars or spaced repetition. The app itself is free without limits and needs no sign-up. The cost comes with convenience. Obsidian Sync, which adds end-to-end encryption, version history and shared vaults, is $4 a month billed annually or $5 monthly, and Publish is $8 per site a month on annual billing. New users should also expect a learning curve, because the app starts plain and you shape it yourself.

Goodnotes is the notebook to choose if a stylus is your main tool. The company says it was made for the tablet, and its feature list backs that up: handwriting that converts to text, search across handwritten notes, a lasso tool, shape recognition and digital stationery, plus hand annotation of PDFs such as lecture slides or contracts. You can also record audio, with transcription of recordings on iOS, and switch between notebooks, typed documents and whiteboards. Apps cover iOS, iPadOS, Mac, Windows, Android and the web. Pricing is low but layered. Essential is $11.99 a year for unlimited files and audio, while sync across devices, real-time collaboration and Drive integration need Pro at $35.99 a year. The free plan stops at 3 files, so it is a trial rather than a long-term option, and the full AI experience costs an extra $9.99 a month through the AI Pass.

Bear is the calm, writer-friendly option for Apple users. Notes are written in simple Markdown, with text, photos, tables and to-do lists in the same note, and organized with tags you can pin and mark with over 250 icons. Headings fold so you can focus on one section of a long draft, and you can drop a sketch inline with an Apple Pencil or a finger. Privacy is a strength: Bear says your notes are between you and iCloud, notes can be encrypted, and Apple's Advanced Data Protection is supported. The free version includes document scanning, search inside PDFs and images and many export formats. The catch for anyone using several devices is that iCloud sync is a Pro feature, at $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year after a 7-day trial. Bear also runs only on Mac, iPhone and iPad, so it is not an option for Windows or Android users.

Craft sits between a notes app and a document editor. Notes become pages you would happily share: you can turn a quick iPhone note into a finished document, add whiteboards, and track structured items in collections. Publishing takes one click, and the free Starter plan already includes AI on Core, Fast and Max models. Real-time sync and link sharing are included, and Craft lists apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows, Android and Vision Pro, plus a web version. Craft has won Mac App of the Year. The free plan is a sampler, though. Starter stops at 1,500 blocks in total and 1 GB of storage, with a 25 MB media upload limit and about 20 lifetime AI sessions, so regular users will need Plus. Its pricing page showed us only zloty prices for Plus and Family, so confirm the US price at checkout.

Google Keep is the fastest way to get a thought out of your head and onto every device. You can save notes, lists, photos, drawings and audio, and Google says everything syncs in real time from your phone to your computer to your smartwatch. Color codes, labels, pins and filters make short notes easy to find, reminders keep deadlines in view, and notes stay editable offline and sync once you reconnect. Collaboration is simple: several people can edit the same note in real time, and notes can be shared with a family group. When a note grows into something bigger, you can export it to Google Docs. That is also where Keep's limits show. It has no notebooks, databases or long-form structure, so it works best next to a fuller app rather than as your only system for a semester of lectures. Keep uses the storage on your Google account, and extra space is sold through Google One.

Joplin is the open source pick, and the only app here with a Linux desktop app and a terminal version alongside Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. Notes are saved in an open format, and synced notes are protected with end-to-end encryption so that no one but you can read them. You choose where they sync: Joplin Cloud, Dropbox or OneDrive. The app handles images, videos, PDFs and audio, renders math and diagrams, and a web clipper for Chrome and Firefox saves pages or screenshots as notes. Plugins, themes and a choice of Rich Text or Markdown editors let you tune it. Joplin Cloud adds sharing, collaboration and publishing notes to the web, with 2 GB of storage on Basic and 30 GB on Pro, and it is based in France. The trade-off is polish. Setting up sync and encryption takes more steps than Notion or Apple Notes, and the plans page showed us only euro prices.

Evernote still has some of the best tools for building an archive: Boolean, geographic and filtered search, a web clipper, document scanning and in-note encryption on Mac and Windows. Newer features add tasks with dates and reminders, an Evernote Calendar that connects Google or Microsoft calendars, an AI Assistant, semantic search, AI Transcribe for meetings and a way to use your notes from Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP-compatible tools. Apps cover iOS, Android, Web, Windows and Mac, and integrations reach Gmail, Drive, Outlook and Slack. The problem for this list is cross-device use on a budget. The free plan stops at 50 notes, 1 notebook and 1 device, and Starter syncs only 3 devices, so full cross-device use means the Advanced plan. Eligible college students get 40% off a year of Advanced. The compare page showed us only zloty prices, so check the US price before you subscribe.