Taking business notes with a standard pen and paper is a thing of the past. Business executives, entrepreneurs, and students are using their Android devices to record critical meeting notes, prepare for a speech, or study a textbook. There are a wide variety of note-taking apps from which to choose. It’s tempting to pick the free app without researching the offerings in depth.
The best note-taking apps allow you to make and use notes on the go, whether for inspiration, ideas, business insights, or even reminders. Note taking apps have become increasingly common, not least with the wide availability of mobile devices, not least smartphones. This means mobile apps for taking notes now allow you to write wherever you are, and there are a large range of apps available. It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer on a call, a secretary taking minutes, or simply inspired by an idea while commuting – the ability to take notes on a mobile device can be a real benefit.
MICROSOFT ONENOTE
Microsoft OneNote is a free and full-featured note-taking app. It’s Microsoft’s answer to Evernote, though without the need for a monthly subscription. Though, of course, there are other differences.
One big one is that OneNote is a lot more freeform. Each Notebook is modeled off a ringbinder, so it’s divided into Sections with subsections called Pages. And each Page is basically a freeform canvas where you can add any kind of note you like, anywhere you want. This means you can drag and drop in an image, click anywhere to add some text notes beside it, and if your computer supports a stylus, scribble a mustache on everyone in the photo. (Otherwise you can draw one on with your trackpad, but it’ll be less stylish.) It feels like a solution purpose-built for students and anyone else who has to take long, discursive notes about something, rather than people looking for a digital notebook to collect short snippets and random ideas.
I’d struggle to call any of Microsoft’s apps intuitive, but OneNote is familiar. The ribbon at the top of the app has five tabs: Home, which has all the basic formatting tools; Insert, which lets you attach files, images, audio recordings, and everything else; Draw, which gives you all the free drawing and highlighting tools; View, which lets you navigate the document and change how things look; and, finally, Tell Me, which is the help function. If you’ve used any version of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint in the last decade, you’ll be right at home. With OneNote’s Zapier integration, you can automate OneNote to eliminate the hassle of moving information between apps. For example, Zapier can automatically create new notes in OneNote whenever you have a new task, note, or calendar event in another app.
In terms of pricing, although OneNote is free, it uses your OneDrive storage. You get 5GB included, which is more than enough for most people. But if you use OneDrive to store your photos, or save a lot of image and audio notes over a four-year university degree, you might hit against that limit. If you do, you can increase it to 100GB for $1.99/month.
BEAR
Though only available on Apple products, Bear is a note taking app to be reckoned with. It has a simple left to right interface with a main menu, a note snippet display of your most recent notes, and then the actual note taking area.
One of its key features is its organizational system. Use hashtags to categorize, then use a slash command to create even more subfolders. You can do this from anywhere in the note. This is a simple way to organize and categorize your notes. The new folders then automatically appear in your main menu. It also uses other markdown text editor shortcuts to link your notes together. Very intuitive!
Pros: Hashtags and categorization from anywhere in the note
Cons: Not enough separate workspaces or different levels of categories.
EVERNOTE
It’s impossible to talk about note-taking apps without mentioning Evernote, so it should be no surprise to see it on this list. It’s one of the most powerful options around and can handle notes in almost any format you want. You can add text notes, audio clips, images, PDF documents, scanned hand-written pages, Slack conversations, emails, websites, and anything else you can think of. If you’re the kind of person who’s as likely to scribble the outline to a best-seller on the back of a napkin as you are to save your shopping list as a voice memo, Evernote is great: it gives you one safe place to throw everything.
But Evernote isn’t just a dumping ground. It’s designed so you can easily sort and organize your notes. Create a new note by clicking New Note, type whatever you want or add any of the supported note types, then, at the bottom of the screen, you can add tags. If you already have some tags set up, they’ll be auto-suggested; otherwise, you can type whatever you want and hit Enter. In the sidebar, click Tags to see a searchable list of every tag you’ve used. It’s a really fast way to sort notes as you create them, without having to worry about putting every note perfectly in its place. Of course, later on you can dive back in and arrange all your notes into meticulously sorted notebooks. In that case, click Notebooks in the sidebar and then New Notebook. Give it a name and you’ll be able to drag and drop notes from anywhere else in Evernote into it. Alternatively, you can right-click on a note, click Move to, and then select your chosen notebook.
Evernote takes things a step further with its search functionality. If you upload an image of a sheet of paper, a business card, a menu, a sign, or anything else with text, Evernote automatically processes the image to make it more readable—and then processes the text to make it searchable. So, if you add a photo of your favorite pancake recipe, you’ll be able to search for it as if it’s a text note you typed yourself. Evernote even works with handwritten notes, though with the huge caveat that your writing must be neat enough that a computer can read it. (Mine, sadly, is not.)
It’s similar with PDFs and other documents you upload—if you have a Premium Evernote subscription, the text is searchable throughout the app. Evernote integrates with Zapier, letting you automate your note-taking. For example, you can automatically create tasks from Evernote reminders, or create new notes for calendar events.
Crucially, that $7.99/month Premium Evernote subscription needs to be mentioned. Evernote’s free plan doesn’t make this list. It’s limited to two devices, and you can’t save notes for offline access on mobile. There are better, or at least almost as good but less limited, free options available. However, if you’re looking for the ultimate everything notebook and don’t mind the monthly fee, then Evernote is easily the app for you.
GOOGLE KEEP
Google Keep is the simplest note-taking app on our list, both visually and how it operates. Think of Keep as your place for storing digital post-it notes, with each note dotted around the interface as if they were laid on a table in front of you. Notes can be given labels, pinned to the top, given a color, paired with reminders and collaborated on in real time. Additionally it also offers speech-to-text functionality so you can dictate notes on the go rather than have to write. There’s also the ability to set up check boxes for lists to work through.
Overall, though, Google Keep is more minimal than other writing apps, which either works for or against it depending on your viewpoint. If you want to break away from your operating system’s notes app, but don’t want all of the features that come with other apps on our list, Google Keep is an, ahem, keeper.
NOTION
Note taking can be something you do for yourself, or something you do with and for others. All the apps we’ve looked at so far are mostly for taking notes for yourself. Sure, you can share and collaborate on notes and even notebooks, but their main features lie elsewhere. With Notion, collaboration on all aspects is built in from the start.
Notion is the only app on this list that skirts the provision of it being a note-taking app. It is, but because of its collaborative features, it can be so much more. It’s basically three tools in one: a powerful notes app (which is why it’s on this list), a task and project manager, and a reference wiki. How you combine those three things is up to you. Each new document or note is called a page, and everything in Notion is referred to as a block. Blocks include basic elements like text, checklists, and headings, as well as media types like images, web bookmarks, video, audio, code snippets, and files. You can use as many blocks you want, in whatever combination, on every page. They’re super quick to insert: just type / and scroll through the list. There are lots of templates built in too, so don’t feel you have to customize absolutely everything when you’re starting out. Just click on Templates in the sidebar, look through the options, and, when you find one you like, click Use This Template.
The sidebar is also how you browse all your pages. It’s split into two sections: Workspace, which is all the pages you share with the rest of your team, and Private, where you can have your own notes. While collaboration is a big part of Notion, it’s not forced on you. Everyone has their own section where they can work on things—and then move them out to the public areas for feedback and revision. It’s a great way for an entire team to work together without getting in each other’s way.
One thing to note: Notion bills itself as an Evernote competitor for personal users. It can be—but it’s too much for most people. If you love the idea of Notion, go right ahead and try the free Personal Plan, but to us, it’s really best as a team notes app.
Notion Price: Free for personal users; free trial for team users with a 1,000 block limit; from $10/month/user for teams with unlimited blocks.
CONCLUSION
Notes are great for anything and everything – and they’re even better when they’re digital. The beauty of a note or reminder is that it’s something we can set and forget – we don’t need to – yet we often do – feel guilty about leaving things undone. So we often cross off ‘make a dentist appointment’, ‘get car MOT’, or ‘remember to turn bath taps off’ from our notes list, only for it to remain there until the next time we open the app again. And this is exactly what makes notes so great – because we can keep track of useful information and then come back to it and complete at a later date and time.