Taking notes used to be so simple. You’d take out a sheet of parchment, dip your quill in ink, and get to writing.
Then a bunch of nerds got together and started inventing things – and that’s when note-taking got complicated. Suddenly we had to choose from different models of typewriters and competing keyboard layouts.
Later the computer showed up, and with it we got GUIs and dozens of different writing applications. And, of course, Al Gore had to go and invent the internet – bringing cloud syncing into the mix.
Evernote
(Android, iPhone, iPad)
Evernote is an impressive note taking app for students. Evernote lets students take notes, create to-do lists and organise their notes in one place. Evernote lets teachers to create and organize notebooks for faculty and team meetings, committees and various professional development. Its limitless uses range from planning a course to delivering a lesson plan to capturing feedback after class. It allows you to take notes, capture photos, create to-do lists, record voice reminders and makes these notes completely searchable, whether you are at school, at home, or on the go. Text notes can include embedded images, sketches, or recordings.
Evernote is a cross-platform note-taking app that’s great for processing hand-written notes and clipping articles from the web. This productivity tool can shift the way students manage information in school and the way teachers share it. Evernote can be used for creating student portfolios, lesson planning, classroom management, taking minutes of meeting and instruction. Available on the Web, Android, Mac, Windows, and iOS.
Teachers can also use Evernote for research. It allows them to collect a large number of resources without having to spend the time to fully read each one to decide if it is worth printing or bookmarking. They can also add their own notes and comments so that they can remember how they might want to apply the information. It is extremely user friendly, as long as you install the web clipper. Just right click and clip! Evernote free plan has a 60MB upload limit per month. Evernote is one of the note taking apps available across multiple devices such as Windows, Mac, iOS, or Android.
Price: Free (premium features are available)
Available for: Android, iOS, macOS, web, Windows
Apple’s Notes app
Apple’s Notes app isn’t just for apology posts on social media. Yes, you can use it to take notes and create to-do lists, but don’t let that simple interface fool you. You can do so much more than just type notes and lists into it. You can also share your notes, add photos or other files to your notes, search for a specific note, scan documents, add tables, and even sketch drawings and add shapes.
Best of all: It’s free, and it’s already included on iOS and MacOS devices, no need to download.
Flexcil 2 Note & PDF Reader
(Android, iPhone, iPad)
Flexcil is one of the best note-taking app on iOS and Android for better study and research. The app is great and has taken notetaking to a next level and is a real productivity boost for its users. Whether you are taking notes, reading documents, bullet journaling, or editing pages from textbooks, use Flexcil. You can highlight by pen gestures and capture images & text on the study note by pen gestures. You can save your time transcribing the summaries by gestures on study notes using Apple pencil.
Notes can be handwritten or entered into text boxes on a document’s original pages or compiled in separate notebook-style pages alongside elements copied from the original.
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Available for: iOS, Android
Simplenote
Simplenote is a great option for those who want a note-taking app that has the user-friendliness and clean interface of a simpler notes app like Keep or Notes, and that can display longer notes (lectures, drafts, etc.) in a much more readable way. Simplenote’s interface combines the best of notebook-style apps like OneNote and sticky notes apps like Keep. It’s also totally free to use and is available on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, and Linux.
Simplenote lets you share your notes, search your notes with tags, and access your notes on multiple devices.
Bear
(iPhone, iPad)
Bear is one of the best note taking app for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch for writers and note-takers. If you are looking for a replacement for Evernote or Apple Notes, then Bear is definitely one that you should take a look at, though it may not be for everyone.
Bear is downright beautiful and one of the prettier writing apps I’ve had the pleasure of using. Like most writing apps, Bear is composed of three parts: the Sidebar (on the left), the Notes List (in the middle), and the Text Editor (on the right).
Bear doesn’t provide this notebook system. Instead, you can use a tag system (like Evernote) to manage your notes. But you can easily mimic the notebook format by using sub tag. The todo is one another nice features of Bear. You can create a task just by highlighting a line, and clicking on T. You can also move the task wherever you want in your notes. While it won’t replace task manager apps like Todoist, Wunderlist, Trello, etc., it can be convenient to have this in your notes.
Bear if you are a writer and want a simple, clean, and fast writing app that is super flexible and just works. You can find Bear – beautiful writing app for notes and prose on the App Store as a universal app for the iPhone and iPad for free.
Price: Free (premium features are available)
Available for: iOS, macOS
Download Bear
Notion for Education
Students and educators may want to take advantage of Notion’s free app program, Notion for Education. Notion is known for being a solid, comprehensive “all-in-one workspace” product that mostly requires a paid subscription to use it. (There is another free version, called Personal, but it has limited features.)
But students and educators with valid school email addresses are in luck because the Notion for Education program allows them to have access to the Personal Pro premium subscription for free. With Notion, you can organize your lecture notes, to-do lists, and assignments and add other elements to your notes, like code, images, videos, or equations. You can also publish your notes online and create to-do lists and reading lists. The Personal Pro subscription also comes with unlimited pages, blocks, and file uploads, plus version history and unlimited guests.
Notion is available for MacOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.
Microsoft OneNote for iPad
(iPhone, iPad)
OneNote is a digital note-taking app that Microsoft provides to schools to create interactive collaboration sites with their students where teachers can place notes with school assignments and students use it because it facilitates the taking of notes, the collection of information. The app is best for students for any form of note-taking including mixing different recording forms. It also allows students to place notes on pages, add drawings, diagrams, audio or video recordings, and images.
Microsoft Onenote is a free app for notetaking. With OneNote, you get unlimited devices – a feature that other note-taking apps, like Evernote and Bear, keep behind a premium subscription. With OneNote you can take with you almost anywhere your class notes, work notes, articles, drawings, the shopping list. You can type, write by hand (using a stylus), clip Web pages and even scan handwritten notes or pages. Since it’s a part of Microsoft’s Office suite, OneNote plays well with applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This study notes app is available across all major platforms such as iOS and Android.
Price: Free
Available for: Android, iOS, macOS, web, Windows
Google Keep
(Android, iPhone, iPad)
Google Keep is a free note taking app best suited for lightweight users. Creating a note is easy – you can type, draw, or add an image (on mobile, you can even use your voice). If you use the Google Keep Chrome extension, you can save URLs, text, and images as you browse the web. Google Keep offers a basic, cross-platform note-taking app that plays well with other Google tools. In Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Drive, or in a file in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides, you can open a Google Keep sidebar to view your existing notes or create a new one.
Everything you save in Google Keep stays synced across multiple devices that you use. One of the greatest benefits of Keep is its seamless integration with the entire Google ecosystem. The Google Keep interface looks exactly like digitized Post-it Notes.
Price: Free
Available for: Android, iOS, macOS, web, Windows
Download Google Keep
OneNote
OneNote is Microsoft’s dedicated note-taking app, and it’s the only one on this list that most resembles an actual notebook. In OneNote, you can create separate notebooks, divide up your notebooks into sections with colorful tabs, and add pages of notes to each section. You can also search your notes, add videos and images to them, highlight them, and add drawings and annotations to them. There’s even an Immersive Reader mode that will read your notes back to you.
You can use OneNote as part of a paid Microsoft 365 subscription, or you can use the free OneNote for Windows 10 app that should’ve come preinstalled on your Windows 10 device. (You can also install the OneNote for Windows 10 app via the Microsoft Store.) The free Windows 10 app may not have as many premium features as the version that comes with a paid subscription, but it’s still a great option for college students on a budget.
Conclusion
There are a lot of note-taking apps out there. And as with most recommendations, you have to figure out what works for you.
I hope that this list will help you decide on your note-taking app, whether it’s on this list or not.