What Is the Best App for Taking Notes

A note taking app is essential in today’s world. Whether it is for class, work, or personal use, you need to make sure that you are using the best solution for the job at hand. There are many apps available in the app store for this purpose. It can be difficult finding the right app to meet all of your note taking needs.

There are many note taking apps for android and it’s hard to determine which ones are best. In this article, we’ll review the top free note taking apps and offer advice on how to choose the right one for your needs.

Notion

Overview: Offers a powerful, database-driven note-taking experience that’s unlike most apps out there.

Compatibility: Mac, iOS, Android, Windows, Browser

Pros:

Flexible pages. Notion has a template engine that allows you to turn pretty much anything into an easily-duplicated template, including a multi-layered collection of pages. It also has great media embedding and previewing tools, including a gallery view for photos and videos.
Powerful tables. Tables in Notion aren’t just charts; they’re databases. Think of Notion’s databases as Google Docs + Google Sheets: Every row in a table is its own Notion page that you can go into and update.
Nested hierarchical organization. You’re probably tired of this. But Notion does this. You can even turn a set of text into a dropdown so you can roll them up when you want non-immediate information out of the way.
Hybrid editor. Notion lets you write in Markdown or use normal keyboard shortcuts and UI elements to format your text.
Free personal accounts. Notion used to be fairly expensive, and it still can be for team plans. However, the Personal plan recently became completely free.

Cons:

Quirks in the editor due to the block system. Unfortunately, Notion falters heavily in the formatting department, and it’s all thanks to their block system. Every paragraph is a block, and each block can be moved around, changed into different elements, labeled, and colored. Unfortunately, once you select beyond one block, you’re now selecting blocks, not text. For now, it’s merely an amazing data storage app, but it’s a below-average writing app. (Notion team: If you’re reading this, maybe you could let us toggle between block mode and writing mode, or make these modes play nicer together, like Medium?)
No offline support. Currently, you need to have an internet connection to use Notion. The team is working to change this, but it’s a big limitation at the moment.

If you’d like to learn how to use Notion, check out our founder Thomas Frank’s free Notion Fundamentals course. In it, you’ll find thorough tutorials on all of Notion’s main features.

Evernote (Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, Web)

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.

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.

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.

Evernote Price: Very limited free plan; $7.99/month for Evernote Premium with unlimited devices and offline mobile access.

If you decide on Evernote, check out 30 tips for Evernote to make the most of your notes. And take a look at 5 hidden Evernote features.

OneNote

Overview: Microsoft’s free cross-platform note-taking app gives Evernote a run for its money, though the interface leaves something to be desired.

Compatibility: Browser, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS

Pros

Totally. Free. It has everything Evernote can do, but there’s no premium tier. So you get the full feature set out of the box.
On basically all the platforms (for free). Just had to emphasize this: With OneNote, you get unlimited devices — a feature that other note-taking apps, like Evernote and Bear, keep behind a premium subscription.
Freeform. Unlike Evernote, you can put text boxes everywhere on screen for OneNote. You can draw. You can even *gasp* change the background to look like a ruled notebook! (Although for some reason, I can never make the words align perfectly to the lines. This bothers me).

Cons

Even less organization than Evernote. It lacks note sorting options, such as sorting notes by newest created or newest modified.
Messy interface + Limited tagging capabilities (although it lets you drill down a couple levels deeper). With OneNote, you have notebooks and dividers within notebooks. Then you can also indent notes within notes. But it’s all over the user interface: notebooks on the left, dividers up top, then notes on the right. I’m a messy note-taker myself, but c’mon.

Dropbox Paper

There may be times when you have to work with a friend or a colleague to gather/share information on a common project. For such occasions, you’ll need an awesome collaborative note taking app, and Dropbox Paper is just that.

Dropbox Paper offers you (and your team) a collaborative workspace where you can not only add and edit notes but also brainstorm, review ideas and even handle meetings. Its task management tools let you assign to-do lists, add due dates and mention others, directly from the active document. Using annotations, you can add comments to a specific part of an image in the document. Connecting your calendar to Paper lets you easily find documents relevant to the meeting’s agenda. From images and audio to YouTube videos and GIFs, you can add almost any type of content to Paper’s workspace. It works seamlessly with external applications such as Sketch and Invision, enabling instant file previews. Being a Dropbox app, Paper integrates well with the cloud storage service, too.

Dropbox Paper is available for both iOS and Android. It can also be accessed online via a browser.

Roam Research

Overview: Roam Research takes a different approach to organization than most note-taking tools. You can instantly link one note to another to create a web of information, doing away with the need for tags and folders.

Compatibility: Browser-only