What is note-taking? Taking notes during a meeting or a class is a habit everyone should have. It not only helps you to understand the topic but also allows you to share your notes with other people. I am sure you have experienced some kind of problems when you needed the notes from a meeting, but couldn’t find them after the meeting finished. I can imagine how frustrating it would be if this happened not once but from time to time.
Note Taking is a process of recording down things through a press precise recorded medium. it is a kind of personal journal or diary to help you preserve your thoughts and ideas for future use.
Software for note-taking refers to the software installed on your PC or laptop that you use to take notes digitally. Some of these programs will help you back up your notes as well as sync them across other devices. A note-taking app or a note-taking software developer is someone who develops applications that help in organizing tasks, listing down assignments, etc., Note-taking on your computer is not new, but there are lots of options, so here are some of the best ones to get you started.
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.
Microsoft OneNote (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Web)
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 ring-binder, 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.
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.
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.
Apple Notes (iOS, macOS, Web)
If you’re firmly entrenched in Apple’s ecosystem, you don’t have to look too far for a great, free note-taking app. Apple Notes (variously called Notes or iCloud Notes, depending on how you’re accessing it) is built into macOS and iOS, and can also be used through your browser. Just head to icloud.com/notes, and you get an online, albeit stripped down, version of the Mac app with all your synced notes—even if you’re on a PC or Chromebook. It’s a nice bonus that keeps your notes from being totally locked into your Apple devices, provided you have enough iCloud space to store everything.
Apple Notes is a little more barebones than our previous two picks, but that’s not really a dealbreaker. It’s convenient, easy to use, and even integrates with Siri. Sure, there aren’t built-in tags, but you can organize notes into as many folders as you need, and there’s always the Search Bar for finding anything that’s gotten buried. You can look for images, text you’ve written, a particular attachment, drawings, text scanned in a document, or something inside the image you’re trying to find (for example, “a bike”).
Once you create a new note, you can add text, attach images, scan documents, draw or handwrite, add checklists, format things into tables, and more. You can add multiple different things to a single note—but unlike with OneNote, they’re compartmentalized. You can’t, for example, use the pen tool to scratch out a text note.
Of course, as a first-party Apple app, Notes plays nice with the whole Apple ecosystem. One clever feature is that you can use your iPhone or iPad to add content directly to Notes on your Mac. Open a new note, click the Attach dropdown, and then choose from Take Photo, Scan Document, and Add Sketch. If you click Scan Document, for example, the camera will open on your iOS device and you’ll be able to automatically scan process, and add letters, recipes, bank statements, and any other documents as PDFs.
As basic as Apple Notes is, it’s very functional and checks all our requirements for a great note-taking app. Power-user features can be useful, but most users aren’t power users—and Apple knows it.
Notion (Mac, iOS, Android, Windows, Browser)
Overview: Offers a powerful, database-driven note-taking experience that’s unlike most apps out there.
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.
Roam Research (Browser-only)
Overview: Roam Research takes a different approach to an 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.
Pros:
- Delightful writing experience. Roam has strong support for Markdown, and the app is set up so that you can immediately begin writing when you open it.
- The set up of the app encourages daily journaling. The default page when you open the app is a “Daily Note” for the current day. I’ve found this encourages me to journal in the course of using the app, which often leads to new ideas.
- Fluid note-to-note linking. One of the core features of Roam is how easy it is to link notes (what Roam calls “Pages”) to each other. After you get the hang of the syntax, you’ll find yourself automatically linking notes (and ideas) together.
- Easy to visualize the connection between notes. Roam features a “Graph Overview” that shows the connections between your notes as a web. It’s an interesting alternative to the hierarchical view that most note-taking apps use.
Cons:
- No offline capability. Roam currently works only in the browser, and it requires an internet connection to access your notes. However, the founder claims an offline version of Roam is in development.
- Learning curve. Roam is very powerful once you learn how to use it, but expect to spend a few hours learning the syntax and overall philosophy of the app.
- Expensive. Now that the pricing model has been implemented, access to Roam will cost you $15/month – more than any other tool on this list. Roam’s fans passionately argue that the tool’s design innovations more than warrant the price. We’ll leave that up to you to decide.
Standard Notes (Browser, Mac, Windows, Linux (!!!), iOS, Android)
Overview: Standard Notes takes security seriously and has powerful search features. The only downside is its lack of in-app image hosting.
Compatibility:
Pros
- Most-security-focused. Everything you write is encrypted by default and only you can access it.
- (Kinda) Free. Plain text editor, however, upgrading to the extended version gives you access to a Markdown editor, a rich text editor, and a code editor.
- Editor changes per note. You can choose if you want the Markdown, rich text, or code editor on a note-by-note basis.
- Powerful search. Custom tags are infinitely nestable, like how Bear lets you tag notes with a “#” and then add tags within that parent tag with a “/”. You can also define custom searches based on different search criteria and save them custom searches.
- Supports all devices. Including Linux.
Cons
- Limited image support. It can’t host in-app. You have to save your images elsewhere before you can save it in the app.
- Can’t drag-and-drop notes between folders and tags.
Slite (Browser, Mac, Windows, Android, iOS)
Overview: Slite offers the best Markdown editing experience we’ve found, and the free version offers enough storage for most students. The interface still leaves something to be desired, however.
Pros
- Free (for most students). Unlimited private notes, and 50 shared notes per months on the free account. This is perfectly usable for most students.
- Best hybrid Markdown text editor of any app on this list. Aside from Dropbox Paper, that is. The editor formats the text as soon as you apply the Markdown syntax. It also lets you embed images, videos, and tables.
- Table of Contents view. This lets you jump around and zoom into the different headings of your document. (Rare in a note-taking app).
Cons
- Nested hierarchy. Slite has “channels” and have “collections” within each channel (think: Evernote stacks and notebooks). You can nest collections infinitely, but you can only sort-by-recency on the channel level.
- User experience. Not as fast as some other platforms, but it’s getting better. Initial CIG tests of Slite were frustrating. Although the features were amazing, the UI was painfully slow and the formatting didn’t appear right away. The devs have done a lot to improve things since then, however, and it’s now snappy enough to make the list.
Ulysses
Ulysses has been around for a while now, and it’s one of the most polished note-taking apps on Apple’s computing platform. (One that’s perfectly equipped for long-form writing, too.) Notes are written and stored in the app’s proprietary Markdown style, which allows for inventive (and colorful) use of headings.
Added to that, images can be embedded in the form of links within documents; rather than displaying them in the body text, you can double click the links to preview image thumbnails. Ulysses also positions images in a sidebar that can also display a word count, mini notes, and other information at a glance.
Ulysses uses iCloud to save and sync your documents, and these can be exported to a number of other formats, including PDF. Word .doc, ebooks, and HTML. All these extra features come with a price tag, with monthly or annual subscriptions available.
Simplenote
Simplenote’s selling point is its clear, simple user interface, making it easy to keep track of notes. It is available for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux, with data synced automatically. There’s also a web app if a client can’t be downloaded.
Tagging and search tools ensure users can find what they’re looking for and notes can be shared or published to others working in the same team or on a project. Simplenote backs up previous versions of documents so it’s always possible to revert to an earlier one.
Simplenote doesn’t have many advanced features but is an ideal candidate for simple note-taking. And best, of all, it’s free.
Bear
A relative newcomer to the note-taking app scene, Bear lies somewhere in-between Evernote and Ulysses, allowing you to create notes and sync them across various Apple devices using iCloud.
Using a Slack-like three-pane interface, you can arrange notes by applying hashtags, which allows a subfolder style system. Bear uses rich Markdown for editing, so you can insert links into documents without having to display the full URLs in a similar manner to Ulysses. However, Bear, which is pretty easy on the eye, and one of the few polished Markdown apps that allow you to insert images directly into notes, which could make it a far more valuable app overall if images are a big part of your workflow.
Latest features include Tag autocomplete, light and dark themes, annotation of PDFs, encryption, and app lock.
Most of Bear’s features are free to use on any iOS device, but there is a paid-for pro-version with additional themes, export options, which are available with a small monthly or annual subscription.
What makes a great note-taking app?
With so many apps to consider, we had some pretty strict criteria for what made a great notes app.
- First, the apps had to do what they set out to do, and do it well. Not every note-taking app needs to have image-to-text features or support styluses, but if it boasted about them, they’d better be good. There are so many different ways to use digital notes that what one person considers essential can just clutter up the interface to another.
- Second, note-taking apps had to be quick and easy to use. A pen and scrap of paper are hard to beat for speed and convenience, but any note-taking app has to get out of your way. Creating, editing, and sorting notes needed to be something that felt seamless and natural, rather than a battle with a horrible user interface. If you couldn’t create a new note in seconds or needed to jump through weird hoops to grab different tools, the app wasn’t making our list.
- Similarly, your notebook is something that needs to be always available, whether you’re at your desk or midair flying coast-to-coast. At a minimum, we needed apps to be available on one desktop and one mobile platform, and to have some kind of offline functionality. Your access to your notebook couldn’t be cut off because you didn’t have Wi-Fi.
- Finally, we required apps to be good value for money. Free is, of course, wonderful, but that does have to be balanced against the likelihood of the service surviving the next few years and the availability of server-based features like syncing. Some of the best apps charge a reasonable subscription price and, as long as they justified the pricing, that was no barrier to inclusion.
Conclusion
Note-taking software is a lot more popular now than it used to be. Years ago you only saw the odd business person with a notepad taking notes during meetings. But now, with the rise in popularity of smartphones, notepads are much less popular. Nevertheless, there are still lots of great reasons to take notes using the software.