If you’re looking for a free Quick Notes app that lets you easily capture and manage your notes, then you’ve come to the right place.
The Best Easy Note Taking app is the best note taking App in the market. It has all the latest features for both iPhone and android users. You can easily transfer your Notes to Google Drive. And it has separate categories for notes. That’s why it is the best quick note taking app in the market with free access through google play store’
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.
Evernote
The best dedicated note-taking app
REASONS TO BUY
+Free to use+Good functionality+Save web pages for offline use
REASONS TO AVOID
-Doesn’t integrate with Microsoft Office
No list of best note-taking apps is complete without Evernote, which is one of the oldest and most fully-featured. Evernote lets you create both simple and complex workflows using a combination of notebooks, notes and tags to keep everything organized.
One of its best features for gathering research is the Web Clipper extension (supported in Chrome, Firefox and Safari), which lets you save entire webpages – including text, images and PDFs – with a single click. Notes can be accessed on laptops, mobile devices and the web, so you’re rarely left with a situation where you can’t retrieve what you’ve saved. Other features include the ability to set reminders, present notes PowerPoint-style, and merge them together.
Recent additions include new tables and a Siri integration for those using the iOS edition.
While there’s a free plan with some limited features, there are also two paid plans, the Evernote Premium plan for individual users, and the Evernote Business plan for business.
The Evernote Premium plan allows for integrations with Slack, Outlook, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce, as well as provides an AI for content suggestions such as similar content in other notes you’ve made, as well as content info from media sites.
The Evernote Business plan includes the above but also comes with collaborative options and team administrative 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.
Ulysses
The best iOS note-taking app
REASONS TO BUY
+Good document managements+Sync between devices
REASONS TO AVOID
-iOS only-Not free
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 a price tag, with monthly or annual subscriptions available.
Bear
Overview: Bear features powerful Markdown capability and an excellent writing experience. The only downside is its lack of Windows support.
Compatibility: Mac, iOS
Pros
- Hybrid Markdown editor. You don’t have to imagine what your formatted Markdown will look like after you write because Bear formats text as you type. SUCH a helpful feature.
- Simple organizational system. Using “#” and “/”, Bear lets you tag each note and nest those tags within each other. #NestedHierarchy
- Archive feature. A small but time-saving feature. Archiving a note takes it out of search and organization without deleting it. This feature is for you if you can’t let go of things that don’t spark joy.
- Clean writing experience. Bear looks good out of the box — writing is readable, simple, and clean. The Premium version gets you a half dozen free themes that look even slicker.
Cons
- Just Mac and iPhone. If you have a Windows setup … Sorry.
- Limited organization After a few weeks of using Bear, I started bumping up against the limitations of its #-and-/ organization system. This pushed me to try out other note-taking apps (I ultimately landed on #2 on this list).
Google Keep
Overview: Google Keep offers a basic, cross-platform note-taking app that plays well with other Google tools. The only downside is its lack of organization features.
Compatibility: iOS, Android, Browser
Pros:
- Totally. Free. YAY!
- Available on every platform. Thanks to your Gmail account, you can access your Keep notes from your old iPhone 5S even if you drop your current Android in the toilet.
- Simple. Imagine how you use sticky notes, and Keep will make sense to you — you write thoughts down, stick it in a place you’ll remember, then (ideally) transfer it somewhere permanent. Keep even looks like a wall of stickies.
Cons:
- No hierarchical organization. There’s only one level of tags. A design trade-off by the Keep team to stick (no pun intended) to their vision for the app, but a trade-off none the less.
Slite
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.
Compatibility: Browser, Mac, Windows, Android, iOS
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.
Typora
Overview: Typora is highly customizable and works on all major operating systems, though it lacks online and mobile apps for working on the go.
Compatibility: Windows, Mac, Linux
Pros:
- Free (for now). It’s in beta mode right now so it might cost $$ in the future.
- Hybrid Markdown editor. It formats text as you type and it’s faster than Slite.
- Focus Mode. It dims the text you’re not currently working on.
- Table of Contents mode. Like Slite, it allows you to zoom into headings and outlines.
- Themes. LOTS of themes that you can customize with CSS — a language that lets you dictate exactly how you want your content presented.
- For Windows, Mac, and even Linux! All the desktops!
Cons:
- No app storage. Since it’s just a Markdown editor, Typora doesn’t store notes in the app. Files are actually stored in your computer’s file system, meaning you can’t move notes around in the app.
- Desktop-only writing app Typora doesn’t have a mobile app, but you can always complement it with a Markdown-editor mobile app, like iA Writer.
Microsoft 365
The best note taking and mobile office platform
REASONS TO BUY
+Full suite of apps+Cloud-based for accessibility+Mobile friendly+Sync to PC+Collaboration
Microsoft Office has come a long way, from being a chunky software platform for your PC, to the new Microsoft 365 cloud-based app which is sleek and accessible for Android and iOS mobile devices.
While most people might think of Microsoft OneNote or Sticky Notes as the basic note-taking app, why settle for a basic app when you can have the full power of the entire Microsoft Office suite on your phone or tablet?
That means having access to Word for starters, which is easily the most important document software available, and much more flexible and manageable as a format when it comes to note-taking than more basic apps. For a start, you won’t need to worry about importing your notes into Word – which is what most people are going to need to do – and there are also the advantages of being able to sync documents with your PC as well as work collaboratively with colleagues.
Perhaps more importantly, it means you can write and edit and send essential documents on the go rather than having to type up notes to later re-use or mine, saving so much time. And that’s before we even mention Excel for spreadsheets, Powerpoint for presentations, or Microsoft Teams for video conferencing which is now built into the platform as standard.
Overall, Microsoft 365 is far more than just a note-taking app, which is why we’ve ranked it as the best.
Conclusion
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.