Today, the best tool for taking notes is no longer a pen or paper. It’s no longer an app for your phone or tablet. The best tool for taking notes is Evernote, which has seamlessly transitioned from being one of the best note taking apps for personal use to being the best digital notebook .
In this article i will be showing you a more effective way towards note taking using these tools below.
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.
Additionally – and perhaps more relevant to this article – here’s an overview of Thomas’ custom note-taking template (download it here) that replicates many of the functions from Evernote:
Evernote
Overview: Evernote is a cross-platform note-taking app that’s great for processing hand-written notes and clipping articles from the web. The price, however, could be prohibitive on a student budget.
Compatibility: Browser, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS
Pros:
- Multiple file formats. If you’re on a paid plan, Evernote can hold anything your professor throws at you: PDF’s, PowerPoints, the 3 different sheets of requirements for one project. One fun extra: If you paste a Google Docs link, Evernote creates a Google Drive icon in-line and changes the URL to the name of the doc.
- Scanner for mobile. You can use Evernote as a scanner to take photos of pages of books that when you don’t want to pay for photocopying. It also has optical character recognition so the correct John Mayer meme will appear when you search for “tremendously unintelligent”.
- Web clipper for browsers. Great for saving those New York Times articles that are hidden behind a paywall so you can use them for your essay later. You can pick how much of the page you want to capture: everything, just the article text, or a highlighted selection of text.
Cons:
- Not a lot of organization. Imagine your study area’s desk: You have notebooks lying around that contain class notes, random doodles, and frustrated journal entries. You can pile up semi-related notebooks into stacks. You can put sticky notes or flags into pages of the notebook that contain certain topics you want to refer to. That’s the extent of organization with Evernote: stacks, notebooks, notes, and tags.
- No Markdown support. Markdown isn’t just for note-taking; it’s for faster writing, too. I use Markdown to write anything that goes on the web. And sometimes I use it to write essays for school, too. Sadly, while Evernote is my research repository, it’s not a tool I use to do the actual writing.
- Pricey. If you use Evernote to scan documents and save research papers like I do, the 60 MB included in the free plan won’t cut it. And if you want to use it with more than 2 devices or use optical character recognition, you have to go Premium. At least students get 50% off Premium for a year.
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.
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.
Apple Notes Price: Free for 5GB of storage across all iCloud services; starts at $0.99/month for 50GB.
There’s a very healthy notes app ecosystem for Apple devices; however, since they’re all paid products and Apple Notes is so good, none of them made this list. For more options, check out our picks for the best Mac note-taking apps.
Best free note-taking 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 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.
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.Create OneNote notes from new or moved Trello cardsUse this ZapCopy new Evernote notes to your OneNote notebookUse this ZapAdd notes on OneNote for upcoming Google Calendar eventsUse this ZapSee more OneNote integrations powered by
OneNote Price: Free for up to 5GB of notes; $1.99/month for 100GB.
Evernote and OneNote are the frontrunners in the note-taking category. Take a look at how they stack up in our Evernote vs. OneNote showdown.
Hive Notes
If you’re a Hive user, Hive Notes is a great way to integrate your meetings with your to-do list. In Hive Notes, you can actually connect a note to a meeting on your Google or Outlook calendar, assign meeting attendees next steps, and easily share the meeting note with everyone after the meeting. This is one of the best note taking apps on the market.
Since Hive Notes syncs up with your calendar, it’ll also send you a reminder in Hive five minutes before your meeting starts prompting you to take notes. If the meeting is recurring, Hive also offers a “notebook” style set-up where you can add multiple entries to the same note. Bonus: real-time collaborative editing is available in Hive Notes, which basically works like a Google Doc so multiple people can add comments at once.
Hugo
Hugo is a centralized place for all notes, meetings, and tasks. This is a relatively newer product on the market, and is basically a central place to gather everything related to any upcoming meetings. In Hugo, you can see a general overview of the meetings on your calendar, as well as any tasks that are related to them. You can also set reminders to alert you to any upcoming meetings so you never forget to set an agenda or prepare.
Hugo also helps you prep agendas with one-click templates and you can take in-meeting notes with both internal and external participants. Hugo is one of our favorite note taking apps for its futuristic and advanced capabilities. Try it if you’re tired of your basic notepad.
Simplenote
Simplenote is one of our favorite note taking apps for those who want something straightforward and simple, as the name suggests. Simplenote allows you to sync all notes across devices, and you can view past changes in markdown mode. Additionally, you can easily share lists/notes and meeting items with other people, as well as publish your notes online.
Bonus: Simplenote is free!
Conclusion
Note-taking applications and apps can be a life-saver if you use them the right way. As web developers we spend all day in front of our PCs and laptops, constantly on the move. Keeping detailed notes of our daily tasks and objectives is extremely important. Unfortunately, paper notebooks are disappearing more and more with modern times so digital note-taking tools such as Evernote or OneNote Pro have become popular substitutes.