Best Note Taking Apps in 2026

Notion is a connected workspace from Notion Labs, a company that describes itself as based in downtown San Francisco with offices around the world. Notes in Notion are pages built from blocks, and any page can hold a database with table, board, calendar or timeline views, so the same tool serves as a personal notebook, a team wiki and a light project tracker. That breadth is the main reason it ranks first here: few note apps let a user move from a meeting note to a linked task database without changing products.

Through 2026 Notion has shifted its weight towards AI. Its release log records Custom Agents that can call sub-agents and reusable skills (Notion 3.7, 15 September 2026), MCP connections and a Skills API (Notion 3.8, 13 October 2026), and a rebuild of Agents on 19 October 2026 that gave them their own computer and browser and the ability to work on a task for up to 24 hours. The Business plan bundles Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search; the Free and Plus plans include only a trial of Notion AI.

The limitations are documented on the pricing page itself. The free plan caps file uploads at 5 MB and page history at seven days, and block limits apply once a workspace has more than one member. Custom Agents are billed separately in Notion credits, at US$10 per 1,000 credits per month, which makes total cost harder to predict. Notion is cloud-first, so users who want plain files on their own disk usually look at Obsidian or Logseq instead.

OneNote is Microsoft's digital notebook, organised in the familiar paper metaphor of notebooks, sections and pages, with text, ink, images and files placed anywhere on an open canvas. Microsoft's support documentation states that all supported versions of OneNote are free to download and use, and that certain premium features can be unlocked with an optional Microsoft 365 or Office subscription; signing in with a compatible subscription adds extras such as Ink Replay, Researcher and Math Assistant.

The app runs on Windows, Mac, the web, iPhone, iPad and Android, and each version reads the same cloud-connected notebooks. That free cross-platform reach, combined with strong pen support on Windows tablets, explains its high position: for people already in the Microsoft ecosystem it costs nothing extra and stores notebooks in the account they already have.

OneNote's history includes a long period with two Windows apps side by side. Microsoft's guidance is that OneNote for Windows 10 reached end of support in October 2025 and that users should move to the OneNote desktop app. The main limitations are the freeform canvas, which makes notes harder to export cleanly to Markdown or other tools, and the dependence on a Microsoft account and its cloud storage for sync. Users who need structured databases or plain-text files will find it less suited than Notion or Obsidian.

Obsidian is a note-taking app that stores notes as plain Markdown files in a local folder, called a vault, on the user's own device. The company was started in 2020 by Erica Xu and Shida Li; its about page lists Steph Ango as chief executive and states that the company is 100% supported by its users, not investors. Its published principles include future-proof data in open formats and privacy through on-device storage.

The core app is free without limits and requires no sign-up. Revenue comes from optional services: Sync, Publish, a voluntary Commercial licence and the Catalyst early-access tier. Development is rapid and public. The changelog records Obsidian 1.14 (5 October 2026), which added a kanban view to Bases, the built-in database feature, and Obsidian 1.15 (2 November 2026), which brought mobile PDF export and reorderable Bases filters.

Obsidian's strengths are data ownership, backlinks and a graph of linked notes, and a large ecosystem of community plugins. Its limitations follow from the same design: real-time collaboration is not the focus, sync between devices costs extra unless the user arranges a third-party method, and the flexibility of plugins and settings asks more set-up time than Apple Notes or Google Keep. Teams wanting shared editing usually pair it with another tool or choose Notion.

Evernote is one of the longest-established note apps, known for capturing web pages, documents and scanned images into searchable notebooks. Its website footer now carries the copyright of Bending Spoons US Inc., reflecting ownership by the Italian app developer Bending Spoons. Under that ownership the plan structure has been rebuilt into Free, Starter, Advanced, a seat-based Flexible plan and an Unlimited enterprise plan.

The comparison page sets out the limits precisely. The Free plan allows 50 notes, one notebook, one device and 1 GB of storage; Starter raises that to 1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, three devices and 5 GB; Advanced removes the caps, subject to safeguard limits. Advanced is also where AI features sit, listed as AI Assistant, semantic search, AI Transcribe, AI Edit and AI Cleanup. All plans include tasks, an Evernote calendar view, offline notes, two-factor authentication and apps for iOS, Android, web, Windows and Mac, and the enterprise tier adds SSO, centralised administration and activity logs.

Evernote's search and clipping remain strong, but the free plan is now among the most restrictive in the category: one device and 50 notes are a trial in practice. The comparison page does not print prices, which appear only at checkout, so buyers cannot compare cost without starting a purchase.

Apple Notes is the note app bundled with macOS, iOS and iPadOS. Apple's Notes User Guide for macOS 27 lists locking notes with a password, tags, Smart Folders, pinned notes, scanned documents and PDFs inside notes, shared notes and folders, Math Notes that solve expressions when the user types an equals sign, and audio recording with live, searchable transcripts. The same note appears on Mac, iPhone and iPad through iCloud.

For people who own Apple devices, Notes costs nothing beyond the hardware. Apple grants 5 GB of iCloud storage on first sign-in, and iCloud+ plans in the US start at US$0.99 per month for 50 GB. That zero-friction start, plus features such as transcription that some competitors charge for, places it above several paid apps for everyday capture.

The limitations are structural. Notes is effectively confined to Apple hardware, with no native Windows or Android apps, so mixed-device households and teams cannot depend on it. Export options are limited compared with Markdown-based apps, and there is no plugin system or database layer. It is a capture and reference tool rather than a knowledge base, and users who outgrow it commonly move to Bear, which keeps an Apple-only focus, or to a cross-platform app.

Google Keep is Google's quick-capture app for notes, lists, photos, drawings and audio recordings. Its Workspace product page describes reminders on notes, finding notes by search, colour codes, labels, pins and filters, offline editing that syncs once a connection returns, and real-time editing of the same note by several people. Notes sync across phones, computers and smartwatches, and Keep appears in the side panel of other Workspace apps so that notes can be added from Gmail or Docs and exported to Google Docs.

Keep ranks for its speed and its place in an ecosystem most people already use. It works well for shopping lists, reminders and short notes that need to reach a phone and a laptop at once, and family-group sharing lets any group member edit shared notes.

Its limitations are deliberate. Keep has no notebooks or nested hierarchy, only labels; formatting is minimal; and long documents belong in Google Docs instead. The product page does not describe Gemini features in Keep or list a separate price, so this list records no pricing figure beyond its inclusion in Google's account and Workspace services. Users who want structure or longer writing tend to pair it with OneNote, Notion or Obsidian.

Goodnotes is a digital paper app built around handwriting with a stylus, used widely by students annotating PDFs and lecture slides. Its pricing page lists Free, Essential, Pro, Teams and Enterprise plans that run on Apple, Android, Windows and the web, plus an Apple-only Special Edition sold as a one-time purchase without cloud features.

The plan design reflects a move from a one-off app towards subscriptions with AI. The free plan allows up to three files and 20 minutes of audio recording, with watermarked exports. Essential (US$11.99 a year) removes file limits; Pro (US$35.99 a year) adds Goodnotes Cloud library sync across platforms, real-time collaboration and advanced AI, including Create Mode, image generation and meeting features. An AI Pass add-on at US$9.99 per month offers roughly twelve times more AI credits. Syncing one library between Apple and non-Apple devices requires Goodnotes Cloud, which is part of Pro.

Goodnotes' strengths are its ink engine, PDF annotation and math assistance. The main limitations are the three-file cap on the free tier, the need for Pro to sync between Apple and non-Apple devices, and a layered pricing scheme (plans plus AI Pass plus a regional Special Edition) that is harder to compare than a single subscription.

Notability is a note app from Ginger Labs, Inc. of San Francisco. It began as an iPad app combining handwriting with synchronised audio recording and now lists apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, web, Mac and Windows. Its current positioning is towards study: the product page highlights live audio transcription, AI-generated quizzes and flashcards, summaries of notes and recordings, chat with notes, checklists of action items from meetings and a YouTube link-to-note feature.

Pricing is published in US dollars and billed yearly. The free Starter plan holds five notes. Lite removes the note limit, Plus adds limited AI quizzes and transcription, and Pro unlocks unlimited transcription, AI summaries and chat with notes; business plans add central admin, shared libraries, audit logs and Microsoft Intune integration. At the time of review the page showed a 20%-off promotion, with list prices of US$14.99, US$19.99 and US$99.99 a year for Lite, Plus and Pro.

Its strengths are the pairing of ink with recorded audio and a generous set of study tools. The limitations are a five-note free tier, version history of only seven days on Lite, and the concentration of unlimited AI features in the Pro tier, which costs several times more than Lite.

Bear is a Markdown-based note and writing app developed by Shiny Frog. It is known for a clean editor in which Markdown formatting renders live as the user types, and for organising notes with nested hashtags rather than folders. The app is available for Mac, iPhone and iPad; the website lists no Windows, Android or web app.

The free version keeps notes locally and includes document scanning and export to formats including Markdown, TextBundle, RTF, PDF, HTML, DOCX and ePub, with three themes. Bear Pro, at US$2.99 a month or US$29.99 a year with a seven-day trial, adds iCloud sync, search inside PDFs and images, and encryption of individual notes unlocked with a password or Face ID. Bear states that notes sit between the user and iCloud and that Apple's Advanced Data Protection is supported.

Bear sits between Apple Notes and Obsidian: more writing-focused and exportable than the former, simpler and less extensible than the latter. Its limitations are the Apple-only platform, the need to pay for sync between a user's own devices, and the absence of real-time collaboration or team features.

Craft is a note and document app built by Balint Orosz that treats each note as a well-formatted document made of blocks, with nested pages, tasks, a calendar of daily notes, tags and search. A distinguishing feature is publishing: pages can be shared as web pages with controls for passwords, email access, expiry, comments and search indexing on paid plans.

The pricing page lists Free, Plus, Family, Team and Enterprise plans. The free plan includes core features but caps content at 1,500 blocks, storage at 1 GB, uploads at 25 MB and version history at seven days, with about 20 lifetime AI sessions. Plus removes content and storage limits, extends history to 30 days and opens Craft's highest AI model tier. The page displays Plus at $4.80 per month on the yearly toggle against a struck-through $8, Family at $9 per month for up to six people and Team at $5 per member per month with a three-member minimum; it does not name the currency and states that prices vary by country. Students receive Plus free with a verified school email.

Craft's strengths are its document design and publishing tools. Its limitations are a tight free-plan block limit, SSO only on Enterprise, and admin controls for restricting invitations still marked as coming soon on Team and Enterprise.

Joplin is an open-source note-taking application that stores notes in Markdown and organises them in notebooks. The project funds development through Joplin Cloud subscriptions, and its plans page refers to the open-source applications that those subscriptions support. Users can sync through Joplin Cloud or another sync target of their choosing, which is the main reason it appeals to people who want an Evernote-style notebook structure without a single vendor holding the data.

Joplin Cloud is priced in euros. Basic costs €2.99 a month (€2.40 a month on yearly billing) with 2 GB of storage and a 10 MB attachment limit; Pro costs €5.99 a month with 30 GB and 200 MB attachments; Pro 100 GB costs €9.99; Teams costs €7.99 per user per month with a two-user minimum. Pro adds notebook sharing, email-to-note and a customisable publishing banner, and all cloud plans include publishing notes to the web and sync across unlimited devices. A self-hosted Joplin Server Business licence is priced from €40 per user per year. Paid plans have a 14-day trial.

Joplin's limitations are an interface that is more utilitarian than Bear or Craft, and cloud prices quoted only in euros. Its AI features are marked as beta on the plans page.

Standard Notes is an end-to-end encrypted note app whose code is published as open source. The company says notes, tags and other app data are encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305, that its encryption has been audited by independent security researchers, and that it has operated for ten years funded entirely by paying users. In April 2024 Proton, the Swiss maker of Proton Mail, announced that the two companies were joining forces, stating that Standard Notes would remain open source and freely available and that prices would not change.

The free Standard plan includes unlimited sync across web, desktop and mobile, offline access, tags, two-factor authentication and daily encrypted email backups. Productivity, at $90 a year, adds Super notes, spreadsheets, daily notebooks, folders, an authenticator and a web clipper with one year of note history. Professional, at $120 a year, adds 100 GB of encrypted file storage, unlimited history, sharing with up to five accounts and hardware security key support.

The trade-off is cost and features. Paid plans are billed only yearly and cost more than Bear or Obsidian Sync, and the free tier keeps note history only for the current session. Encryption also limits server-side features such as AI search that cloud-first competitors offer.

Logseq is an open-source outliner in which every note is a list of blocks that can be referenced and linked individually, with a daily journal page as the default entry point. Its GitHub repository describes it as a privacy-first, open-source platform for knowledge management and collaboration, licensed under AGPL-3.0, and shows about 45,600 stars. Desktop builds are distributed through the repository's releases page and a web app runs at app.logseq.com.

Logseq is in the middle of a large architectural change. The repository states that the new database (DB) version is in beta, that the new mobile app and RTC real-time sync are in alpha, and warns that data loss is possible, recommending backups and a dedicated test graph. The original file-based version, which stores pages as Markdown files on disk, remains the stable route.

Logseq suits people who think in outlines and want block references, queries and a graph of linked ideas without paying a licence. Its limitations are the transition risk documented by the developers themselves, sync that is still in alpha, and an outliner-only model that feels unfamiliar to users who want free-form documents. Obsidian covers similar ground with a more stable release cadence.

UpNote is a note app from UpNote Pte. Ltd. that offers an Evernote-like notebook structure at a low price, with apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android and web clipper extensions for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Its editor supports rich text and Markdown, code blocks, tables, internal note links and collapsible sections, and notes can be organised with nested notebooks, hashtags, pins and spaces.

The free tier syncs across devices but is limited to 50 notes with basic features. Premium costs $1.99 per month or $39.99 as a one-time lifetime purchase, bought through the iOS, Android or Mac app, and adds unlimited notes, attachments, note locking, themes and export to text, PDF, HTML and Markdown; the site notes that prices vary by region and tax. Automatic backup, version history, a passcode lock and secret-link sharing are part of the product.

UpNote's appeal is cost: the lifetime option is unusual among synced note apps. The limitations are a small company with few published details, no collaboration or team plan, no AI features, and a 50-note free tier that functions mostly as a trial.