Note-taking apps are not all created equal. In fact, the deeper you dig into them, the more you realize how different they all are in terms of what they offer in both concept and abilities. While a solid note-taking app is a necessary piece of any suite of productivity apps, figuring out what to do with it in the first place is half the challenge.
Getting the right note-taking app is as much about finding one that clicks with you as it is about the nitty-gritty details of the service. In general, however, a reliable note-taking app lets you jot down all the things you want to remember quickly, easily, no matter where you are, and likewise lets you refer to all those notes anytime and anywhere.
It's 2018, and it's time you ditch the paper and embrace the future of note taking. For school or in business, taking notes in lectures or meetings is the best way to keep track of what's. In addition to general note taking and to-do list management, Evernote lets you search through scanned documents, handwritten text, and images; collaborate with others through shared notebooks; record audio notes; and more.
The giants in the space, namely Editors' Choice Evernote and runner up Microsoft OneNote, aim to do it all, offering rich features, support for multimedia notes, and tools that blur the lines between apps for personal use and those intended for work.
Evernote caused a ruckus over the past few years among its paying users for hiking the price and slashing the lower tiers of service. While many people are thinking about leaving Evernote, the sad state of affairs at the moment is that nothing lives up to it. If you use the full gamut of Evernote's features and functionality, there simply isn't a good Evernote alternative just yet. OneNote is a close second, but transitioning to it from Evernote is tough. The two services have structural differences that make it difficult to map one set of notes into the other app.
There are alternatives, of course, and hopefully some of them will get better in time. Zoho Notebook is a fine example. It scored low in our testing because it's only available on limited platforms (a Mac app and web clipper only just became available), but the company formerly had a full range of apps for a very similar product by the same name that's been retired. With the rebirth of Zoho Notebook, we should soon see more apps and additional functionality in this rookie service.
Pricing and Plans
A huge part of the reason people got miffed at Evernote was its price hike. It costs more than any other note-taking and syncing app. While it does have a free version, nonpaying Evernote members are limited to syncing their notes among only two devices and the Web app. That's painfully limiting.
Evernote accounts come in four tiers of service: Basic (free), Plus ($34.99 per year or $3.99 per month), Premium ($69.99 per year or $7.99 per month), and Evernote Business. The free tier lets you upload only 60MB of data each month, but the data you use is yours to keep. So technically speaking, the total storage is unlimited because you get more every month ad infinitum. Plus and Premium members can upload more and get a whole host of features that aren't included for free.
Google Keep is free with no upsells or special plans. All it requires is a Google account. The amount of storage space you get in Keep is dependent on your Google Drive storage, which is 15GB by default. You can pay $1.99 per month for 1TB of storage, which will be shared across all Google apps. There is an upload limit for images of 10MB and 25MP.
Microsoft OneNote handles storage similarly to Google Keep, using OneDrive for storage the same way Keep uses Google Drive. OneNote is also free with no special upgrades for extra features. The max file upload size is 100MB. Free users get 5GB of space, whereas Office 365 account holders get 1TB all told, shared among other Office Online apps. An Office 365 Personal account costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year.
Simplenote is a free service with no upgrades or in-app purchases. It has a variety of apps for all major platforms, and there is no limit on storage, so long as you don't abuse it, according to the company's terms. Simplenote doesn't support uploads, multimedia, or even formattingâjust text. It's worth noting that you'd have a hard time abusing limitless storage with plain text.
Features Worth Having
A few features worth having in a note taking and syncing app are optical character recognition (OCR), a good Web clipper, and organizational tools that work for you.
OCR comes in handy when snapping pictures of text. Google Keep can actually transcribe text that's in an image into typed text that you can then copy and paste or edit at will. Evernote Premium can run OCR on all text in images, including handwriting, when you look for words in a search. Microsoft OneNote can also read OCR text from photos. It also has a useful Digital Ink feature that turns your own handwriting into typed text when you use a tablet. It's handy for students writing equations that are otherwise difficult to type with a keyboard.
A Web clipper is another great feature for your note-taking app if you often find things on the Web that you want to save. For example, I clip a lot of recipes that I find online into my note-taking apps. Evernote and OneNote have Web clippers, and both give you options for saving the entire page or just core elements. Google Keep has a Web clipper, but it only saves the URL and a title, not the actual contents.
In terms of organizational tools, every app is different, but the important thing is you have an interface that makes sense to you and that helps you find what you need when you need it. Evernote uses notes, notebooks, stacks of notebooks, and tags, whereas OneNote has pages, sections, and notebooks. Both Simplenote and Google Keep only use tags, so if you prefer to not think about where you're putting your notes, those tools might be better options.
Take Notes, Sync, and Go
While Evernote remains PCMag's Editors' Choice for note-taking and syncing apps, we did lower its overall rating to reflect its drop in value after the changes in its pricing and services. Hopefully, the uproar caused by Evernote will light a fire under competitors to hurry up and improve their apps. There are a lot of promising apps, but most of them need more time to mature. The read the capsule reviews below, and, if one of them sounds interesting, please be sure to click through to the full review for more details.
Featured Note-Taking App Reviews:
I have spent the past few weeks â but really, itâs been the past few years â hunting for the perfect note-taking app. Iâm here to tell you that it doesnât exist, if only because everybodyâs definition of âperfectâ is different when it comes to something as personal as a repository of all your notes.
After my most recent round of testing, I have landed on what I believe is the best note-taking app for most people, even though it might not be the best note-taking app for you. There might be one special feature you really care about, for example, or you might be willing to spend a little money every month to get a better experience. I wonât be able to cover every one of those cases, but Iâll make some extra recommendations.
Strange as it seems, itâs useful to actually say what I mean by a ânote-taking app.â I mean more than simply a text editor. There are people who swear by just using Notepad or TextEdit and then manually organizing the text files they save. Instead, what I mean is an app where you can quickly create a note and it will automatically be saved and synced to your other devices.
A good note-taking app should be fast. It should sync your notes across multiple devices quickly and accurately. It should be available no matter what computing platform you use now or might switch to in the future. It should have lightning-fast search across all of your notes. It shouldnât be bogged down with too many confusing features â but it also canât be so bare-bones that it wonât meet your needs. It should protect the security and privacy of your notes. It should also be inexpensive, or even free.
Those are my priorities, and I think that they should form the basis for any app that wants to be the universal default note-taking app. There are surprisingly few apps that meet all these requirements. And even the ones that do have annoying aspects to them, which means that I donât have a standout, unequivocal recommendation. I have to equivocate. Nothing is perfect.
All that said, the best note-taking app for most people is Microsoft OneNote.
The best for most people: Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft OneNote is the best notes app for most people because it hits all of the most important requirements: itâs reliable, fairly fast, and works across Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and the web. It offers lots of different kinds of text formatting options and drawing tools, plus a âweb clipperâ for quickly adding notes from websites youâre browsing.
It doesnât cost anything for most people. The only cost is cloud storage that kicks in once youâve stored more than 5GB â that would be a gigantic amount of text notes, though you might hit it faster if you attach a lot of large images. Even then, Microsoftâs OneDrive starts at as little as $1.99 a month for 100GB â storage you can also use for lots of other purposes, like files or photos.
The mix of features, price, and availability OneNote offers is very nearly unique, though there are other apps that come close. What puts OneNote over the top is the quality of its apps across different platforms and the fact that it doesnât limit you to only syncing your notes to two devices on its free tier. It has very impressive document scanning, allowing you to extract the text from even very long documents.
OneNote is also secure â or at least as secure as any data that Microsoft keeps, which is pretty darn secure. You can put it behind a two-factor login and the data is encrypted using the same tools (and following the same rules) as other Microsoft Azure services.
Our review of Microsoft OneNote
But I have to admit that I donât love OneNote. I find its interface a little overwrought: your notes are kept in âpages,â which are nested into âsections,â which are then nested into multiple ânotebooksâ (and you can even have subpages nested within your pages). The extra layers of organization are the most infuriating things about OneNote. The second most infuriating thing is that it treats each page like a âcanvasâ where text is just one of many possible elements â which is great in theory, but in practice sometimes makes for a weird interface where you end up typing in an extraneous text box.
If youâre not annoyed to death by those interface issues, youâll find OneNote to be fast, reliable, and powerful.
If you are too annoyed, you should consider Evernote. It is a very comparable alternative to OneNote, but unfortunately puts a two-device limit on its free plan, which is too restrictive.
If you only use Apple devices: Apple Notes
If all the phones and computers and tablets you own are iPads, the best note-taking app is the one that Apple has built in: Apple Notes. Unlike some of Appleâs other default apps like Mail or Contacts, Apple Notes is full featured, updated often, and a real pleasure to use. Thereâs also a web version if you need it from time to time. Apple Notes is also secure, protected by the same system Apple uses to protect all synced user data. Best personal finance software for mac 2017.
It is not as good as it should be at making your data portable â i.e. exporting it if you want to use it in another app. And if you are an Android or Windows user (or even might be someday), keeping all your information in Notes could mean a huge hassle later. Apple has joined a tech consortium promising to make it easier to import and export data, but hasnât released the tools yet.
Our review of Apple Notes (iOS)
Plus, Apple Notes is the app of choice for screenshot-style apologies from celebrities on Instagram and Twitter. Every time you use it, you can pretend youâre a fallen star!
Some other options (and why you might want to use them)
As I mentioned at the outset, there are a ton of note-taking apps available and some might work better for your specific needs than our primary picks. A prior version of this guide selected Google Keep as the best option, but Keep just lacks too many features that people really need â while you can search all your notes, you canât search for text within a single note, ironically.
I mentioned Evernote above, which is a good alternative to OneNote. It costs $7.99 per month (or $70 per year) to unlock the full feature set. I generally prefer Evernoteâs interface, which is simpler and more intuitive. Evernote has some atrocious features like one that puts related articles under your notes. It has also had a rocky few years in terms of overall app quality, so youâre taking a small leap of faith that the company will improve things in the near future.
Other fully cross-platform apps exist and some of them are pretty good. I personally like Simplenote a lot, but itâs strictly text-only and could stand to have some upgrades to its security model. Zoho Notebook works a little like Google Keep, but its desktop apps are not great. Notion is a great project management app, but a pretty bad app for just taking notes. Standard Notes is good if you want total control and total security, but itâs difficult to configure and its apps are only okay.
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Two honorable mentions for people who want to write in Markdown (and you know who you are if you do): Bear and iA Writer are excellent. Bear is unfortunately only available on Apple devices and iA Writer doesnât yet have a web client.
If none of these apps sound just right for you, I suggest Weep. No, there is not an app called Weep. Itâs just what I do, every day, when I think about how the perfect note-taking app doesnât exist. Join me for a good cry.
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