Share on Facebook Tweet this Share From keeping track of professional deadlines to keeping your personal life in order, a great note-taking app can do wonders for your productivity. The features you want (and how much you’re willing to pay for them) depends largely on what you’ll be using a note-taking app for. To help you sort through all the options, we’ve rounded up five of our favorite note-taking apps and summarized exactly what each one offers, where you can use them, and how much they’ll cost – Free Available for Mac, iOs, Android. It’s tempting to bury the lede and save our top pick for last, but this app is so damn good we just can’t wait that long to tell you about it. Zoho’s Notebook app is a serious contender for anyone that wants the ability to incorporate visual pizzazz into their note-taking.
It uses more of a card-like display than a list view, but it does let you sort your notes into different notebooks for an added layer of organization. The app is available for iOs and Android devices, as well as a desktop version for Mac. The first thing you’re likely to notice with Zoho Notebook is its pure visual appeal.
Even if an flair isn’t high on your list of must-haves for a note-taking app, there’s no denying that Zoho has created something genuinely beautiful here. Each notebook is displayed as a literal notebook – a lovely little graphic of a -like book, with the ability to select from a range of pre-designed covers. The care that went into creating the cover options is obvious, with geometric designs, quirky illustrations, and holiday options. Once you navigate inside one of your books, you’ll find each individual note displayed as a card.
Again, there’s a distinctly artistic feel to the ways in which you can color code your notecards. The list of pre-selected colors is varied, offering a lot more than the typical primary or CMYK colors. There’s also the option of selecting your own color from a color wheel, which allows you to create a completely custom scheme for yourself that can go so far as selecting different shades of the same color for some satisfyingly deep color-coding. Especially considering the app is entirely free, the visual design alone makes it worth a download. You’re not just looking for a note-taking app that looks like an art exhibit, though, so let’s discuss some of its features.
The good news is that Zoho has put just as much thought into Notebook’s functionality as its appearance. You can choose from several different card types, including basic text notes, checklists, audio notes, photos, uploaded files, and sketches – and each of these card types is loaded with its own handy features. Text notes can include embedded images, sketches, or recordings.
Items on checklists can be marked complete with a simple tap. Photos can be uploaded from a file, pulled from your phone’s saved photos, or taken and added to a note in real time. Documents like PDFs and spreadsheets can also be uploaded from a file, and the app has a nifty feature that will let you scan a document using the camera on your mobile device. Lay your document on a flat surface, hold the camera over it, and the app will automatically locate the edges of the document and snap a pic, creating a crisp scan with no superfluous background information. The sketch function includes the standard ability to change ink color, brush size, and pen type, but in true Zoho fashion it also goes a step further by allowing you to use your sketches as custom notebook covers on the main page. You can lock notes behind a password wall, which will blur them out on the main screen so you don’t have to worry about anyone seeing something confidential (or just embarrassing) while you’re scrolling through the app in public.
Accessibility is on-point with a broad-reaching search function that will check notebook titles as well as content within each individual card. The app is clearly designed with mobile user-friendliness at the forefront, with responsive gestures that make for a silky smooth navigational experience. To add cards to specific notebooks, you click on your preferred book and create a new card, but you can also set a default notebook so whenever you create a new card from the main page it goes to a set location. You can sync to as many devices as you like, and it’s as close to instant as you could expect with so many features. At a price point of exactly $0, a striking visual design, ample customization options, and reliable syncing, Zoho Notebook just might be the best note-taking app you can find right now without dropping any dough. The problems are few and far between: there’s currently no great collaboration feature and you can’t use the app on a Windows desktop.
But with such a satisfying mobile experience and the ability to sync unlimited iOs or Android devices, that’s far from a deal-killer. If you want a quick download that won’t cost you anything and is practically guaranteed to leave you satisfied, Zoho Notebook is your pick.
– Free and Paid Versions Available for web, desktop, iOs, Android. A long-time leader in the note-taking world, Evernote is loaded with an insane number of features that quite frankly just can’t be found in other apps. All those features ain’t free, though, and it can cost you a pretty penny if you want all the bells and whistles this app has to offer. You’ve got three account options with Evernote, and it’s important to know what each type offers before you spend any money. Let’s start with the free version.
It’s called a Basic Account, and anyone can get one just by signing up with an email address. The Basic Account gets you a surprising number of features considering you pay diddly for it. You can create as many notes as you like and organize them into, complete with tags for sorting. Each note has basic text editing options, as well as the ability to add images, audio recordings, and content you clip from the web via a browser add-on. You can use the app’s search function to quickly find what you’re looking for.
You can also set reminders on specific notes, mark-up images, and create shortcuts for frequently-accessed notes. Plus, you can share any note with whomever you please via email, URL,. And all these features are available via the web app, desktop client, or mobile apps for iOs and Android. They couldn’t very well make money on upgrades if they gave you absolutely everything for free, though, so the Basic version does have its limits – and depending on what you plan to use Evernote for, those limits could be deal-breakers.
First off, the Basic Account only lets you sync to two devices at a time. This alone may be enough to incentivize some users to upgrade (or send them packing to find an alternative), so it’s something to consider if you’ve got several devices. Secondly, the Basic Account only allows offline access to your notes from the desktop app.
So if you’re stuck somewhere where you can’t access WiFi on your phone, you’re out of luck until you can get back to civilization. This could be another big deal-breaker for a lot of folks, especially those who want to get the most out of using the app on the go. Here’s the real kicker, though: the free account has a monthly upload limit of 60MB. This doesn’t just refer to uploading new images and documents into notes – there are a lot of things that contribute to your monthly limit. Editing a text inside of a note, for example, contributes to your upload limit, as does rotating or deleting a picture inside a note. In fact, pretty much anything you do that requires the app to re-sync your notes across your devices contributes to your limit. You can see how this can quickly become frustrating if you’re someone who likes to update or re-work the notes you’ve made.
It can be quite limiting and has the potential to detract from the app’s otherwise useful features. If you can’t play around with editing your notes as often as you like, then the plethora of editing features becomes less appealing.
So what about the upgrades? There are two paid versions of Evernote: Premium and Business. Both get you a hefty boost to the monthly upload limit (10GB and 20GB, respectively), as well as access to more personalized customer support. Shelling out some money also affords you blanket offline access to your notes, syncing across unlimited devices, and the ability to forward emails into the app.
You can annotate PDFs, search text in uploaded documents, and digitize with both upgrade options as well. Plus, you can take advantage of the app’s handy presentation mode, which will turn your notes into a presentation with one click if you want to, say, lead a business meeting or give a drunken dissertation on your Westworld predictions. If you’re interested in the app for personal use only, there’s not much reason to go so far as upgrading to the Business Account, which includes central user administration and the ability to use shared workspaces for easier collaboration and project management. There’s no arguing that the quality and quantity of Evernote’s features is impressive. Not only that, but the intuitive functionality of the app makes it downright pleasant to use. There’s not another note-taking app out there that can offer everything Evernote can in one neatly wrapped package. Still, the upgrades aren’t cheap (the Premium account will cost you $69.99/year and the Business Account is $14.99 per month per user) and whether Evernote is worth the cost depends entirely on how frequently you plan to use it, on which devices, and for what purpose.
We highly recommend giving the Basic Account a try before you commit to a paid plan. When it comes down to entering those credit card digits, you may find that you can live without some of the features and go with a more affordable (or free) alternative. – Free Version and Paid Version (with Office 365) Available for web, Windows desktop, Mac, iOs, and Android You’ll often see ’s OneNote referenced as the closest thing you can get to Evernote without spending money, and in many ways, that’s true. OneNote does share a lot of similar features with Evernote, and it’s a contender for anyone looking for a note-taking app that’s built with an eye for business. Unlike Evernote, you can get free access to all of OneNote’s features for the low, low cost of the time it takes you to create a free Microsoft account (if you already have a Skype, Outlook, or Xbox Live account you’ve already got this step taken care of). Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to make notes and sync them across all the devices you please, with available versions for the web, Windows, Mac, iOs devices, and Android devices. While OneNote does sort of have paid options, you don’t lose a single feature by opting for the free version (though you do get less cloud storage, at only 5GB as opposed to the 1TB shared across all apps if you have an Office subscription).
You can create notes and notebooks, tag entries, restore older versions of notes, insert audio clips, clip content from webpages, mark-up embedded media, and make sketches with your finger or stylus. You don’t have to worry about getting stuck without access to your information, because you can always access your notes when you’re offline.
If you want to work together on something, you can share notes to let other users view and edit them. If you decide to get a full Microsoft Office subscription, OneNote integrates nicely with the other Office apps, allowing you to do things like create notes from your Outlook emails or embed spreadsheets from Excel.
Where OneNote falls a little short, however, is in its user interface. If you’re already familiar with Office apps, you’ll find the OneNote interface familiar, as it has the same look, feel, and menu layout as Microsoft’s other applications. Even if you haven’t used other Office apps, the learning curve for navigating OneNote’s features isn’t too steep – but you may find yourself having to do a little Googling at first since the user interface isn’t as intuitive as Evernote’s. The search feature is one area where OneNote’s shortcomings are apparent: you can search notebook titles or within an individual notebook, but you’ll find the function lacking if you want to do a blanket search across all content in all your notebooks at once. The web clipping feature is not as fool-proof as Evernote’s and tagging is also a bit clunkier.