You’ve got it! That genius epiphany, that brilliant screenplay idea, that jolt of terror that you’ll forget to pick up the dry cleaning. It’s come to you in a flash, and you need to jot it down now before this ephemeral whiff of remembrance floats out of your brain forever. So you pull out your phone and start swiping through your apps. But there’s no good option for dictating your thoughts. All your apps are either too slow or too cumbersome to whip open in a pinch. Or, if you do have a go-to app, it’s all so cluttered and impossible to organize that your wonderful idea vanishes into the void of all your other half-formed notions. What you need is a great notes app, one that makes it easy to organize all the disparate ingots of thought in your life. We’re here to help.
Every app in this list lets you do the same basic sorts of things: write down quick ideas, make checklists, set reminder notifications, incorporate drawings and images. There isn’t any single best app for every note-taker out there. But out of all the options, these are the best we’ve used.
Google Keep
If you’re an Android user, try Google Keep—it’s preinstalled on your phone, and features just about the best mix of simplicity and functionality of any notes app. Easily tap open a new note, or use voice commands to transcribe your spoken words. On the main screen, all your items look like Post-it notes pasted up on a board. You have several options for style and color-coding, and you can slide notes around to organize them in your own way.
Keep is especially useful if you already use the rest of the Google suite. You can access Keep within Gmail, where a little bar will pop up along the side showing all your notes. As with Google Docs, notes in Keep are easy to share, and you can invite others to collaborate.
For a simpler, more action-oriented chore tracker that keeps you firmly rooted in the Google ecosystem, try Google Tasks. These handy timestamped checkmarks automatically integrate into your calendar, and can be found in the same sidebar along with Keep notes in Gmail.
Notion
Notion is the big kid’s note-taking app. It’s varied, complex, and very capable of capturing all manner of projects, from simple to-do lists to carefully plotted out budgets and planning documents. It comes with a variety of templates for things like habit tracking, personal finance, travel planning, hobbies, career building, and food and nutrition tracking. It’s also great for collaboration, and just about anything can be shared with other users. You can use the sharing features to coordinate calendars, edit documents, and keep track of tasks as a group.
And because AI is inside every app these days, Notion has an embedded AI assistant. A little star icon on the side of the text box offers prompts for the AI to help brainstorm ideas, form outlines, or just spitball blog posts.
New users opening it for the first time might find the user interface to be a little obtuse, but once you get the hang of Notion’s peculiarities and learn to navigate the app, its powers become clear.
Microsoft OneNote
If you’re looking for a notes management system that integrates with all of your other productivity software, but you're a Microsoft person and not a Google person, then Microsoft OneNote is for you. It has much of the same functionality as Google Keep, but it syncs with the tools in Microsoft's Office suite—Word, Excel, and Outlook—instead of Google's suite.
On the desktop, it operates a lot like Microsoft Word, with a file menu up at the top and all of the familiar layout and formatting options for your text-based notes.
Notes are nested inside custom category tabs; think color-coded tags in a three-ring binder. You can attach specific notes to meetings via Outlook and prioritize them using urgency tags of various levels. If you’re looking for a “professional” notes app, OneNote is a great option.
Plus, if you have a subscription to Microsoft 365 on the desktop, you can then take advantage of Microsoft’s Copilot AI integration in OneNote. The AI helper can create summaries and to-do lists, collate information from various sources, or just rewrite your notes to make them more clear and coherent.
Apple Notes
If you use an iPhone, then Apple Notes is an obvious choice. It comes installed on your phone, and, like Google Keep, it excels in its simplicity. While there are more advanced features, like the ability to add attachments and to clip text and images from the web, they don’t clutter things up.
Organization is also superb if you take the time to set up category folders and nest subfolders inside them. If you’ve already gotten used to Apple Notes, there’s nothing wrong with sticking with it. Oh yes, and if you’re feeling adventurous, you can dictate notes to Siri—it's not as knowledgeable as the other AI-powered assistants out there, but it transcribes speech pretty well.
Bear
Meet Apple Notes’ more refined cousin. Bear notes offer a bevy of styling options that allow you to change themes, adjust formatting, and play with the typography of your notes. (It is available on iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers only.) Functionally, Bear works the same as any of the other apps on this list, albeit with a lot more flair. It packages all its features in a warm, cozy style that won Apple’s design award in 2017.
One of Bear’s most helpful features is the ability to link notes together via tags. Just tag your thoughts with the appropriate category (work, wedding, books to read) as you jot them down, and Bear will sort them into their proper folders. If it feels like your thoughts come from all over the place, or if you're bad at keeping things organized in folders, this can be a great way to keep your digital life in order.
Bear got a big version 2 update last year, which was a labor of love that gave it a bunch of new features. The updated app is better at organizing tables, has the ability to add footnotes, and offers better in-note search. It's all wrapped in a more pleasant design too.
Bear is a free app, but a Pro version costs $30 per year and offers additional features like custom themes, the ability to sync with iCloud, and the option to export notes in more formats like PDF and HTML.
Evernote
Sorry to say, but we can't recommend Evernote anymore. Once the most innovative of the cloud-based notes apps, Evernote has since evolved into a sad shadow of itself. The app now is a cluttered mess that has jammed together just about every feature imaginable: group chat, photo transcription, web clipping, and integration with other online services. As a result, it’s much more cumbersome to use than the others on this list when you just want to jot down a simple idea. We were also turned off by the sheer volume of pop-up ads that appear over and over to prompt you to subscribe to Evernote’s $130 per year premium tier. (Evernote’s current new parent company, Bending Spoons, laid off its entire US workforce last year.)
Unfortunately, lots of people still use Evernote, and probably feel locked into its now-degraded ecosystem. It may be hard to make that switch to a new app, but if you’d like to, it’s possible to remove your notes from Evernote. Sadly, exporting your stuff off the app has become almost as cumbersome as using the app itself. Still, if you plan to make the switch, here’s how to do it:
First off, you’ll need to do it on the desktop app, as neither the website nor mobile app offer an option to export your data. Download the desktop client if you haven’t already, then go into Notes on the left-hand sidebar.
Select all your notes by hitting Edit, Select All (or control/command+A). With everything selected, right-click the notes and hit Export, or go to File and then Export. Evernote lets you export only 100 notes at a time, so you may need to repeat the process to grab everything. You can export the files as a web page (HTML) or a .enex file, which can be opened by some other popular note apps, or by one of the free .enex file readers you can find online.
When you import your files into another notes app, the formatting might not translate perfectly, but at least you still have your thoughts written down.
Or Just Scribble for Real
Sometimes, a simple note app can’t keep up with your output—especially if you’re someone who takes copious notes for work. Maybe you just like to write things out longhand but want the ease of digital searching later on. In that case, it may be time to consider a dedicated note-taking tablet. This is obviously a bigger investment than a simple, mostly free app, but these portable devices can be quite handy. They can capture all of your pen strokes, sync them to the cloud, and make them shareable and editable later on.
You have a few solid options. The $500 reMarkable is the most prominent. Not only does the E Ink screen offer a phenomenal writing experience, it works as an ebook reader as well. If you’re really into writing on paper, the $150 Moleskine Smart Writing Set Ellipse is a digital note-reader and ink-on-paper tablet in one. Another good choice is the Sony Digital Paper ($500 and up). It’s much the same as the reMarkable, but there’s a version with a slightly smaller footprint.
And of course, there ain’t nothing wrong with some good pen and paper. It’s easy to get lost in our phones sometimes, and having that tactile experience of writing in a nice hardbound Leuchtturm notebook or other paper planner can be a nice break from those omnipresent screens.
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