Best Note Taking For Mac, Priced With iCloud

The free option and the cheapest paid option cost about the same. That's the thing nobody mentions when they rank the best note taking for Mac.

Apple Notes costs nothing and stores your notes in iCloud, and an Apple Account comes with 5GB. Once you pass 5GB the next tier is $0.99 a month, which is $11.88 a year. Bear Pro is $29.99 a year. Obsidian's Sync add-on is $4 per user per month on annual billing, so $48. The free app isn't free forever, it's free until a storage number, and the storage number is shared with your photos.

Short version. Apple Notes if you're not sure, because it's already there and it rates 4.84 on the App Store from over six hundred thousand ratings. Obsidian if you want your notes as files on your own disk. Bear if you want something in between that looks nice. Craft if you want documents rather than notes. Prices below came off each vendor's own page on 28 July 2026.

The Free One Runs On A Shared Meter

Here's the part I think is genuinely underrated. Apple Notes doesn't have tiers, it has a storage pool, and the pool is the same one holding your photo library.

Text notes barely register against that. Scanned documents, attached PDFs, images pasted from Safari, and audio recordings absolutely do. So the honest answer to "what does Apple Notes cost" is nothing until the day your phone starts nagging about iCloud, and because that day arrives after a holiday or a long weekend of photos rather than after a week of heavy note-taking, almost nobody attributes the upgrade to their notes app, which is how a paid product hides inside a free one for years.

Which puts it in a dead heat with the cheap paid apps rather than well below them. Bear Pro at $29.99 a year is roughly two and a half times the 50GB iCloud tier, not infinitely more than free.

What The Mac App Store Actually Says

I pulled these off the store rather than out of a roundup.

Two things stand out. Apple Notes matches Craft at the top of the ratings and has roughly ninety times the sample size. And Bear's current Mac listing showed zero ratings when I looked, which usually means a listing reset rather than an unloved app, since Bear on iPhone has a long history and its own following.

Obsidian isn't on the Mac App Store at all. You download it from obsidian.md. That's a deliberate choice by a company that doesn't want to hand Apple a cut of something it mostly gives away, and it also means the app can do things sandboxed apps can't, like read every file in a folder you point it at.

Every Free Tier Stops Somewhere Different

This is the actual decision, and it's obscured by everyone comparing features instead of boundaries.

Read down the middle column and you'll see four completely different theories of what a free user should be allowed to do.

Bear caps a capability. You can write forever and export everything, you just can't sync. Craft caps volume. Notion caps file sizes and history. Evernote caps almost everything including how many machines you can be on. Obsidian and Joplin cap nothing at all and sell you the plumbing separately.

I have a preference here and I'll state it as a preference rather than a fact. Capping a capability is more honest than capping volume, because you find out on day one instead of on month eight when you've got two hundred notes in there and a decision to make under pressure.

The Craft row bothers me and I'm leaving it half-finished on purpose. Their pricing page was running a 40% promotion when I loaded it and the monthly and annual figures came out in an order that didn't make sense, with monthly apparently cheaper than annual. Rather than publish a number I can't explain, I'll say the free tier is 1,500 blocks and you should read the price yourself.

Bear Gives Away The Exports

One detail worth pulling out because it inverts the usual pattern.

Bear's free version exports to TXT, Markdown, TextBundle, RTF, PDF, JPG, HTML, DOCX and ePub. Nine formats, no payment, no watermark. What it withholds is iCloud sync and OCR search inside PDFs and images.

Compare that with the handwriting apps, where the free tier lets you keep working and stamps a watermark on anything you take out. Two opposite philosophies about what a free user is. One says you can leave whenever you like but your notes live on one machine. The other says your notes follow you everywhere but you can't take them anywhere useful.

If you've ever wondered which of those you'd rather be locked into, that's the question, and it's more useful than any feature checklist, because a checklist assumes you'll still be using the app in three years while the export policy is the only part of the product designed for the version of you who won't be, and that version turns up more often than anybody plans for.

Which Ones Keep Notes As Files

On a Mac this matters more than on a phone, because a Mac has a filesystem you actually touch.

Obsidian's notes are plain Markdown in a folder you chose. You can open them in TextEdit, grep them from Terminal, back them up with anything, and the app is a viewer over the top. Joplin is the same idea with a different sync story. Bear exports to Markdown but stores its own way, so the files are a copy rather than the original.

Apple Notes, Craft and Notion all keep your notes in their own structure. That's not a betrayal, it's what lets them do the clever things. It does mean the notes exist inside an application rather than inside your disk, and the difference only becomes visible on the day you want to leave.

The full version of this argument, with both vendors' pricing pages laid out side by side, is in the Obsidian and Notion comparison. It's the clearest example of the split in the whole category.

What I Run On A Mac, Which Isn't Any Of These

My notes are Markdown files sitting next to the projects they belong to, in one repository, opened in whatever editor is already in front of me. So functionally I run the Obsidian model without running Obsidian, which is a slightly annoying thing to admit in an article ranking note apps.

I didn't arrive there through principle. I arrived there because I once spent months improving a product while the site it lived on sat at average position 47 in Search Console, indexed and completely invisible, and the whole time it felt like progress because there was always something to fix. Nobody could find the thing. That was the problem, and no amount of better tooling was going to touch it.

Since then I'm suspicious of any decision that produces a nice spreadsheet and no output. Picking a note app is exactly that shape. It's pleasant, it's legible, you can spend an evening on it, and at the end you have zero notes.

I'd rather you opened Apple Notes today than opened the right app in a fortnight. It's already installed, it rates higher than anything you'd replace it with, and it costs a dollar a month at the point where it stops being free.

How I'd Pick

Start with what's already on the machine for one month of real use. Not an afternoon of testing, a month of actual notes.

Then let the friction name your app. If the friction is "these notes are trapped in an app", go to Obsidian and never think about it again. If it's "I want this to look nice and sync", Bear at $29.99 a year. If it's "I need documents with structure rather than notes", Craft. If it's "I need my notes tied to my calendar", NotePlan, which rates 4.79 from 1,497 ratings and is the only one on the list built around that idea.

And if nothing rubs, you're finished, and you saved yourself both the subscription and the evening. That outcome is more common than the roundups suggest.

For the rest of what a Mac already does before you install anything, the macOS productivity apps piece covers the built-in tools people pay to replace. For the arithmetic on running several of these subscriptions at once, the productivity apps breakdown adds them up, and the total is the part that changes minds.

Questions People Ask

What's the best free note taking app for Mac? Apple Notes for most people, on the evidence of its own store rating and the fact it's already installed. Obsidian if you want the files to be yours.

Does Apple Notes cost anything? Not directly. It uses iCloud storage, which starts at 5GB free and then $0.99 a month for 50GB, and that pool is shared with photos and backups.

Is Bear worth $29.99 a year? What you're buying is iCloud sync and OCR search inside PDFs and images. Everything else, including all nine export formats, is in the free version. Judge it on those two things.

Which Mac note app is best for handwriting? None of these, really. That's a tablet question and the answer lives in the notebook app from Apple piece, where the built-in Notes app turns out to rate higher than the paid handwriting leaders.

Can I move notes between these later? Markdown is the common ground and Bear, Obsidian, Joplin and Craft all speak it to some degree. Apple Notes exports per note as PDF, which is fine for reading and useless for editing. Plan on your notes living where you put them, and pick accordingly.