Digital Note Taking App, Picked By What You Capture

Evernote's free plan syncs to one device. Fifty notes, one notebook, one device, and 1GB of storage, per their own plan comparison page.

One device is the number that should stop you, because a digital note taking app that lives on a single machine is a text file with extra steps, and syncing is the entire reason most people leave paper in the first place.

Here's the short version. Free ceilings in this category range from three files at one end to no limit at all at the other, which is a spread nobody puts in a table. Obsidian and Joplin are free without note limits and keep files you own. Google Keep syncs in real time across everything and works offline. GoodNotes and Notability cap you at three and five items respectively. Everything below came off each product's own pages on 28 July 2026.

What Each Free Tier Actually Holds

I lined the free plans up by the only unit that matters at the start, which is how much you can put in before it stops working.

Three items against no limit at all. That's the actual range of this category and it's an order of magnitude wider than any roundup implies, because roundups list features and features look similar across all eight of these.

The pattern is not subtle once you see it. Products that store your notes on their servers cap you tightly, because every free note costs them money. Products that store notes on your machine don't cap you at all, because your notes cost them nothing. Everything else about the free tier follows from that one fact.

Evernote's tier is the most restrictive of the server-backed ones by some distance. Fifty notes is under two months of light use for most people, and their Starter tier lifts it to 1000 notes, 20 notebooks, 3 devices and 5GB. Their comparison page doesn't publish what Starter costs. I clicked through looking for it and the page routes you to checkout instead, so I can tell you what you get and not what you'd pay.

Pick By What You Capture

The better question than "which app is best" is what you're putting into it, since these products are built around different input types and are merely adequate at the others.

Blanks are things the product's own pages didn't state, not features I'm claiming are absent.

Google Keep's line is worth quoting because it's the most direct answer to the capture question anywhere in this list. Create and share notes, lists, photos, drawings, and audio. Five input types named in one sentence, it works offline with changes syncing when you reconnect, and it syncs in real time across phone, computer and smartwatch. For quick capture that's a complete product and it doesn't charge you.

OneNote is the other one that genuinely takes everything, and it's free as an app on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android. The Microsoft 365 subscription it's advertised alongside is $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year for Personal, and that money buys the rest of Office rather than OneNote itself.

Sync Is What You're Actually Buying

Once you sort the category by free ceiling, the pricing makes a different kind of sense. Nobody is selling you a note editor. They're selling you the same note appearing on your phone.

Obsidian is explicit about this in a way I appreciate. The app is free without limits and no sign-up. Sync is $4 USD per user per month billed annually, or $5 billed monthly. Publish, which puts notes on the web, is $8 USD per site per month annually or $10 monthly. There's a $25 USD one-time Catalyst licence for early access, and a Commercial licence at $50 USD per user per year for organisations.

So Obsidian's sync runs $48 a year. GoodNotes Pro, which is an entire handwriting application with collaboration and cloud storage, is $35.99 a year. Paying a third more for sync alone than for a whole competing app is a genuinely odd-looking comparison, and it makes sense only when you remember that Obsidian isn't charging you for the software at all, so the $48 is the whole bill rather than an add-on to one.

Google Keep syncs across everything at no stated price. Joplin syncs over WebDAV or Dropbox for free, or through Joplin Cloud from EUR 2.40 a month billed yearly, priced in euros on the page I loaded. Evernote makes you pay to reach a second device.

Four completely different answers to one problem. I don't think there's a right one, but I do think sync is the line item to compare, and nobody compares it because it's boring next to a feature list.

The One Device Rule

I want to sit on the Evernote free tier a bit longer, because it's the clearest example of a limit that doesn't announce itself.

Fifty notes is a visible cap. You'll see it coming, you'll get a warning, and you'll make a decision with information. One device is invisible, because the moment you notice it is the moment you're standing somewhere without your laptop wanting a note you definitely wrote.

Their ladder lifts it in steps. Free is 1 device, Starter is 3 devices, Advanced is unlimited. Storage goes 1GB, 5GB, unlimited. Notes go 50, 1000, unlimited. It's a coherent ladder and I've no complaint about the structure. The complaint, if there is one, is that "1 device" reads as a small technical detail in a comparison table and functions as the main product decision.

The general lesson I'd take from it applies past Evernote. When you're reading a free tier, sort the limits into ones you'll see coming and ones you won't. Storage caps and note counts you'll see. Device limits, history windows and export restrictions you won't, and those are the ones worth checking twice.

Why I Have An Absurd Number Of Files

My own bias here is that I generate a lot of material and almost none of it costs me anything to make.

I self-publish books on Amazon's KDP platform, and I generate images and video locally on an M4 Pro rather than paying per render, which means the marginal cost of one more draft, one more version, one more variation is basically electricity. When making a thing is free you make far more things, and you keep them, because deleting is a decision and keeping isn't.

The consequence for note apps is that any tier measured in dozens of notes is useless to me before I've started. Fifty notes is a morning. Three files is a paragraph. That's not a criticism of those tiers, since they're clearly sized for a different person, it's a declaration that I'm not the person they're sized for and you should discount my enthusiasm for the unlimited options accordingly.

If your actual note volume is twenty things a year, Evernote free is fine and everything I've said about ceilings is irrelevant to you. I'd genuinely rather say that than pretend everybody has my problem.

Questions That Come Up

What's the best free digital note taking app? Google Keep if you capture on a phone, OneNote if you want one page that takes anything, Obsidian or Joplin if you want the files to still be yours in ten years. All three of those are complete products at zero.

Do I need one that handles handwriting? Only if you handwrite. The handwriting apps are a separate market with separate pricing, and the head-to-head between the two biggest is in the Notability versus GoodNotes comparison.

Is it worth paying for sync? Usually yes, if the alternative is notes stranded on one machine, and $4 to $5 a month is the going rate. Before you pay, check whether something you already have syncs free, because several do.

What about AI summaries and transcription? That's now a priced feature in most of these and the units vary wildly between vendors. The AI note taking app piece covers what you're actually buying.

Which one keeps notes safest long term? The ones where the file is on your disk in a readable format, which is Obsidian and Joplin. The longer argument, built around search and retrieval rather than capture, is in the best note keeping app comparison, and the plain-files-versus-workspace question specifically is in Obsidian vs Notion.

What I'd Try First

Whatever's already installed, for two weeks, without importing anything.

If you're on Android or in Gmail, that's Keep. On Windows, that's OneNote. On a Mac or iPhone, that's Apple Notes. All free, all syncing, all good enough that a meaningful share of people never need anything else.

Then let the failure tell you what to buy. If you ran out of room, you want an app with no ceiling. If you couldn't find something, you want search. If you couldn't reach it from another machine, you want sync, and that's the cheapest of the three problems to fix. There's the full cost picture once you start assembling several of these in the productivity apps breakdown.