A Good App To Take Notes, Picked For Leaving

The top result for this search is a Reddit thread from somebody switching away from Evernote. The fourth is a Medium post titled "I Tried Every Note-Taking App, Here's What I Actually Use".

So the honest starting point for anyone hunting a good app to take notes is that the people ahead of you in this queue are mostly on their second or third one. That's not a failure of the software. It's what the category does, and it means the smartest thing you can optimise for at the start is not features. It's how cheaply you can leave.

Quick answer for anyone who wants to stop reading. Use whatever came with your device for two weeks, which is Apple Notes on an iPhone or Mac, Google Keep on Android, OneNote on Windows. All three are free, all three sync, and a large share of people never need anything else. If you already know you'll want the notes in ten years, start on Obsidian instead, because it keeps plain files on your own disk and asks for no account. Everything below came off each vendor's own pages and the app stores on 29 July 2026.

Half This Results Page Is People Switching

Look at what Google is serving. A Reddit thread about leaving Evernote. A Zapier roundup. A Play Store listing. A personal essay about trying everything.

That mix tells you the search intent better than any keyword tool. People asking this question have usually already picked once, hit something, and come back. The Zapier piece even describes Evernote's free plan, which is 50 notes on one device, as "utterly useless", which is a strong word for a roundup and a fair one for a limit that low.

What none of those pages do is treat switching as the expected outcome and pick accordingly. They rank apps as though you'll marry one. I'd rather assume you won't.

Days Until The Free Plan Stops

Nobody converts free-tier limits into time, so I did. Assume three notes a day, which is a modest amount for somebody genuinely taking notes rather than intending to.

One day. That's the honest reading of Goodnotes' free tier for somebody taking three notes a day, and Notability's is two.

I'm not calling either of those a scam. They're handwriting apps and their business is the paid tier, so the free plan is a preview and both companies charge $11.99 a year, which is not a lot of money for something you might open daily for five years. What bothers me is that the roundups call these free tiers, unqualified, in the same table as Obsidian, which is genuinely free with no ceiling at all. Those are different words being used for the same thing.

Evernote's seventeen days is the sneakiest of them. It's long enough that you'll have imported things and built a habit before the wall arrives, which is presumably the design, and it's the reason so many of these search results are people leaving Evernote specifically.

Which Ones Want An Account First

Second table, and this one surprised me more than the first, because it's the difference between trying an app and joining something.

Two apps on that list let you write something before you've told anybody who you are, and both of them are the ones that keep files on your machine. That correlation isn't a coincidence. If your notes never touch a server, there's nothing for the company to attach an identity to.

I'd put more weight on this than most people do, and not for privacy reasons particularly. It's that an account is the first stage of a switching cost. Once your notes are behind a login, moving them is an export job rather than a copy, and export jobs get postponed until they become migrations, and migrations get postponed forever.

The Two Walls You Won't See Coming

Storage caps and note counts are visible. You get warned, you make a decision, fine.

The two that arrive silently are device limits and history windows. Evernote's free plan is one device, which you discover on the day you're somewhere without your laptop wanting a note you definitely wrote. Notion's free plan keeps seven days of page history, and Craft's free plan keeps seven days too, which covers "I deleted that this morning" and does nothing for "I reorganised everything in June".

There's a third one that's half visible, and it's exports. Goodnotes stamps a watermark on anything exported from its free tier, so the free plan isn't limited by how much you write so much as by whether the output can leave the app in a state you'd hand to another person. That's a restriction on the exit rather than the entrance, which is exactly the kind I'd want flagged before I started.

A Good App Only Has To Do Four Things

Strip the feature lists back and this is what's actually load-bearing for somebody starting out.

It has to open fast enough that you use it while the thought is still there. It has to be on every device you own, because a note you can't reach is a note you didn't take. It has to find things later, which is a different job from storing them and the one most people discover they cared about eighteen months in. And it has to let you take your text out in a format something else can read.

That's the whole specification. Everything else on a pricing page is aimed at a person with a specific problem, and if you don't have that problem yet, buying the solution to it is just a way of feeling organised.

Apple Notes clears all four for free on Apple hardware. Google Keep clears all four for free if you're already in a Google account. OneNote clears all four and runs on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android, per Microsoft's own page, which makes it the only free option here that doesn't care what you own.

The Insurance Policy Costs Nothing

Here's the move I'd make regardless of which app you pick, and it takes about five minutes a year.

Every couple of months, export. Whatever the app offers, wherever it lands, into a folder with a date on it. You will almost certainly never open those folders. That's fine, that's what insurance is, and the cost is a few minutes against the scenario where a company changes its free tier or its pricing or its mind.

Obsidian and Joplin make this pointless because the files were already yours, which is the actual argument for them and it's a quieter argument than the plugin ecosystems people usually lead with. There's a fuller comparison of the plain-files approach against the workspace approach in the Obsidian vs Notion piece, and it's a genuinely close call for one person.

I Couldn't Tell You Which App I Was Using

Small confession, offered as evidence rather than advice.

I've shipped seven digital products priced between $29 and $49, and the first sale on one of my sites was $29.99, roughly two months after launch. During those two months I was writing constantly. If you asked me which note app I was using at the time, I'd have to go back through folders to work it out, and I'm not confident I'd find an answer.

That's my honest data point on how much the app choice mattered to anything I've made. Not zero. Somewhere close to it. The things that actually went wrong in that period were about nobody being able to find the product, and no note-taking setup on earth was going to fix that.

What I do now is boring and it's worked for years. Plain files, in a folder, next to whatever project they belong to, opened in whatever editor is already in front of me. I self-publish books as well, and a manuscript is a thing you come back to in month six needing a detail you half-remember, so the only property I've ever really needed is that search finds it. Plain text is searchable by anything, including tools that don't exist yet.

I'll flag the bias, because it's a strong one. That setup suits somebody who types and doesn't handwrite. If you write with a pen, none of it applies to you and you want a different article.

Questions People Ask

What's the best free note app? Whatever came with your device, honestly. Apple Notes holds the highest App Store rating of any note app I checked, 4.84 from 618,613 ratings, and OneNote has more ratings than anything else at 1,055,046 and costs nothing on any platform.

Is Evernote still worth trying? The free tier is 50 notes on 1 device with 1GB and 200 attachments, off their own comparison page, and they don't publish prices for the paid tiers on that page. That's enough for me to suggest starting elsewhere.

Do I need to pay for anything? Not at the start, and possibly not ever. Every paid tier I priced is selling sync across devices, collaboration, or capacity, and a single person on two devices frequently needs none of the three.

What if I want to write by hand? Different category with different money in it, and the free tiers there are much tighter. The decision-first version for tablets is in the best note taking program for iPad piece.

I'm on Android, does that change anything? A bit, and the store data is worth reading before you install. The notes app Android rundown covers ratings, update dates and what each free tier really caps.

What about notes I don't want to keep? Use something disposable rather than filing them. The free browser options, most of which keep text in your own browser, are in the online notepad comparison.

How do I stop losing things in there? That's a retrieval problem rather than a capture one, and it's the whole subject of the best note keeping app piece, which is built around search coverage instead of features.

What I'd Do In Week One

Open the app already on your phone. Take notes in it for two weeks without changing a single setting, importing anything, or reading another comparison.

Then write down what annoyed you, in one sentence. Almost everybody's sentence is about finding things, reaching them from another machine, or running out of room, and each of those has a different and cheap answer. Buy the answer to your sentence and nothing else.

The version of this that goes wrong is the one where somebody spends a fortnight choosing and then has an empty notebook and a subscription. I've watched people do it and I've done a version of it myself with other kinds of software. There's the full arithmetic on what happens once three or four of these charges land in the same month in the productivity apps breakdown, and a wider survey of the category, sorted by what you capture, in the digital note taking app rundown.