The Notebook App Apple Makes Is Called Notes

The top result for notebook app Apple searches is made by Zoho, a software company headquartered in India. Apple's own app comes sixth.

That's not a scandal, it's a naming collision. Apple's note-taking app is called Notes, not Notebook, so a search using the word notebook surfaces every third-party app that put the word in its title. There are several, they're all free to install, and at least three of them charge money once you're inside.

Fast answer. Apple's app is Notes, it's already on your device, it holds a 4.84 rating from 617,751 ratings on the App Store, and that's a higher score from a larger sample than either Goodnotes or Notability. If you want a notebook metaphor with covers and sections, Zoho Notebook is the app you're seeing at the top, and it's free to a point. All figures below came off the App Store on 28 July 2026.

Who Actually Makes These

I looked up every App Store result in that search rather than guessing from the titles.

Two of the five are the same company's app for different platforms. One is a numbered Ontario corporation, which is not a criticism, plenty of good software ships under a holding company name, but it's the kind of thing worth knowing before you hand an app your diary.

Apple's own entry sits between two Zoho listings and a numbered company. Nothing about the result page tells you which one is the built-in.

The Free Built In One Rates Highest

This is the part I found genuinely surprising and then, on reflection, not surprising at all.

Notes holds 4.84 from 617,751 ratings. Notability is 4.76 from 451,384. Goodnotes is 4.72 from 437,177. Zoho Notebook is 4.70 from 23,847.

So the app that costs nothing, that nobody writes a roundup about, and that gets placed fourth in every comparison article, has both the highest average and the largest sample of the group. By a margin that isn't huge but also isn't noise, given the sample sizes involved.

I'd read that carefully rather than triumphantly. Ratings measure the gap between expectation and delivery, and expectations for a free preinstalled app are low, which flatters it. People who bought Goodnotes had a reason and a price in mind, and paying makes you a harder marker.

Even allowing for all that, six hundred thousand people rating the default app at nearly five stars is a fact that never appears in a single article recommending you replace it.

What Notes Does That People Pay For

Reading Apple's own user guide for Notes on Mac turned up a list longer than I expected, and a couple of items I'd have bet money weren't in there.

It records and transcribes audio and makes the transcripts searchable. It solves maths inline, so typing an expression and an equals sign gives you the answer in the note. It has tags and Smart Folders that populate themselves. Notes can be locked with a password. There's a Quick Note for capture, tables, lists, highlighting, drag-and-drop for photos, videos and PDFs, markup on attachments, PDF and scanned document handling, and sharing and collaboration on individual notes or whole folders.

The transcription one is worth pausing on, because audio transcription is the headline feature of an entire category of paid apps. Notability puts recording and transcription on its $15.99 a year tier and unlimited transcription on the $79.99 tier. Otter's paid plan is $8.33 per user per month on annual billing for 1,200 minutes.

Apple charges nothing and doesn't advertise it, which is roughly Apple's whole personality with this app.

What's missing compared to the paid handwriting apps is a proper PDF annotation workflow, notebook and section organisation, audio synced to the position of your pen on the page, and handwriting search across years of notes. Those are real gaps and they're each worth twelve to sixteen dollars a year to the right person, which is the argument I worked through in the best note taking app for iPad piece.

Zoho Notebook Has Five Prices

The app ranking first here is free to install and carries in-app purchases, and I counted five distinct prices in the store listing.

The paired numbers are almost certainly monthly and annual for the same tier, which would make Pro $2.49 a month or $24.99 a year, and AI $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. I say almost certainly because the store lists in-app purchases as names and prices with no billing period attached, so that's my inference rather than a quoted fact.

Zoho's own pricing page fills in some of the limits without filling in the numbers. Notebook Essential gives 2GB per user and up to 10 versions of a note. Pro gives 100GB storage, uploads up to 1GB, and up to 100 versions. The AI tier is metered at 100 minutes per user per month of transcription and roughly 60 uses a month of the writing assistant. The page showed me the limits and left the price fields empty on the version I loaded, which is why the store listing is doing the work above.

The App Store description does give the free ceiling. Notes up to 30MB, file uploads up to 100MB.

For a free tier that's generous compared to the handwriting apps, where free means three files or five notes. Zoho is capping the size of things rather than the number of them, which suits a person taking lots of small notes and punishes a person scanning documents.

A Mac App With No Ratings At All

Position four is Zoho's Mac version, and it has zero ratings.

Not a low score. None. Zero people have rated it, on a listing that Google is placing on the first page of results for a query with thousands of monthly searches.

I mention it because it's a useful reminder about what an App Store ranking in Google actually means. It means the page matched the query, not that the app has users. A store listing is a well-structured page on a very trusted domain, so these things rank on naming alone, and four of the ten results here are store pages rather than anything written by a person who used the software.

If you're comparing apps by what ranks, you're partly comparing app names.

Why This Search Confuses Everyone

Three separate things get called a notebook on Apple platforms and people asking this question usually mean one of them without knowing the others exist.

There's Apple Notes, the built-in app, which is note-shaped rather than notebook-shaped. Everything is a flat note in a folder.

There's the notebook metaphor, which is what Zoho Notebook and Goodnotes sell, where you get covers, sections and pages that turn. If the picture in your head has a cover on it, that's the category you want.

And there's the MacBook, which is a laptop, and which occasionally sends people here when they meant something else entirely. If you're after sticky notes on a Mac desktop rather than a note app, that's a different tool and the built-in one is called Stickies.

I don't think any of these are the wrong answer. I think the search term is doing three jobs and the results page is trying to serve all three at once, which is why it looks like it does.

When I'd Leave Notes

I don't use any of them, which I should say plainly before offering an opinion. 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. It's not a system, it's a habit that stuck.

The reason it stuck is a lesson from somewhere else. I had a site sitting at average position 47 in Search Console for months, meaning indexed and never once seen by a human, and I spent that whole period improving the product because improving felt like the work. It wasn't. Tool selection has the same trap at a smaller scale. Choosing feels like progress.

So my honest advice is to leave Notes only when you can name the thing it won't do. Not a feeling that better software exists. A sentence. "I need audio synced to my handwriting." "I need a PDF I can mark up across forty pages and search later." "I need my notes as files I can back up myself."

If you can't finish that sentence, the sixth result is your answer and you already have it. If you can, the Goodnotes price breakdown covers what the upgrade actually costs, including a one-time purchase option their pricing page won't print, and the best note taking for Mac piece covers the desktop side where the file-ownership question gets sharper.

Questions People Ask

Does Apple have a notebook app? It has Notes, which does the same job with a different metaphor. There's no Apple app called Notebook, which is why third-party apps with that name dominate this search.

Is Apple Notes actually good? On the App Store's own numbers, 4.84 from 617,751 ratings, which is the best score of any app in this result set. Take that as evidence rather than proof.

Is Zoho Notebook free? Free to install, with a free tier capped at 30MB notes and 100MB uploads, and five different in-app purchase prices above that from $2.49 to $49.99.

Why is Apple Notes only updated once in a while? Its App Store listing shows 12 December 2025 as the last update, because system apps ship with OS releases rather than on their own schedule. Every third-party app in the table above updated within the last three weeks.

Can I use Apple Notes on Windows or Android? Through iCloud on the web, in a limited form. It's an Apple-ecosystem app by design, and that's the trade you're making, which is exactly the trade a stack of subscriptions is supposed to buy you out of. The productivity apps breakdown prices what that buyout actually costs per year.