The Notes App Samsung Ships, Priced Properly

Ten people can edit the same note at once in the notes app Samsung ships free on every Galaxy. The nearest equivalent I could price, Goodnotes Teams, is $120 per seat per year, so the same ten-person setup there runs $1,200 annually.

That's not a fair fight and I know it. Different products, different guarantees, no admin console on the Samsung side. But it's the sort of comparison nobody bothers making, because preinstalled software gets treated as furniture rather than as a thing with a market value.

Quick answer for anyone deciding. Samsung Notes is free, it's genuinely good, and the parts that make it good are welded to Galaxy hardware. If you're staying on Samsung, stop shopping. If you might switch to an iPhone, know now that there's no Samsung-published notes app in the App Store and plan your exit before you've got four years of handwriting in there.

What Samsung Actually Ships

I pulled this from Samsung's own support page rather than a review, on 28 July 2026.

The app runs on Galaxy phones, tablets and Galaxy Book PCs, and it's distributed through the Play Store, the Microsoft Store and Galaxy Store. You can write text, drop in images with footnotes, record voice, and draw with a range of brush types and a colour mixer. Handwriting can be moved around after the fact and converted to text. PDFs import and get annotated inside the app. Folders and subfolders exist, along with twelve page templates. Notes export to PowerPoint or Word.

Collaboration goes up to nine other people on the same note at the same time. There's a documented sync with Microsoft OneNote, and the Reminder app syncs with Microsoft To Do.

On devices with Galaxy AI there's automatic formatting, summaries, spell checking, instant translation, voice memo transcription, and custom note covers. Landscape mode on the Z TriFold and Z Fold7.

None of that costs anything.

The Same Features, Bought Separately

So what would you pay to assemble that from apps you'd have to buy? I priced the nearest equivalents off each vendor's own pricing page.

Buy the two subscriptions that cover the most ground, Goodnotes Pro and Notability Pro, and you're at $115.98 a year. Add the AI layer and it's $235.86.

Now, this is an approximation and I want to be clear about that. The paid apps do things Samsung Notes doesn't, particularly around pen feel and PDF workflow, and Samsung's AI features are tied to hardware you already paid for inside the phone price. I'm not claiming a Galaxy owner is a hundred and sixteen dollars a year richer.

What I am claiming is that the free app on the phone sits in the same feature bracket as the paid apps people spend a week comparing, and it almost never makes those comparison articles, because there's no affiliate link on software that arrives preinstalled.

What Leaving Costs

This is the part I'd think about before the features, and it's the reason the article exists.

The iOS row is the one that catches people. I searched the US App Store for a Samsung notes app and got Google Keep, Apple Notes, OneNote, Goodnotes and a handful of third-party notepads back. No Samsung entry. So the migration is an export, and exports out of handwriting apps are lossy in the same way everywhere. Your ink becomes a picture of ink.

The documented OneNote sync is the bridge I'd actually use. It moves your notes into a free app that exists on every platform, which is a better destination than a folder of Word files, and it's a Samsung-documented feature rather than a workaround somebody invented on a forum.

Do it while you still own the Galaxy. Not after, when the phone has been traded in and the account is half-closed and the only copy of the note you actually cared about is in a format that needed the original app to open properly, which is the version of this story I hear most often and the one that's entirely avoidable with ten minutes of setup while everything still works.

The Ten Month Gap

Samsung Notes has a billion-plus downloads, 14.6 million reviews and a 4.8 rating on Play. Its listing says last updated 23 September 2025.

Every other major note app I checked had shipped an update within the previous eight weeks. Google Keep's listing said 27 July 2026, which was the day before I looked.

Here's the caveat, and it matters. Preinstalled Samsung apps update through Galaxy Store and through the phone's own system updates, so the Play listing isn't the channel most Samsung Notes users receive. A stale date there doesn't mean the app on your Galaxy is stale.

It does mean the version a non-Samsung Android phone would install has been sitting still for ten months. If you were considering Samsung Notes on a Pixel because you liked it on an old phone, that's the thing to weigh. The notes app for Android comparison has the full table of download counts, ratings and update dates across eleven apps if you want to see where everything sits.

Fourteen Million People Bothered To Rate It

Something in that data set kept nagging at me, so I worked it out.

Samsung Notes and Google Keep both sit in the billion-plus download bracket. Samsung Notes has 14.6 million reviews. Keep has 2.5 million. That's roughly 5.8 times the review volume from a nominally similar user base, and Samsung's average is 4.8 against Keep's 4.7.

I can think of two explanations and I can't separate them from the outside. Preinstalled apps prompt for ratings in places downloaded apps don't, which inflates volume. And Samsung Notes is the kind of app people have opinions about, because writing by hand is personal in a way a shopping list isn't.

Either way, the practical read is that 4.8 across 14.6 million reviewers is drawn from an unusually ordinary sample. Most app ratings come from enthusiasts and complainers, the two groups motivated enough to leave one. This one includes a lot of people who just have a Galaxy, which makes it a better signal than most, if a duller one.

Worth holding next to the general point that the software already on your machine rarely appears in a roundup. The productivity apps piece makes that argument across the whole category, and preinstalled note apps are the clearest example of it.

No Data Collected

Samsung Notes declares no data shared with third parties and no data collected in its Play Store Data safety section. Obsidian and Joplin are the only other apps on my list that declare the same.

That's a developer declaration rather than an audit, so treat it as what Samsung was willing to sign rather than as a finding. It's still notable for a preinstalled app from a phone manufacturer, and it's a cleaner box than several apps that market themselves on privacy.

I went through all eleven declarations properly in the Android notes application piece, including the three apps that declare Location as a collected category, which is a strange thing to find in a notepad.

Where It's Weaker Than The Reviews Suggest

I don't own a Galaxy and I'm not going to pretend I've spent a semester writing on one, so this section is inference from documentation rather than experience. Take it accordingly.

The AI features are conditional. Samsung's page attaches them to "Galaxy AI devices", which is a moving list tied to recent hardware, so an older Galaxy gets the note app without the summaries, translation and transcription. That's the difference between a free app that matches Notability Pro and a free app that matches Goodnotes Essential, and the marketing doesn't draw the line for you.

The export formats are Word and PowerPoint. Those are good, cross-platform, widely readable formats, and they're also formats that discard structure. There's no Markdown, no open note bundle, nothing designed for another note app to import cleanly.

And the collaboration ceiling is nine other people, which is generous for free and small for anything organisational, though I'd argue that most people asking about shared notes are picturing four friends revising for the same exam rather than a company rolling something out, and for that group the ceiling may as well not exist. It's a study group, not a department.

What I'd Do With It

Use it if you have it. That's most of my advice and I don't think it needs decorating.

The part worth being deliberate about is the exit, and I say that as someone who learned the general lesson expensively rather than in this category. I once had a site sitting at average position 47 in Search Console for months. Indexed, invisible, no human ever saw it. I spent that whole stretch improving the thing instead of asking how anybody would find it, because improving felt like the work. Choosing tools has the same failure mode reversed. You optimise the daily experience and never once ask what happens on the day you leave.

So my honest position on Samsung Notes is that the daily experience is excellent and free, and the exit is worse than average, and those two facts belong in the same sentence rather than in different reviews.

Set up the OneNote sync now, while it's a two-minute job and not an emergency. Then forget about it and go take some notes.

If you're wondering what the paid alternatives actually cost over years rather than months, the Goodnotes price breakdown has the full ladder including the one-time purchase figure their pricing page won't print.

Questions People Ask

Is Samsung Notes free? Yes, with no ads badge and no in-app purchases badge on its Play listing. The AI features cost nothing extra but require a Galaxy AI device.

Can I use Samsung Notes on a non-Samsung phone? It's on the Play Store, so yes technically. The pen features and the AI features are tied to Samsung hardware, and that Play build hasn't been updated since September 2025.

Can I get Samsung Notes on an iPhone? Not as a Samsung app. My App Store search returned nothing from Samsung. Export or bridge to OneNote before you switch.

Does Samsung Notes work on Windows? Yes, Samsung lists the Microsoft Store as a distribution channel alongside Play and Galaxy Store, and Galaxy Book PCs are named on their support page.

How do I get my notes out? Export to Word or PowerPoint, or sync with Microsoft OneNote using the documented integration. PDFs you imported come back out as PDFs. Handwriting flattens on the way out, which is true of every app in this category rather than a Samsung failing.

Is it better than Google Keep? For handwriting with a pen, easily. For quick lists synced to an account you can reach from any device on any platform, Keep, and it isn't close either.