Sticky Notepad Tools, Compared By Platform

The sticky notepad you're looking for is almost certainly already on your computer, and nobody tells you that because there's no money in it.

Here's the short version before anything else. Windows ships Sticky Notes free from the Microsoft Store. macOS has shipped Stickies for years and it's sitting in your Applications folder right now. Both do the coloured-square-that-floats-on-your-desktop thing that people come to this search for, and both cost nothing. If you need more than they give you, the paid and third-party options are below, and if you meant the paper kind, that's covered too, including the arithmetic on reusable ones.

Prices checked on each vendor's own page, 28 July 2026.

The Free One Already On Your Machine

Apple's documentation for Stickies is worth reading, because the app does considerably more than the beige squares most people remember it as.

You get formatted text and bulleted lists with adjustable indentation. You can drag images and PDFs straight in, with markup tools for editing them. Notes float above other windows or go semi-transparent so you can see through them. There's find and replace across all your notes. Colours, obviously. And it exports to plain text, RTF or RTFD, or migrates every note you have into the Notes app in one move.

That last bit matters more than it sounds and I'll come back to it.

Microsoft Sticky Notes is a free download from the Microsoft Store for Windows. I couldn't get the Store listing to render its full feature list or version number for me, so I'm not going to itemise what it does beyond confirming it's free and it's theirs, which is more than I can say for several of the alternatives.

What The Top App Store Result Actually Is

This one made me laugh a bit.

The number one App Store result for "sticky notepad" right now is an app called Sticky Notepad, subtitled Notes and Memo. It's free, 2.8 MB, published by an individual developer, requires macOS 11.0 or later, and Apple's own listing says it has insufficient ratings to display an overview. Not a bad rating. Not enough ratings to show one.

The feature list is fine, honestly. Rich text with bold and italic and strikethrough, H1 through H3 headings, bulleted and numbered lists and to-do checkboxes, a stay-on-top pin, six theme colours with transparency, dark mode, resizable notes, fonts from 11pt to 96pt, export to TXT, menu bar access with the dock icon hidden. That's a competent little app and I've got nothing against it.

But it's a Mac app, sitting at the top of a search for a term with tens of thousands of monthly searches, competing against an app Apple already gives every Mac owner for free, and hardly anyone has rated it. That's what the top of this SERP looks like once you actually open the results, and it's a decent argument for checking your Applications folder before you install anything.

When The Built In Ones Run Out

Fair enough, there are real reasons to want something else.

Simple Sticky Notes is the long-running Windows alternative, and its site says it's completely free for personal and commercial use, which is an unusual thing to offer and worth noting. There's a store section on their site, so I'd assume there's a paid tier of some sort, but the pricing wasn't on the page I loaded and I'm not going to invent a number for it.

The other reason people move is sync. Built-in sticky notes tend to live on one machine. If you want the same note on a phone and a laptop, that's the point where Google Keep starts making sense, since it syncs across devices and works offline with changes syncing later, and it does colour codes, labels, pins and filters, plus reminders, photos, drawings and audio. Google's product page doesn't state a price for personal use anywhere I could find, and I've never been charged for it, but I'd rather describe that accurately than assert something I didn't read.

If you want the full comparison of note apps that sync properly rather than just stick to a desktop, the note keeping app rundown covers that side, and the Android notes app piece handles the phone question specifically.

Questions That Come Up

Is there a sticky note app that syncs between Windows and Mac? Not a built-in one, since the built-ins are platform-specific by design. Cross-platform means going to something like Google Keep, which syncs across devices and works offline, or accepting that you keep two separate sets.

Can I put sticky notes on my desktop for free? Yes, on both major platforms, using software you already have. Windows has Sticky Notes free from the Microsoft Store, macOS has Stickies preinstalled, and both float on the desktop, which is the actual thing people want.

Do I need an app at all for a quick note? Often not. A browser tab does it and there's nothing to install, and the online notepad options mostly store the text in your own browser rather than on someone's server. For a phone number you'll use in ten minutes, that's the whole solution.

What about Mac specifically? Stickies covers most of it and there's more detail in the sticky notes on MacBook walkthrough, including the settings that make notes stay on top properly, which is the part people usually can't find.

Are the paid sticky note apps worth it? For a single desktop, I'd say almost never. The features people pay for are sync, encryption, and organisation across hundreds of notes, and if you have hundreds of sticky notes you've outgrown sticky notes.

The Two Features That Actually Decide It

That sync question comes up often enough that it's worth being systematic, so here's the version with the products laid out side by side. Two things separate a sticky notepad from an ordinary notes app, and almost every comparison of these tools ignores both in favour of listing colours.

The first is whether the note floats above your other windows. That's the entire point of the format. If you have to go looking for it, it's just a note, and the whole reason the paper version works is that it physically gets in your way. The second thing is whether it follows you to another device, which is where the free built-ins tend to stop.

I put together what I could confirm from each product's own pages. The blanks are honest blanks, not implied nos.

Look at the shape of that. Nothing in the list does both things well, and I don't think that's an accident, because the desktop-floating apps are old operating system utilities and the syncing ones were built as phone apps. If you need both, you're picking which half to give up.

The Paper Half Of This Search

About a third of the results for this term are physical products, which tells you the search is split roughly down the middle between people who want software and people who want a pad of paper.

I'm not going to pretend paper is obsolete. The reason a physical sticky note works is that it occupies space in the world, and a digital one occupies space in a window you closed. That's a real difference and no app fixes it.

What's changed is that reusable versions exist now. Rocketbook sells a Reusable Sticky Notes Starter Kit at $29.99, which gets you 15 reusable and restickable 3 inch by 3 inch notes, a carrying case, a microfiber towel and a Pilot FriXion pen. You write with any FriXion pen, wipe the note clear with water, and the adhesive is rated for being stuck and restuck hundreds of times. Their app scans and files them to cloud storage.

Thirty dollars for fifteen sticky notes sounds insane until you do the division.

Cost Per Note, Reusable Versus Disposable

I couldn't load Post-it's pricing page today, it timed out on me twice, so I'm not going to quote a per-sheet price for the disposable ones. Instead here's the reusable side worked out properly, and you can hold your own pad price against it.

At $29.99 for 15 notes, the effective cost depends entirely on how many times you genuinely reuse each one.

Two caveats before anyone takes this to a spreadsheet. The kit price includes a pen, a case and a cloth, so some of that $29.99 isn't notes at all, which makes the real per-note figures slightly better than the table says. And I've assumed you actually reuse them, which is the entire load-bearing assumption and the one I'd bet against for most people.

If a disposable pad works out around a penny a sheet, which is the sort of number I'd guess without having verified it, you'd need roughly 200 reuses per note before the reusable kit wins on raw cost. That's a lot of wiping. The honest case for the reusable version isn't money, it's that you stop running out and you stop buying pads, and there's a scanning workflow attached.

Getting Your Notes Back Out Later

Nobody thinks about this with sticky notes because they feel temporary, and then three years later there are forty of them holding things you'd rather not lose.

macOS Stickies is the good citizen here. Apple's own guide describes exporting to plain text, RTF or RTFD, and migrating all notes to the Notes app in one action. That's a real exit.

The dedicated App Store app I mentioned exports to TXT, which is also fine. Google Keep exports notes to Google Docs. Simple Sticky Notes I couldn't confirm either way from the page I loaded.

The pattern I'd apply, and this goes for the wider productivity apps question too, is that the export path should exist before you put anything important in. Not because you plan to leave, but because you will eventually, and the day you want to leave is the worst day to discover the answer.

What Sticky Notes Are Genuinely Good At

Short bits of text you'll act on within a day. That's it. That's the category.

The moment a sticky note contains something you need next month, it's the wrong container and it should be in a real notes app. I've watched myself do this repeatedly, and the failure isn't the tool, it's using a deliberately temporary thing as permanent storage because it was the window that happened to be open.

What I'd Do

Open your Applications folder or your Start menu first. There's a very good chance the thing you were about to download is already sitting there, made by the company that made your operating system, free, and with a documented way to get your notes back out.

If it isn't enough, the gap you've hit is usually sync, and sync is the thing worth paying for or switching for. Colours and fonts are not.

And if you came here for paper, buy the cheap pad. The reusable kit is a nice object and the maths only works if you're the sort of person who genuinely wipes and rewrites, which I'd want to be honest with yourself about before spending thirty dollars on fifteen squares.