The Best Note Taking App? I’ve Tried Them All. Here’s My Verdict.
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I have been taking notes on my phone since 2008, which means I have been not-so-quietly accumulating opinions about the best note taking apps for the better part of two decades, and I have reached the point where I feel entitled to share them with you.
The short answer to “what’s the best note-taking app” is: it depends, which I know is annoying, so let me give you the longer answer instead, which is: I’ve used all of the main ones, I have strong feelings about most of them, and I’ll tell you exactly where I landed and why.
TLDR; there is no perfect system. There never is. But some of these are a lot better than others for specific types of people, and figuring out which type of person you are is actually most of the battle.
Apple Notes: the one that’s always just…there
I’ve had Apple Notes on my phone since my first iPhone in 2008, which makes it the longest relationship I have with any piece of software. Maybe?
It’s my default “jot something down immediately” tool, and for that job it’s basically perfect. Shared shopping lists, house notes, bucket lists, trip plans…all of that lives in Apple Notes because it’s fast, it’s frictionless, and everyone I share notes with is already in the Apple ecosystem so sharing works without an explanation or a signup.
There are obviously limitations though. Apple Notes has a tendency to become a graveyard of ideas if you’re not disciplined about it, and I am not always disciplined about it. The formatting is basic and the functionality hits a ceiling pretty quickly (at least for how my brain works). And while it technically has a web version, let’s be honest – if you’re not Apple, you’re not really using Apple Notes, and that matters if you ever need to work across devices or platforms.
For what it is, a fast, reliable, always-there capture tool, it’s great. As a system for organizing your thoughts and work, it runs out of road fairly quickly.
Best for: iPhone users who need fast capture and aren’t looking for anything more complex than that.
Notion: a love story that ends in overwhelm
I tried to go deep with Notion. I bought a template from Gumroad. I watched tutorials. I went down multiple rabbit holes trying to get my setup exactly right.
Here is what I discovered: Notion is extraordinarily powerful, and that power is precisely the problem if you are a perfectionist with an ADHD hyperfocus mode and a tendency toward analysis paralysis. Every time I opened it I wanted it to look perfect, function perfectly, be the perfect system for every possible use case I might ever have, and so I spent a lot of time building and rebuilding and reorganizing instead of actually using it to do anything.
The irony of a note-taking app becoming the thing that stops you taking notes is not lost on me.
Notion is incredible if you have the discipline to constrain it (and we have already established that I am occasionally lacking in discipline), or if you’re building something collaborative with a team and need a shared workspace with real structure. As a personal productivity tool for someone like me, it became an elaborate procrastination machine with a very beautiful interface.
Best for: Actually lots and lots of things, it is powerful (with great power comes great responsibility). Teams who need a shared workspace, or individuals with the discipline to set it up simply and leave it alone.
Obsidian: too open for my particular brain
Obsidian is the one that makes a certain type of person absolutely evangelical, and I understand why, and it is still not for me. And I think that’s OK?
I’ve realised something about myself through all of this note-taking app exploration, which is that sometimes I kind of need a bit of structure to be creative. The blank screen of Obsidian made me freeze up. Who knew? (Maybe something else to unpack in therapy…)
I am a systems-building person, I think, but Obsidian feels mind-mappy in a way that makes me feel weird, or maybe just a little dumb, and I’m not entirely sure how to explain it better than that. Maybe I should give it another try at some point. But right now it sits in the “not for me, or at least not for me yet” category, and I’ve made peace with that.
Best for: Technical users who want to build a fully customized personal knowledge management system and find that process actually energizing. If that sentence made you feel excited rather than tired, download Obsidian immediately.
Evernote: the one that got away
I loved Evernote. I saw the founder Phil Libin speak at SXSW years ago and he was engaging and sharp and gave the kind of talk that makes you want to immediately go and reorganise your entire life inside his product, and I went and did exactly that.
I even went down a full GTD rabbit hole specifically around Evernote — there’s a blog called The Secret Weapon that’s entirely about implementing Getting Things Done inside Evernote, and I was very much in that world for a while, and it was good (and maybe a little weird).
Evernote is powerful. Evernote is beautiful. Evernote also feels expensive now, and the pricing changes over the years have pushed a lot of loyal users away, myself included. My husband won’t become an Evernote person. My friends live in the Apple ecosystem. The network effects work against it in my particular life.
But I want to be wooed back. I am actively open to being wooed back. If Evernote is reading this: call me.
Best for: Power users who want a feature-rich, cross-platform note-taking system and are willing to pay for it. Also for people who, like me, for some reason are romantically attached to it and haven’t fully let go.
OneNote: the one I use because I have to
OneNote is my corporate tool and I want to be very clear that I am using it because my day job lives in the Microsoft ecosystem and I am trying to be a good girl about data security and client agreements and keeping work stuff in work tools.
I use it for meeting agendas, and notes for things I want to remember to raise in conversations with my closest collaborators. It sits alongside Teams and Microsoft Tasks in Outlook and together they form a system that is imperfect and occasionally makes me want to throw my laptop out of a window, but it’s not really my call so I make the best of it.
The rabbit holes I go down trying to optimise my OneNote setup are, if nothing else, a reliable source of productive-feeling procrastination. So there’s that.
Best for: People who work in Microsoft-heavy organisations and need their notes to live where their work already lives. Not really a choice so much as a consequence.
On being poly-app
Here’s where I’ve landed after fifteen-plus years of this: I am a poly-app person, and I’ve mostly made peace with that.
Apple Notes for fast capture and shared lists. OneNote for the day job. And a corner of my heart permanently reserved for Evernote, waiting for the right moment and the right pricing tier to justify coming back.
The note-taking app discourse online would have you believe there is one perfect tool and your job is to find it and commit to it and never stray. I don’t think that’s true for most people. Different contexts have different needs, and the tool that works for a quick grocery list is not the same tool that works for building a knowledge base, and that’s fine.
The real system isn’t the app. It’s knowing what you need, being honest about how your brain works, and not spending so long optimizing the container that you forget to put anything in it. (I say this as someone who has absolutely done that. Multiple times. In multiple apps.)
If you want to know how I handle tasks rather than notes, I’ve written about my Things 3 setup here – same philosophy, different container, more app-based opinions.
The verdict – is there actually a best note taking app?
If you’re starting from scratch and want my actual recommendation: start with Apple Notes. It’s free, it’s fast, it’s already on your phone (if you’re an Android user, mega-apologies for the Apple-centric tone here, it is not on your phone, but whilst not being a fangirl of Apple, I have acknowledged that my life setup is Apple-centric). See if you outgrow it. Most people don’t need anything more.
If you outgrow it and you’re willing to pay for something more powerful: try Evernote. The free tier will show you quickly whether it’s the right fit.
If you’re building something collaborative or you have the discipline to keep it simple: Notion is worth the learning curve.
If you’re technical and you love building systems: Obsidian. Go wild.
If your company uses Microsoft: OneNote. I’m sorry.
Note-taking is just one piece of the puzzle. If you want to see everything else I use to run a one-person operation, the full stack is here.
Chloë Scout previously built and exited an ecommerce business that grew to nearly $10M in annual revenue with over 100 employees. She writes about the practical, unglamorous, nuts-and-bolts side of building and running a business, without the MBA.
