

Microsoft OneNote is the best notes app for most people because it hits all of the most important requirements: it’s reliable, fairly fast, and works across Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and the web. It offers lots of different kinds of text formatting options and drawing tools, plus a “web clipper” for quickly adding notes from websites you’re browsing.

BEST NOTE TAKING APP FOR MAC AND IPHONE PLUS It doesn’t cost anything for most people. The only cost is cloud storage that kicks in once you’ve stored more than 5GB - that would be a gigantic amount of text notes, though you might hit it faster if you attach a lot of large images. Even then, Microsoft’s OneDrive starts at as little as $1.99 a month for 100GB - storage you can also use for lots of other purposes, like files or photos. The mix of features, price, and availability OneNote offers is very nearly unique, though there are other apps that come close. What puts OneNote over the top is the quality of its apps across different platforms and the fact that it doesn’t limit you to only syncing your notes to two devices on its free tier. It has very impressive document scanning, allowing you to extract the text from even very long documents. OneNote is also secure - or at least as secure as any data that Microsoft keeps, which is pretty darn secure. You can put it behind a two-factor login and the data is encrypted using the same tools (and following the same rules) as other Microsoft Azure services.īuy for $0.00 from Microsoft Buy for $0.00 from Mac App Store Buy for $0.00 from Google Playīut I have to admit that I don’t love OneNote. I find its interface a little overwrought: your notes are kept in “pages,” which are nested into “sections,” which are then nested into multiple “notebooks” (and you can even have subpages nested within your pages). The extra layers of organization are the most infuriating things about OneNote.

The second most infuriating thing is that it treats each page like a “canvas” where text is just one of many possible elements - which is great in theory, but in practice sometimes makes for a weird interface where you end up typing in an extraneous text box. If you’re not annoyed to death by those interface issues, you’ll find OneNote to be fast, reliable, and powerful. If you are too annoyed, you should consider Evernote. It is a very comparable alternative to OneNote, but unfortunately puts a two-device limit on its free plan, which is too restrictive. BEST NOTE TAKING APP FOR MAC AND IPHONE FREE.

