Best Note-taking Apps and Software in 2019

by Bradley Nice, Content Manager at ClickHelp — all-in-one help authoring tool

With the technology spreading, note-taking apps are slowly replacing old-school sticky notes. And that’s understandable — you can’t hold everything in your head and you can’t carry sticky notes everywhere with you. So let’s have a look at some of the best representatives of this type of software!

Google Keep

I wonder why Google doesn’t pre-install this on Android phones like Apple does with their Notes app. It’s simple and quite an effective way of keeping short notes — I’ve used it for couple of years a while ago. Though it doesn’t have lots of formatting options, but still does its main job.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Absolutely free
• Works on most devices
• Has web version

Cons

• No rich text formatting
• Only basic categorisation — with labels

Bear Notes

I’ve stumbled upon Bear App when searching a replacement to the standard iOS notes app. And it exceeded my expectations. It’s a perfect note-taking app with a whole lot of features even in the free version. It only takes two clicks to add a new note!

The design is absolutely marvellous and the UX side of the app is brilliant as well.

Pros

• Very fast
• TONS of formatting options
• Great UX
• Low pricing
• Ways to organize stuff like hashtags

Cons

• Apple devices only
• Has a price tag on some features like cloud sync

Evernote

Evernote has been there for ages. It has app for every device, including web, features to organize your notes — notebooks or tags, and a handful of formatting options.

Pros

• Cross-platform sync
• Free version with quite a lot of features
• Many services around the web have Evernote integration

Cons

• Can be slow
• Paid plans don’t come cheap
• Only two synced devices on free plan
• No offline notes — you have to pay for that

OneNote

Everyone who uses WIndows should know OneNote. Quite recently (about a year a go) it was redesigned. The Desktop/tablet version is not just a note-taking app, but feels more like an actual notebook. You can paint, you can place text wherever you want — there are few tools besides the text tool. A must-have for creative people.

Pros

• Absolutely free
• Awesome drawing tools
• Lots of formatting options
• Cross-platform sync with OneDrive

Cons

• Cross-platform sync only with OneDrive
• Can take its time to load, especially when there’s a lot of stuff in there
• Requires Microsoft account

Notion.so

Notion is common to OneNote in a sense that it’s not just a note-taking app. On the official website, it’s stated that it is an “all-in-one” workspace. And it’s kinda true — you can create complex hierarchy of your “notes”, insert tables, create kanban boards and a lot of advanced stuff like this.

Pros

• A LOT of advanced stuff — code snippets, to-do lists, quotes, galleries…
• Rich formatting options
• Has a number of different templates
• Cross-platform
• Allows embedding of many things (including google docs and spreadsheets)

The bad

• Can be overwhelming at first
• No offline mode — it only caches the stuff you visited and updates it once you go online
• Free plan has a limit of 1000 ‘blocks’ (basically every text piece, picture, etc.), but devs promise it amounts to ⅓ of “Moby-Dick”

Honorable mentions

Quip

Quip is kinda similar to Notion in terms of ‘all-in-one’, letting you work with docs, spreadsheets and slides in one place. While Quip gives a more polished feel, it doesn’t have any free plans. Otherwise they’re quite on par with Notion.

Workflowly

It’s not much of a note-taking, but rather a list-making app. It is structured as a list with hierarchical items.

Ulysses

This app has reach markdown capabilities, export to various formats and organization features. It’s only available for Apple devices and has no free plans.

Dropbox Paper

It’s free, but requires Dropbox account. If you use Dropbox in your daily life — go ahead, it’s always a good idea to keep to one ecosystem. But to me, it feels like a limited version of Notion.

What you should choose depends on your needs. I’ve just listed some of the stuff I’ve used in my life and that I found useful. Go ahead, try them all and choose the one that suits you best!

But if I had to choose, it would be Bear App for Apple users and Evernote for the rest.