Last updated: April 2026
The note-taking app market has settled since the last refresh. Five years ago this category was chaos - new apps launched monthly, Roam Research was ascendant, and Notion was still catching on. In 2026 the field has stabilised: Notion dominates the structured-work end, Obsidian owns the writer/researcher end, and Apple Notes has quietly become the default for Apple users who don’t need anything more. Everything else competes in specific niches - markdown-first, journaling, team collaboration, cheap-and-simple.
This is the list I’d give a friend who asked “which note app should I actually use?” in 2026. Pricing is verified in April 2026. I’ve been explicit about free-versus-subscription because that single piece of information determines which of these will still be the right answer for you in three years.
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Pricing: Free
Simplenote is exactly what the name says - a cross-platform plain-text note-taking app with sync and no clutter. Made by Automattic (the WordPress company). Free forever, no subscription, no paid tier, no ads. If you’ve ever looked at a feature-packed note app and wanted the opposite, this is it.
Best for: writers who want frictionless capture and don’t need images, attachments, or collaboration.
Pricing: Free (hard-capped at 50 notes and 1 notebook); paid Starter, Advanced, and Enterprise tiers (Evernote consolidated its old Personal and Professional plans into this lineup - check evernote.com/compare-plans for current pricing)
The classic. Under Bending Spoons ownership since late 2022, Evernote has had its free tier severely cut back and its paid tiers repeatedly repriced. The app itself is faster and more reliable than the pre-2023 version, and the Advanced tier’s AI-Powered Search can genuinely find things across a large notebook. For new users in 2026, I’d point most people to Obsidian or Notion first; for existing users with years of notes, a paid Evernote tier is the sensible home.
Pricing: Free
Still the fastest way to capture a whiteboard after a meeting, a passage from a paper book, or a printed document you’ll want to revisit. Pair with a scanning app (Apple Notes has document scanning built in; Adobe Scan is free; Genius Scan works on both Android and iOS) and your photos become OCR-searchable text. Don’t overthink it.
Pricing: Free with a Microsoft account
OneNote is genuinely excellent and surprisingly underrated. Hierarchical notebooks → sections → pages. Strong handwriting support on tablets with a stylus. Free forever for personal use. If you’re already in the Microsoft ecosystem (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive), OneNote plugs in everywhere.
Pricing: Free with a Google account
Keep is designed for quick, lightweight capture - coloured sticky notes, checklists, voice memos, and short reminders. Not for long-form notes or research. Best for grocery lists, quick reminders, and snippets you’d otherwise scribble on a Post-it.
Pricing: Free with an Apple ID
Apple Notes has quietly become the default note app for a huge number of Mac/iPhone/iPad users, and for good reason. It now supports tags, folders, smart folders, collaboration, document scanning, handwriting-to-text, markdown-adjacent formatting, and AI-powered features on recent Apple Intelligence-capable devices. If you’re on Apple hardware and you don’t have a specific need for Notion or Obsidian, Apple Notes probably covers what you actually need.
Pricing: Free tier available; Pro $2.99/month or $29.99/year
Bear is a Mac/iOS-only markdown note-taking app with a beautifully clean interface. Bear 2 rebuilt the app on a new foundation and fixed the long-running sync complaints. Excellent for writers who want markdown with a polished interface rather than raw plain text. Apple-only.
Pricing: Free tier available; Premium from $2.99/month
Day One is built specifically for journaling rather than general note-taking. Photos, location, mood tracking, on-this-day recall, end-to-end encryption. If you want a journal that isn’t a generic note app pressed into service, Day One is still the category leader. Acquired by Automattic in 2021; actively developed.
Pricing: $5.99/month or $39.99/year (subscription only; Apple-only)
Ulysses is a writer’s tool more than a note-taker, but the overlap is large enough to belong here. Markdown, clean interface, strong export to Word, PDF, ePub. Organised as “sheets” rather than files, which suits writers who think in fragments and assemble later. Apple-only.
Pricing: Free (for individuals and small teams); Plus $10/user/month annual ($12 monthly); Business $20/user/month annual; Enterprise custom
Notion is the category leader for structured work - databases, project pages, team wikis, meeting notes that tie into ongoing projects. The free plan for individuals and small teams is generous and covers most personal use. Plus at $10/user/month annual unlocks unlimited file uploads, 30-day version history, and unlimited guests. Business at $20/user/month annual adds Notion AI (after the May 2025 restructure, AI moved to Business-and-above tiers). Overkill for simple notes; perfect for teams and knowledge bases.
Pricing: Free
Zoho Notebook is a genuinely free, polished cross-platform note app. No subscription tier, no paywall. Clean card-based interface, web clipper, audio notes, photo notes, checklist notes. Underrated alternative to Evernote and Google Keep.
Pricing: Free (except the paper)
Not digital, but hard to beat for some use cases. Cheap, always available, no battery life to worry about, no passwords, no sync conflicts. You can always GTD your Moleskine notebook. Index cards remain the best tool I’ve found for outlining a book - shuffleable in a way that no digital outline app has matched.
Pricing: $15/month (Pro); annual discount and lifetime Believer plan available
Roam popularised bidirectional linking in note-taking - the idea that notes become a graph rather than a tree. Its moment peaked around 2020–2022; since then, Obsidian and Logseq have eaten much of its market by offering similar features for free or near-free. Still used by serious thinkers who like its daily-notes-and-graph paradigm. If the price doesn’t put you off, it’s a credible tool; if it does, Obsidian gets you most of the way for free.
Pricing: Free
The oldest note system on this list. A folder of .txt or .md files in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive, edited in any text editor. Portable, future-proof, sync comes free from whichever cloud drive you already pay for. Less flashy than the alternatives; zero lock-in. Writers who’ve been burned by app shutdowns (TinyLetter, Wunderlist, Vesper, Evernote pricing hikes) often end up here.
Pricing: Free (open-source); Joplin Cloud from €2.99/month for hosted sync
Open-source markdown note-taking app with end-to-end encryption, plugin support, and a loyal community. Works on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. Bring-your-own-sync (Dropbox, OneDrive, Joplin Cloud, Nextcloud). If you want Obsidian-level power with a more traditional notebook metaphor, Joplin is the closest match.
Pricing: Free for personal use and commercial use (as of Feb 2024); Sync $5/month or $4/month annual; Publish $10/month or $8/month annual; optional $50/year commercial licence for supporting development; optional $25 one-time Catalyst licence
Obsidian is the most significant note-taking app to emerge in the last five years. Local-first, markdown-based, with bidirectional linking, a graph view, and a huge plugin ecosystem. Your notes live as plain markdown files on your computer - no vendor lock-in. The core app is genuinely free with no feature gates; Sync and Publish are optional paid add-ons. For serious writers, researchers, and knowledge workers, this is the tool I’d recommend first.
Free, open-source, local-first knowledge graph. Similar concept to Roam but free. If you want Roam’s outliner-and-graph paradigm without the $15/month subscription, Logseq is the strongest alternative.
Note-taking for reading is a slightly different job from capturing a stray idea. You want to grab a passage, tie it to a source, and be able to find it again months later. Three tools handle this better than a general note app.
Kindle highlights. Kindle and the Kindle app have a built-in highlighting and annotation tool: underline a passage, add a typed note, and it syncs to Amazon’s cloud. Your highlights collect on a per-book “Notebook” page you can open on any device, and they export so you can pull them into whatever note system you keep.
Readwise and Readwise Reader. Readwise pulls your highlights out of Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper and other sources into one place, then surfaces them on a spaced-repetition schedule so you actually revisit them. Its companion app, Readwise Reader, is a read-later tool for articles, PDFs, emails and epubs where the highlights you make flow into the same review queue. It is a paid subscription after a free trial. This is the closest thing to a purpose-built “notes from reading” pipeline.
MarginNote. MarginNote 4 (iPad and Mac only, synced through iCloud) is aimed at students and researchers working across several books at once. It turns highlights into mind maps and flashcards, which suits exam prep and close reading more than casual note capture. There is a 14-day free trial. Worth knowing it does not run on Windows or Android.
For book clubs and study groups, pair one of the above with a shared space in Notion or a shared Apple/Google note so annotations sit next to the discussion. The habit that makes any of this pay off is a regular review: skim your highlights weekly and write a two-line summary of what mattered, in your own words, rather than letting them pile up unread.
Shortest version of the advice I give in person:
Don’t spend more than an afternoon deciding. Most of these tools import from most of the others, so switching costs are lower than people expect.
I’ve been writing about writing tools for over a decade. I’ve had active accounts on Evernote (since 2010), Simplenote, OneNote, Apple Notes, Bear, Notion, Day One, Ulysses, Obsidian, and most of the others on this list at various points. Several of these tools I use every day; others I tested extensively and moved away from. The recommendations above reflect what I actually use and would set up for a new writer today.
For each app I evaluated: current pricing (verified on the vendor’s site in April 2026), platform support, export and import options, sync reliability, offline support, collaboration features, and long-term viability (is the company stable, is development active, has the pricing model changed recently in ways that might repeat).
Which note-taking app is best in 2026? There isn’t a single best - it depends on use case. For most writers doing serious long-term work, Obsidian. For teams and structured project work, Notion. For simple cross-device notes on Apple hardware, Apple Notes. For a free, polished, cross-platform option, Simplenote or Zoho Notebook.
Is Evernote still worth using in 2026? For existing users with years of notes, yes - the app is genuinely better than it was pre-Bending Spoons acquisition, and a paid Evernote tier covers most heavy use. For new users starting from scratch, I’d recommend Obsidian (free, local-first) or Notion (free for individuals) before Evernote.
What’s the best free note-taking app? Apple Notes for Apple users. Simplenote, Zoho Notebook, or plain text files for cross-platform. Obsidian for the most powerful free option. OneNote for Microsoft ecosystem users.
Obsidian vs Notion - which should I pick? Obsidian is better for individual writers, researchers, and anyone doing deep single-person knowledge work with markdown. Notion is better for structured project work, databases, team wikis, and anything where multiple people need to collaborate on the same page. Many people run both - Obsidian for private thinking, Notion for shared work.
Do I need to pay for a note-taking app? No. Apple Notes, Simplenote, Zoho Notebook, OneNote, Google Keep, Joplin, Logseq, and Obsidian (core) are all free. Pay only when you need specific features - cross-device sync beyond what your cloud drive already provides, collaboration, AI-powered search, or specific writer-focused tools like Ulysses or Bear.
Which note app is most future-proof? Plain text files in any cloud drive, followed by Obsidian and Joplin (both use open markdown files you own locally). The apps most at risk of price hikes or feature changes are the ones where your notes live inside a proprietary format or cloud - that lesson has been relearned with Evernote, Vesper, Wunderlist, and Catch Notes over the last fifteen years.
If you want more on the tools that pair with note-taking, see our guides on AI writing software and the Grammarly review.
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