We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. Microsoft OneNote for a free note-taking appĪll of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Here are the best note-taking apps I could find. As a rule, if an app supports video calls out of the box, it's not a notes app.Įven with all these criteria in place, I still tested close to 40 different note apps for taking notes online. There are some great super-niche notes apps designed for fiction writers or developers, but they aren't fit for most people, so weren't in consideration for a place on this list. Similarly, there are lots of powerful business collaboration tools that claim to be notes apps but just aren't suitable for one person. I also only really considered general-purpose personal note-taking apps. So for this list, I didn't look at every app that could be used to take notes or even every business collaboration tool that claimed it was a notes app-I was only interested in apps that were explicitly designed to be notes apps.

Handwriting notes vs typing notes