Nothing beats the convenience of jotting down quick thoughts as they come to you. A note-taking app on your best phone is a perfect place to put them. Whether you’re looking for a simple note-taking app to replace your sticky notes, or a sophisticated solution with better organization for meeting details, voice recordings, and interesting articles from the web, we have you covered with the 10 best note-taking apps for your smartphone.

What Makes a Great Note-Taking App?

Before diving into the list, let’s consider what features make a note-taking app stand out:

• Intuitive Interface: The app should be easy to navigate and use, allowing you to quickly jot down notes and find them later.

• Organization Features:  Look for features like folders, tags, and search functions to keep your notes structured and accessible.

• Cross-Platform Compatibility: Seamlessly access and edit your notes across your devices, whether you're on your phone, tablet, or computer.

• Media Support: The ability to add images, audio recordings, or even files to your notes can be invaluable.

• Collaboration: If you plan to work with others on notes, look for apps with built-in sharing and real-time editing features.
  

So, Here are the Top Note-Taking Apps

1. OneNote

OneNote is Microsoft's powerful cross-platform note-taking solution. The app comes with Windows Sticky Notes integration. It mimics a traditional notebook with sections and pages to organize notes. You can add text, insert media, record audio, and use a rich text editor for complete formatting.

OneNote also offers an option to enable a badge that shows an app shortcut on your screen. Tap the OneNote badge and take a note without opening the app. Microsoft recently redesigned the OneNote app on Android with a new home page that shows your frequently used notebooks and sticky notes.

You can password-protect a notebook section. Invite others to a notebook for real-time collaboration and export a page as a PDF to share it with others. OneNote uses Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage to save and sync your data. OneNote is free and available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and the web.

Price: Free

2. Bundled Notes

If UI design is high on your priority list, look no further than Bundled Notes. It’s one of the few apps that embrace the Material You theme, and the implementation is flawless. Other than notes and to-dos, Bundled Notes offers a markdown editor with rich formatting and Kanban-style boards to manage small personal projects. The app relies on tags to organize notes, tasks, and projects.

The app’s free version restricts you to six bundles and 150MB of account storage. You can unlock 15GB of account storage, a 400MB file upload limit, and access the web app by paying for the Professional subscription.

Bundled Notes is available on Android and the web. The developer has promised an iOS and Mac app in the future.

Price: $2.99 per month or $29 per year

3. Evernote

Evernote has been around for ages and the mobile and desktop apps received a fresh coat of paint with a recent redesign. The popular note-taking app offers a new customizable Home dashboard to check your recent notes, web clips, images, documents, and frequently used notebooks. There’s a Scratchpad to quickly jot down notes as well.

You can customize the dashboard widgets and place a wallpaper at the top to start the day. The usual Evernote features include a robust tag system to organize notes, a search function to find text inside PDF files, a browser extension to save snippets or web pages, and a rich text editor.

Evernote was recently sold to Milan-based Bending Spoons. The acquisition hasn't affected the pace of new features. The company announced backlinks to jump between related notes from a single page. It’s a must-have feature for power users and it’s good to see the green elephant taking some cues from rivals like Notion.

Evernote also rolled out native task management for you to check your to-dos from one place. The software is available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and the web.

Price: There is Free Plan. Also, you can buy more capacity or AI features for Evernote Personal ($3.5/month or $30/year), Evernote Professional ($4/month or $40/year)

4. Google Keep

The default note-taking app on Android, Google Keep, gets the job done with basic note-taking options. You can create a new note with different theme options, set a background, and add tasks, media, drawings, and voice recordings. Like Gmail, Google Keep uses labels to organize notes in different folders. You can pin notes and set reminders, but there’s no way to password-protect your sensitive notes. When it comes to collaboration, you can invite others in Google Keep and work on the next trip plan as a group.

Other than the recent Material You makeover, Google Keep has largely remained the same for all these years. It’s time for Google to introduce rich text formatting and new features to Keep. The free app is available on iOS, Android, and the web.

Price: Free

5. Standard Notes

Standard Notes is open-source and protects your notes with industry-leading encryption. The free plan of Standard Notes includes cross-platform sync, an offline function, a passcode feature to lock notes, tag organization, and unlimited device support. You need to upgrade to the Productivity or Professional plan for rich text formatting, task management, a one-year note revision history, and better organization through nested folders. The latter is worth considering if you store many photos and videos in notes, as the plan comes with 100 GB of encrypted cloud storage.

Standard Notes has native apps on every mobile (iOS and Android) and desktop platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux).

Price: You can use Free version with enough capacity or buy Productivity ($90/year), Professional ($120/year)

6. Simplenote

If you feel overwhelmed by dozens of features in other note-taking solutions, Simplenote streamlines the experience with a simple note-taking offering. Built by the developers of WordPress, Simplenote offers markdown for rich formatting, to-do lists, passcode protection for private notes. It helps you stay organized with tags. Simplenote misses out on basic features like media attachment, voice notes, PDF file support, and web clipping.

Price: Free

7. Nimbus Note

Nimbus is a feature-packed note-taking app on Android. It offers a rich text editor, markdown support, photos, videos, PDF attachment, a web clipper, and a built-in scanner to digitize your physical documents. Nimbus also lets you create multiple workspaces for different purposes. For instance, you can keep personal information in a specific workspace. You can also share the office workspace with your colleagues. Nimbus's search is as good as Evernote's. You can search for text inside PDF, images, Word, and HTML files.

Nimbus Pro unlocks unlimited notes, blocks, 5GB/month of uploads, advanced search, and more workspaces. Nimbus is a cross-platform solution with native apps on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and the web.

Price: There is Free Plan. Also, you can buy advanced features for Standard ($15/month or $108/year)

8. Obsidian

Don’t consider Obsidian as your standard note-taking app. Obsidian offers a unique take on note-taking with internal linking and a graph view to check connected notes. Besides full markdown support, a customizable toolbar, and various themes, you can explore community plugins to add missing features to your Obsidian experience. We hope to see UI refinements in the future, as the current implementation looks dated.

Price: It is Free to use for personal purpose. But Commercial use $50 for per user,per year.

9. Notion

Notion is more than just a standard note-taking app. The company used to offer a web-wrapper app on mobile devices. Notion recently redesigned its mobile offering with native elements on iOS and Android. It now looks and feels much better.

Besides standard notes, you can add tables to manage information and explore the calendar, timeline, list, and board views. The app works flawlessly with other third-party services like Slack, OneDrive, Asana, GitHub, Figma, and more.

Notion shines with a rich template library. You can either select from the built-in templates to get started or explore templates from the Notion community. You can create multiple workspaces to manage notes, track projects, plan your next summer picnic, and share your work workspace with other team members and collaborators.

Notion is available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and the web.

Price: The Personal plan is Free to download and use. Subscription plans start at $12 per month for the Plus plan, which offers unlimited file uploads and a 30-day version history for pages.

10. Squid

Unlike the standard note-taking apps on the list, Squid is aimed at phones, tablets, and the best Chromebooks with stylus support. Squid helps you write as you would on paper. It turns your phone into a virtual whiteboard.

You can also mark up PDFs, fill out forms, edit notes, sign documents, import images, and annotate them. Squid comes with Chromecast support. It allows you to cast the note to a nearby smart TV or an external monitor or projector. Squid Premium unlocks features such as PDF import, highlighter, eraser, shapes, text in Dropbox and Box, and cloud backup solutions.

Our only gripe with Squid is the user interface. It still uses an age-old hamburger menu for navigation. We are looking forward to major UI changes in future updates.

Price: Free