Note-taking is personal. It has as much to do with how your mind works as it does with what you’re taking notes about and why you’re taking them in the first place.
Still, search for the best note-taking app and you’ll invariably find Evernote at the top of most lists.
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Some notes are for sharing. Some are a reminder. Some are taken and never looked at again.
Sometimes a note is a quick thought, jotted down on-the-go on a mobile device. Other times your notes are prepared at length at your computer over a large project, meeting, or study session.
Hugo - Best meeting notes app. For iOS and in your web browser. (Android, iPadOS, and macOS are. To use Evernote for Gmail, you must first install the add-on. You can do so from the G Suite Marketplace or by following the steps below. Open your inbox at Gmail.com. Click the plus (+) symbol in the add-on section to the right of your messages list.
Evernote is fine, generally-speaking — but you’re not just anyone, and your notes aren’t just any notes.
To find the best Evernote alternatives, we tested and used over 30 apps, reviewed top threads on Reddit, and consulted reviews on G2 to hear what the community had to say.
It’s not all just Evernote vs OneNote anymore. There are a slew of great note-taking apps, each with a key advantage over Evernote depending on what you are doing.
The best note-taking apps that aren’t Evernote:
- Hugo - Best meeting notes app
- CacoonWeaver - Best speech-to-text notes app
- Milanote - Best whiteboard-style notes app for creatives
- Bear - Speediest markdown notepad for iOS & Mac
- Typora - Best distraction-free notes app
- Workflowy - Infinite expandable bullet points
- OneNote - Best free option (not just for Microsoft lovers)
- Boost Note - Best note-taking app for developers
- Google Keep - Best note-taking app for Google fanatics
- Ulysses - Top-of-the line notes for serious writers
- Notability - Best notes app for iPad with Apple Pencil
- Nebo - Best note-taking app for Surface with Surface Pen
Why Evernote is no longer the gold-standard for notes
For many years, Evernote was on top of the note-taking game. With its sleek, comfortable interface, enjoyable mobile experience, and easy way of organizing with folders and stacks of folders, Evernote dominated the note-taking world after the iPhone’s original launch in 2007.
However, over the last 4+ years, Evernote has undergone a series of problematic changes, introducing bizarre new products in an attempt to expand its reach. They also changed the free plan in ways that have driven away users by crippling key features unless you pay.
Evernote remains a great product in many ways. It syncs across devices, offers a handy web clipper, and can even search handwriting.
But in trying to be all things to all people, the notes app market has opened up, offering a slew of note-taking apps that are going to appeal to more specific groups of people looking for more specific solutions.
What’s not on this list?
With note-taking apps, you need to be able to quickly take notes. Speed is of the essence. That means not having to waste time organizing and saving your files. You also need to be able to easily search your notes to find information.
Of course, you can take notes almost anywhere you can write.
Some people use the cells in a spreadsheet. Others use word processing apps like Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Authors may prefer to jot down notes inside the tools they are already working in, like Scrivener. You can also take notes in project management software like Asana, or collaborative docs like Dropbox Paper.
None of these, however, beat the speed and simplicity of a dedicated notes app.
So in this post, we’re only looking at tools that are primarily for notes. Full-on word processing tools aren’t in the running, nor are project management tools or CRMs that happen to have a notes function. (Ulysses might be a minor exception, as it can be both a notes tool and word processor depending on how you use it.)
With that, here are the best note-taking tools in 2020 that aren’t Evernote.
Hugo - Best meeting notes app
For iOS and in your web browser. (Android, iPadOS, and macOS are on the horizon)
Plenty of note-taking apps are good generally-speaking, but taking notes in meetings poses some unique challenges. Fortunately, Hugo is purpose-built for meeting notes at work.
First, staying organized. Hugo centralizes and organizes all of your meeting notes with the help of your calendar. Notes are associated with your actual meetings, so you basically don’t have to worry about categorizing anything. (You can always add tags if you want to.) This works with G Suite, Gmail, or Office 365 calendars.
Plus, Hugo also integrates with over 20 other apps used for work. It syncs notes to your CRM (e.g. Salesforce), pushes tasks to project management tools (e.g. Jira), and works seamlessly with video conferencing tools (e.g. Zoom).
The Chrome browser extension gives you access to your notes from any page in your browser, which means you don’t have to dedicate your screen to note-taking during a video call. Just open and close the Hugo drawer when you need to check your agenda or jot a note down.
Hugo isn’t designed to just help you (although it will). With accounts for teams, collaborative note-taking, and a library of 80+ meeting note templates, everyone in your organization can use Hugo to centralize your meeting notes together.
During the pandemic, Hugo is offering free accounts to teams of up to 40 users. If you sign up during this period, you’ll get to keep that pricing even after the pandemic is over.
Hugo Pricing:
- Free plan: Yes
- Paid plan: $6/user/month for teams 11+
ALSO: Take a look at this guide to taking amazing meeting notes.
CacoonWeaver - Best speech-to-text notes app
Evernote G Suite
Compatibility: iOS (iPhone/iPad)
CacoonWeaver is the best way to collect audio notes for iOS. Pop open the app and transcribe your ideas, thoughts, memories, and dreams. To organize your notes with voice commands, just say something like, “Cacoon Shopping” and the app will automatically put your notes in the Shopping category.
Unlike other note-taking apps where you need to enable dictation to record an audio note, and then carefully watch to make sure your text is going in correctly, CacoonWeaver records your audio and transcribes at the same time.
You can play back your notes, or read them back, which gives you the peace of mind to know that no matter what, your information won’t be lost, and there are no limitations on the max length of an audio recording.
CacoonWeaver also keeps track of where you had ideas, showing you blips on a map.
The UI is clean and minimalistic for distraction-free recording and offers custom push notifications and nudges to help you be your best self.
Because it is still in its debut phase, CacoonWeaver is currently free and keeps your data private and secure. The app claims to be in beta but it is fully functional and in better shape bugs-wise than a lot of other apps you’ll find on the AppStore.
CacconWeaver Pricing:
- Free app: Yes
- Paid plan: N/A
Milanote - Best whiteboard-style notes app for creatives
Compatibility: Desktop apps for Mac and Windows, plus mobile apps for iOS and Android
The Next Web calls Milanote “the Evernote for Creatives” and it’s easy to see why creative directors, filmmakers, photographers, marketers, and designers of all kinds enjoy using it.
Unlike most note-taking apps, Milanote takes a highly-visual approach, allowing you to organize your ideas and projects in visual boards. Collect images, videos, text, and tasks all together on your screen.
If your creative process includes activities like mood boarding, brainstorming, storyboarding, or mind-mapping, the visual canvas offers a flexible and delightful experience.
Milanote works for teams and clients too, with build-tin commenting, sharing, and notifications. Plus, you can download a high-quality, printable PDF of any board.
You can try Milanote free with no time limit, although it is limited to 100 notes, images, or links (and only 10 file uploads). After that, it’s $9.99 for unlimited storage
Milanote Pricing:
- Free plan: Yes
- Paid plan: $12.50/month when billed monthly, $9.99/month when billed annually.
Bear - Fastest markdown notepad for iOS & Mac
Compatibility: iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Mac
For Apple fans looking to upgrade beyond Apple Notes, Bear offers a good balance of features, design, convenience, and software speed. If you’re coming from Evernote, for example, it’s so fast, you’ll notice the difference immediately.
From your very first note, Bear’s design shines, treating you with elegant typography and theme options which include multiple dark modes.
Bear's speed isn't just for writing notes, either. Searching in the app also runs fast, with minimal delays when searching notes.
With many advanced markdown options (or is it markup?), Bear works great if you like to format as you type. Hybrid markdown support means you can see the formatted text as you’re typing, although if you’re not a regular user of markdown, you might not enjoy the experience at first. You can easily export these nicely-formatted notes to HTML, PDF, and TXT.
It also has quick shortcuts, such as for finding today’s date, and supports checkboxes to help with to-dos. Built-in tagging is powerful and allows you to create tags anywhere in a document that are automatically captured in the sidebar.
Bear uses iCloud to speedily sync notes between iOS and Mac with a Pro membership. Still, some users complain that this should be a free feature like it is with most other note-taking apps.
Bear is rated 4.5 out of 5 on G2 Crowd with positive reviews from many note-taking app power users, such as consultants, software developers, and UI/UX designers. The biggest complaint about Bear is a lack of helpful or effective support.
Bear pricing:
- Free app: Yes
- Paid Plan: Bear Pro is $1.49/monthly, $14.99 annually with a free trial
Typora - Best distraction-free notes app
Compatibility: For desktop/laptop computers only (Mac, Windows, and Linux)
Typora is a slick alternative to Bear that is even more minimalist and distraction-free. The app is simple, with very little UI getting in the way. It’s also beautifully designed, with clear, aesthetically-pleasing text.
Typora has a night mode and also supports custom themes so that you can create the perfect writing experience.
It also has two cool modes. One is a unique Focus Mode that highlights the paragraph you’re currently working on, while graying out everything else. Typewriter Mode similarly highlights the center of your screen.
Many of the same advanced markdown features are in Typora, meaning that you can type up nicely-formatted notes without ever having to shift your hand to your mouse. Even so, if you want to get a little bit fancy, Typora supports tables, diagrams, mathematical formats, footnotes, code fences, and task lists.
Typora Pricing:
- Free app: Yes, during beta
- Paid Plan: Not yet announced
Workflowy - Infinite expandable bullet points
Compatibility: Desktop apps for Windows, Mac and Linux, plus iOS, Android, and in your browser
Do you love taking notes with bullet points?
Do you wish everything in life could be bullets — Infinite, ever-expanding bullet points, as far as the sky can reach?
Does your whole world spin around lists and bullet points? If not, would you like it to?
If the answer the above is a resounding Yes!, you’ll be in heaven with Workflowy.
The concept is simple. Workflowy lets you create infinite piles of bullet points which are also each their own document. Expand, collapse, move documents, drill in and out — it’s intuitive and natural bullet points at a scale that you may have never dreamed of.
The product works well for outlining and project organization just naturally. It’s novel, intuitive, and requires very little learning to figure out.
The only downside to Workflowy is in organizing more matrixed information. This might be more challenging, because every bit of information may not have a clear place in your stack of bullet points for where it should belong. (Contrast this with Hugo, which organizes meeting notes based on your calendar, so notes don’t live in just one particular place — they’re associated with names, companies, dates, meeting titles, etc..)
Still, for your next novel or work project, especially for people whose minds work in a certain bullet-driven way, give Workflowy a try.
Workflowly Pricing:
- Free plan: Yes
- Paid plan: $5/month
OneNote - Best free option (not just for Microsoft lovers)
For iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and in the browser
Simple, practical, and ubiquitous for Windows and Office users, OneNote is a free note-taking app that seems to be everywhere.
It’s a great basic option, with a familiar UI to anyone who has ever used Microsoft products like Word, and while it does most of the things Evernote does, it stands out because of one big four-letter word that starts with an F.
Free.
You get more advanced functionality here without having to pay.
In OneNote, you can add multimedia elements to your notes, such as audio, video, images, and even websites using the Webclipper browser extension. Task lists are an option, although robust task management in OneNote can be challenging because you can’t put due dates on anything.
OneNote has a large folder organization system, letting you create notebooks and sections, and nest them inside each other. The way that sections get dragged around can be frustrating — trying to move one section below another and can have it end up inside on accident — but again, for a free option, for many, this may be a minor inconvenience. Cross-notebook search is available, although there is a learning curve to finding your information.
OneNote uses OneDrive to sync across all of your Microsoft apps. If you don’t have an Office 365 subscription, you can upgrade your OneDrive to a paid plan for an increase in storage space.
OneNote Pricing:
- Free app: Yes
- Paid plan: Upgrade OneDrive for more storage space, starting at $1.99/month for 100 GB
Boost Note - Best note-taking app for developers
Compatibility: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and in your browser
Stylish, markdown-enabled, and fully open-source, Boost Note is a developer’s dream. The interface resembles Sublime, the popular text editor, with a slight skew toward taking quick and easy notes.
Boost Note highlights syntax for you and recognizes over 100 programming languages. It also supports math blocks where you can write math equations using LaTeX syntax. Themes are fully customizable.
Notes are stored safely in the cloud, with more file system-based storage coming soon.
Boost Note Pricing:
- Free app: Yes (100 MB cloud storage)
- Paid plan: 2GB cloud storage at $3/month. Boost Note for Teams launches in June 2020.
Google Keep - Best note-taking app for Google fanatics
Ezvid screen recorder download. Compatibility: Android, iOS, and in your web browser
Google Keep is a straightforward notes app that comes as part of your G Suite or Gmail account. It offers a clean, nicely-organized UI that has most of the standard features you’re looking for in a note-taking app, without too many bells and whistles.
If the rest of your life already revolves around Google products, Google Keep may be the right pick for you.
As you create notes, they are organized on your screen visually in a corkboard style. You can change the background colors to give it a post-it notes effect. While if you take a ton of notes, this may feel haphazard, with moderate use it's colorful and fun.
You might be wondering, Why do I need Google Keep when I have Google Docs?
For some users, it may be redundant to have multiple types of Google Docs, but others may enjoy the simpler note-taking experience in Google Keep. And if your notes start to become something more than just a note, there’s always the Copy to Google Docs action to transfer it over.
Google Keep Pricing: Check your ip address classcisco certified network associate.
- Free app: Yes
- Paid plan: N/A
Evernote G Suite Account
Ulysses - Top-of-the-line notes app for serious writers
Compatibility: Mac, iPad, iPhone
For writers and authors, Ulysses is a notes app that will replace your word processor 99% of the time. Fully-featured and elegant, it is a very power writing app.
Export in various file formats, including text, HTML, ePub, PDF, and DOCX, plus a number of export styles for professional-looking PDFs and manuscripts. You can also schedule or publish articles to Wordpress and Medium directly within the app.
Ulysses also excels at organizing, if you’re willing to set it up. With views, custom searches, filters, and tags, it’s the most organizable note-taking experience on this list (except for Hugo, which auto-organizes meeting notes based on your calendar.)
All of this functionality comes at a cost, however. Ulysses is free to try, but if you get hooked, there’s not paired down free version to stick with.
Ulysses
- Free plan: Trial only
- Paid plan: $4.99/month or $39.99 ($3.33/month) when paid annually
Notability - Best note-taking app for iPad with Apple Pencil
Compatibility: iOS (iPhone and iPad)
Combine handwriting, photos, and typing into a single note with Notability. The elegant interface is nicely-designed, letting you choose from a variety of typing and drawing instruments with ease.
Notability has a nice range of sketching tools that make it easy to recolor, scale, and adjust your ideas and sketches. You can also pick from different paper backgrounds, for example, to sketch your notes on graph paper, or more textured art paper.
Notability syncs with iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, AirDrop, and Email for easy sharing with colleagues and study partners.
It’s also great for annotating PDFs.
Notability Pricing:
- Free trial: No
- Paid app: $8.99
(Note: Nebo, discussed below, is another great option that works across all tablet platforms.)
Nebo - Best note-taking app for Surface with Surface Pen
Compatibility: iOS, Android, and Windows
Microsoft’s Surface Pen offers a delightful drawing experience on the Surface Book, Pro, and Studio, and there’s no reason you can’t use OneNote for this purpose. The anniversary update of Windows 10 also brought the Windows Ink Workspace, which gives you three cool apps: Sticky Notes, Sketchpad, and Screen sketch.
If you have an active pen like the Surface Pen, you might be asking, with all this greatness bundled for you in Windows, can note-taking get any better?
The answer is yes, and the other answer is Nebo.
Draw sketches and diagrams. Easily switch between your pen and keyboard.
There are tons of cool gestures that make the experience delightful, like how you can scratch out a letter to delete it, or swipe up to join two sentences together.
Getting notes out of Nebo is a breeze, with image, text, DOCX, and HTML formats available. You can also copy/paste diagrams to PowerPoint and they stay fully-editable.
Nebo pricing:
- Free app: N/A
- Paid app: $9.99
Unless you carry a notebook around in your pocket, the chances are pretty good that you’re using your mobile device to keep track of your digital life. If you’re looking for tools to help you keep your life organized, chances are pretty good that you’ve used or at least heard of Evernote.
Released in 2004, Evernote is a note-taking app that used to be the undisputed king of personal productivity tools. However, after a series of botched product launches and a major managerial restructure in 2015, Evernote lost its way as a product. It strayed too far from its core value proposition of helping people “remember everything” and opened itself up to competition from Google, Microsoft, and other companies.
Evernote is still alive and kicking—for now. But, unlike in 2004, users have many more choices available to them today, one of which is Google Keep. Launched in 2013, Google Keep is a completely free, lightweight note-taking tool that offers some of the same functionality as Evernote. Is it any good, though?
That’s what we’re going to find out in this post.
We’ll be taking a side-by-side look at Google Keep vs. Evernote to see how the two tools stack up. We’ll include the pros and cons of each tool across a range of criteria, such as note-taking, ease-of-use, and integrations, before making our recommendation toward the end of the post.
Google Keep vs. Evernote—Post-its vs. Notebooks
Ultimately, the choice between Google Keep and Evernote doesn’t come down to features or functionality. It comes down to how you prefer to take notes.
Google Keep looks and feels like putting Post-its on a whiteboard. Evernote feels like writing things down in an actual notebook. That’s the biggest difference between the two tools. It’s not just about aesthetics. This dichotomy affects how the two products feel and what it’s like to use them.
Google Keep is almost deceptively simple. You can separate your stuff into two categories (Notes and Reminders), add custom labels to your notes, and archive or delete old notes. You can make quick text notes and to-do lists with checkboxes.
That’s pretty much Keep in a nutshell. There are no complex organizational options and no fancy templates—just notes, reminders, lists, and labels.
Evernote is a bit more fully featured than Keep. Notes are stored within Notebooks, which can be organized into Notebook Stacks. Evernote has a pretty robust search function, complete with its own unique syntax and advanced operators. It can even search scanned images of handwritten notes for specific keywords.
Let’s take a closer look at how Evernote and Google Keep compare.
Note-Taking: Winner = Google Keep
At their simplest, Google Keep and Evernote are note-taking tools. They can both do more besides, but that’s their primary function. And when it comes to pure note-taking, Google Keep is the clear winner.
Google Keep’s key advantage as a note-taking app is speed. Simply start typing to begin creating a note, then click “Close” when you’re done to create it. Once a note has been created, you can set a reminder, share it with someone else, assign a color code to it, add an image, or label it. You can also Pin notes to keep them prominently visible, and you can archive old notes when you’re done with them.
Unlike Evernote, Google Keep doesn’t emphasize organization of notes; it’s all about speed. You probably wouldn’t spend hours painstakingly organizing the many Post-its stuck to every available surface on your desk, so Keep’s organizational options are limited to color coding and labels.
Creating notes in Evernote, on the other hand, is more complicated.
On desktop, creating a Note in Evernote is needlessly frustrating. Upon opening an empty Notebook, you’re presented with a prompt to create a new note. However, you can’t click on the document icon or the “+” symbol in the prompt—you can create a new Note only by clicking the actual “+” button in the upper-left corner. It’s counterintuitive and just plain bad UX.
It doesn’t get any better once you start creating a note. Evernote gives you tons of formatting options when creating notes—you’ll see all of the formatting tools you’d expect to see when formatting a blog post in a dedicated CMS—but actually working with and formatting text is just as frustrating.
Unlike Keep’s checklists, which can be created as easily as bulleted or numbered lists, Evernote forces you to add checkboxes to list items as separate elements. This means that, to create a new checklist item, you have to create a new checkbox then type out the actual list item. You can’t convert a bulleted list into a checklist, for example. Creating notes on mobile is a bit better, but there’s simply no excuse for making note-taking—the very core of Evernote as a product—so complex.
Setting reminders isn’t as straightforward as it should be, either. Click the alarm-clock icon in the upper-left and you’ll be informed that a reminder has been set. Clicking the “Notify Me” button presents you with a range of options, but there’s no way to move backward through this process; if you change your mind and want to be reminded about an event the day after tomorrow instead of tomorrow, there’s no way to move back and change the notification. You have to create the notification and then go back and edit it.
Even if you’re happy with being notified “tomorrow,” you can’t set a specific time to be notified. In the example below, I told Evernote to notify me about this task via email tomorrow. Apparently, I’ll receive an email “first thing in the morning,” whenever that is.
Then there’s the issue of how Evernote organizes new notes by default. Unless you specify otherwise, new notes are created as Untitled Notes. If you keep creating quick notes without giving them titles, it won’t be long before you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack of Untitled Notes.
Search: Winner = Google Keep
When it comes to search, Keep is faster, but Evernote has more options.
Searching in Keep feels much faster than searching in Evernote. But since Keep notes are simpler and have fewer organizational options, it’s not the fairest comparison. Simply enter a keyword in the search field, and Keep will scan all notes (including archived notes) for string matches. It’s fast and simple, and it works really well on mobile.
Evernote’s search feature is a little slower than Keep’s (particularly if you have lots of Notebooks or Stacks), but it’s a lot more robust. Evernote has its own search syntax, which is ideal for power users. It also boasts some advanced search operands that will feel familiar to anyone who has used Google’s advanced search commands.
Unfortunately, even simple keyword searches can cause Evernote to seize up or crash on desktop and the web app, which overshadows the tool’s admittedly impressive search tools. This problem isn’t unique to Evernote’s search function—generally, Evernote is still quite unstable, even after years of user complaints—it’s just especially visible when searching.
Evernote may have more search options, but they aren’t much use when they only seem to work half the time. As such, Google Keep edges out as the winner in this category.
Ease of Use: Winner = Google Keep
Google Keep might not have the bells and whistles that Evernote has, but its simplicity is Keep’s greatest advantage.
Since Google streamlined the UI of G Suite a few years back, most Google products now rely on the same design conventions, UI elements, and overall look and feel. If you use Gmail, you’re already most of the way toward knowing how to use Google Keep. However, like the best software products, Keep doesn’t assume a certain level of familiarity to use it effectively. Keep’s onboarding flow is quick and simple, and lets you get right down to creating and saving notes almost immediately. Even functionality that might not be as intuitive, such as adding images to event reminders, is easy to figure out.
Evernote, on the other hand, has become increasingly confusing over the years. As we noted in our review of Evernote, there are several inconsistencies between the desktop and mobile Evernote apps. That is particularly evident in the Work Chat function and in Spaces, Evernote’s half-baked, Slack-like collaboration tool.
It’s worth pointing out that Evernote isn’t a bad tool; it’s just not nearly as good as it used to be. Evernote is still arguably more accessible than tools like Notion that have steeper learning curves. But compared to the minimal simplicity of Keep, Evernote just doesn’t stand a chance.
Integrations: Winner = Draw
One of the challenges that note-taking apps have to solve is cross-platform compatibility with the tools we use every day. After all, even the most capable note-taking app won’t be much use if it can’t access and store information from a broad range of sources. That’s why integrations are so important for note-taking apps—they have to fit into our existing workflows seamlessly.
When it comes to integrations, Evernote and Google Keep are on pretty equal footing. Evernote boasts a range of integrations with many of the most popular software tools out there. Since deciding to aggressively pursue business users in 2016, Evernote has added integrations with a wide range of productivity tools, including Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive, Slack, Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams. If you decide to take Evernote to work with you, it’s never been easier to do so.
Google Keep might not have as many integrations as Evernote, but it does have one key advantage: its broader integration with the rest of G Suite.
Moving between Keep and other Google products is practically effortless. You can drag and drop items from Keep into Docs, Sheets, or Slides. Obviously, Keep’s tight integration with Docs is the real focus here, though.
Ordinarily, we’d declare Evernote the winner in this round. However, Keep’s seamless integration with Docs and G Suite is so useful, we’re going to call this one a draw.
Overall Winner: Google Keep
Evernote G Suite App
Evernote is a capable tool that can do a lot of cool things. It just doesn’t do enough things well enough to justify paying almost $100 a year for it—especially when Google Keep (and other note-taking tools) offer so much for free.
Although we have to recommend Google Keep to most users, there are some exceptions. If you’ve been using Evernote for years, there’s little point in disrupting your personal workflow to switch tools arbitrarily. Similarly, if you don’t use Google Docs or other G Suite products that benefit from integration with Keep, Google Keep’s simplicity might be a little too simple.
If you’re looking for a simple, lightweight note-taking app with a genuine emphasis on notes, you could do a lot worse than taking Google Keep for a spin. Evernote still has its uses, of course, but it’s getting harder and harder to recommend it as more note-taking tools emerge in the personal productivity space.