#BEST ONLINE NOTE TAKING SOFTWARE FULL#
#BEST ONLINE NOTE TAKING SOFTWARE OFFLINE#
#BEST ONLINE NOTE TAKING SOFTWARE FREE#

#BEST ONLINE NOTE TAKING SOFTWARE FREE#

The ribbon at the top of the app has five tabs: Home, which has all the basic formatting tools Insert, which lets you attach files, images, audio recordings, and everything else Draw, which gives you all the free drawing and highlighting tools View, which lets you navigate the document and change how things look and, finally, Tell Me, which is the help function.

I'd struggle to call any of Microsoft's apps intuitive, but OneNote is familiar. (Otherwise you can draw one on with your trackpad, but it'll be less stylish.) It feels like a solution purpose-built for students and anyone else who has to take long, discursive notes about something, rather than people looking for a digital notebook to collect short snippets and random ideas. This means you can drag and drop in an image, click anywhere to add some text notes beside it, and if your computer supports a stylus, scribble a mustache on everyone in the photo. And each page is basically a canvas where you can add any kind of note you like, anywhere you want. Each Notebook is modeled off a ringbinder, so it's divided into sections with subsections called pages. OneNote is incredibly freeform when it comes to taking notes. It's Microsoft's answer to Evernote (the next app on this list), though without the need for a monthly subscription. Microsoft OneNote is a free and full-featured note-taking app. Many of the best apps charge a reasonable subscription price, and as long as it was warranted by the features offered, that was no barrier to inclusion. At Zapier, we love a good free app, but with things as permanent as notes, that has to be balanced against the likelihood of the service surviving the next few years and being able to offer server-based features like syncing. You can't be locked out of your notebook because you don't have Wi-Fi.įinally, we had the value for money test.

#BEST ONLINE NOTE TAKING SOFTWARE OFFLINE#

At a minimum, we required apps to be available on one desktop and one mobile platform, and to have some kind of offline functionality. Similarly, the biggest reason to have a notes app instead of a notebook is that you can access it from anywhere on any device at any time, whether you're at your desk at work, chilling on your couch at home, or flying coast-to-coast. This rule also extended to other features: editing and sorting notes had to feel seamless and natural, rather than require a battle with a horrible user interface. If it wasn't almost as convenient to open a notes app and create a quick note as it was to reach across my desk for a Moleskine and a pen, it didn't make the cut. The real competition here wasn't other note-taking apps, but a pen and scrap of paper. Second, all the note-taking apps had to be quick and easy to use. Not every note-taking app needs to have features like image-to-text conversion or stylus support, but if it boasted about them, they had to be well-executed and nice to use.

This sounds like an easy bar to clear, but you'd be surprised at how many apps fell short. With so many apps to consider, we had some pretty strict criteria for what made a great notes app.įirst, the apps had to be good at what they claimed to do.

#BEST ONLINE NOTE TAKING SOFTWARE FULL#

For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. 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. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.

Best online note taking software