Best Note-Taking Apps for Mac of 2025

Plottr

Plottr lets you easily arrange (and rearrange) your scenes, plots, and character arcs so you can quickly find your way to the end of your tale — no corkboard required. Plottr automatically generates a clean outline of your story for you to review, edit, and export as the basis of your manuscript. You don’t have to start from scratch. Plottr comes with over a dozen templates (and counting) based on proven storytelling structures to help move your story from idea to execution. The fun is just beginning. Once you've finished outlining your story, Plottr makes it easy to start writing — just export your files and let your creative muscles get to work!

103 Ratings

Starting Price: $15

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Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft

Microsoft OneNote is your digital notebook. Get organized in notebooks you can divide into sections and pages. With easy navigation and search, you’ll always find your notes right where you left them. Revise your notes with type, highlighting, or ink annotations. With OneNote across all your devices, you’ll never miss a flash of inspiration. Great minds don’t always think alike, but they can share ideas and create together in OneNote. Sort content across notebooks, sections, and pages. Highlight can’t-miss notes with Important and To-Do tags. Draw your thoughts and annotate your notes, using a stylus or your finger. Record audio notes, insert online videos, and add files. Use the OneNote Web Clipper to save content with a single click. Share notebooks with coworkers, friends, and family. Teachers can use OneNote to organize lesson plans in searchable digital notebooks, and staff can create a sharable content library. Encourage students to handwrite notes and sketch diagrams.

32 Ratings

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Notion

Notion Labs

Notion is a highly versatile and collaborative workspace designed to help individuals and teams manage documents, wikis, projects, and tasks efficiently. It offers a wide array of features like customizable views for workflows, project tracking, and document creation, all within a single platform. Notion allows users to create a shared knowledge base, organize notes, and collaborate seamlessly on content creation. Additionally, its built-in AI assistance features help users summarize, write, and instantly search for relevant content, significantly enhancing productivity. The platform integrates effortlessly with other popular apps such as Slack, Google Drive, and Trello, providing a seamless experience for teams looking for an all-in-one platform to manage their projects, goals, and knowledge in an organized, collaborative environment.

23 Ratings

Starting Price: $12/user/month

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Zoho Notebook

Zoho

The most beautiful note taking app across devices. Different types of notes should be treated differently. Each Note Card type is designed to complement the type of note you're taking. Jot, list, record, sketch, and snap what you need to remember with Text Card. Safely and securely share your notes with friends and co-workers. Share notes and collaborate securely with the people you trust—and only them. This is the Notebook you'll never lose because it syncs to the cloud and across your devices. It's always backed-up and always up to date. We don't sell your info. We don't do ads. Our business model ensures our ability to act in your best interest while storing and securing your data.

14 Ratings

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Apple Notes

Apple

Notes is the best place to jot down quick thoughts or to save longer notes filled with checklists, images, web links, scanned documents, handwritten notes, or sketches. And with iCloud, it’s easy to keep all your devices in sync, so you’ll always have your notes with you.

14 Ratings

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Notability

Ginger Labs

Combine handwriting, photos and typing in a single note to bring your projects to life. Use a wide range of note-taking and sketching tools to capture every detail. You can even add and annotate PDFs in Notability. It’s the perfect place to create and organize work, school, and life's information! Experiment with different tools to create beautiful, hand-crafted notes and sketches. Continue to scale, rotate, and recolor your ideas and sketches until your notes are just how you want them. Once you're done, organize your notes with ease so you always know where to find what matters most. Zoom in on the specifics, or explore the big picture by combining sketches, outlines, and type. Now you are ready to share your notes with colleagues or study partners through Google Drive, AirDrop, Email and Dropbox.

6 Ratings

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Outline

Gorillized Corporation

Outline is the ultimate productivity-boosting note-taking app for your Mac, iPad and iPhone. It allows you to effortlessly capture, organize, and sync your notes across devices. With 100% compatibility with OneNote, you can import and export seamlessly. Annotate PDFs, add images, and stay organized with folders and tags. Whether you prefer cloud storage or local storage, Outline offers flexible options. Upgrade your note-taking skills and gain full control over your digital workspace with this powerful app!

4 Ratings

Starting Price: $4.99

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Obsidian

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. The human brain is non-linear: we jump from idea to idea, all the time. Your second brain should work the same. In Obsidian, making and following "connections" is frictionless. Tend to your notes like a gardener; at the end of the day, sit back and marvel at your own knowledge graph. Note-taking is incredibly personal. Tried every app, but there's always something not quite right? You deserve better. Obsidian is built to be extensible. With 22 core plugins and 149 community plugins, set up your own toolkit and get running in minutes. You'll even be able to install third party plugins or build your own once Obsidian reaches v1.0. Sky's the limit. In our age when cloud services can shut down, get bought, or change privacy policy any day, the last thing you want is proprietary formats and data lock-in. With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder.

3 Ratings

Starting Price: $25 one-time payment

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GoodNotes

Time Base Technology

Take beautiful, searchable handwritten notes and effortlessly organize all your documents & notebooks in a single place. Always find what you wrote. Thanks to powerful OCR technology, everything in GoodNotes is searchable. Find handwritten notes, PDF text, document & folder titles, typed text, and outlines. Write and sketch with your finger or a stylus on digital paper & imported documents. You can add images, typed text and perfect shapes to the page and reorder and resize them as you wish. GoodNotes lets you escape the limits of real paper. GoodNotes is a single place for all your documents. Quickly import PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files to annotate them or create a new blank notebook to take notes. Organize and manage them with ease. No document will ever be lost again. Write down ideas on the go and annotate photos. You will always have your notes with you on all of your devices thanks to iCloud sync. Endless sheets of paper in your pocket.

2 Ratings

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Notejoy

Monki Labs

Whether you are collaborating in real-time or across time zones, Notejoy always makes your colleagues feel like they are right there with you. Leverage Notejoy's blazingly fast quick find and powerful search to find exactly what you are looking for. Flexible workspaces for your clients and projects. Flexible team libraries allow you to set up workspaces for internal teams, external client teams, and any combination of team members. Collaborate in real-time so there's one conversation and one version. Team libraries of any size or mix, by company, project, external clients, and more. Manage permissions on who can view, comment and edit. Content digests help you stay on top of what's popular and being worked on. Share and edit content with your team in real-time, so everyone stays up-to-date. Share files, link resources, and have discussions to keep projects moving.

1 Rating

Starting Price: $4 per user per month

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NotePlan

Your tasks, notes, and calendar all linked in one place. Use the flexibility of Markdown to quickly create tasks. Add options for repeating to-dos, easily move tasks into the future, and add tags and mentions. Speed up your workflow with natural language input and autocompletion of tags, mentions, and links. Meeting minutes, reference material, or quick notes: store everything in NotePlan. Organize your notes any way you like. From simple folders or a digital Bullet Journal to a fully linked Zettelkasten system. All stored locally and available on every device. A note for each day keeps you in control of your schedule, today and tomorrow. Outline your tasks, write down and link your notes, even block time right in your calendar. See exactly what’s on your calendar, plan ahead, or look back. Everything you put into NotePlan is stored in plaintext Markdown files, easily opened in any text editor. That means you’re never locked in and always in control of your files.

1 Rating

Starting Price: $6.99 per month

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mymind

Your new mind analyzes images, articles and websites, tagging it for you automatically so you can easily find it later. You can save images, links, notes, videos, quotes, PDFs, articles - anything you want to remember. From the web, your computer or your phone. And remember, it's all private. Nobody will see what's on your mind. mymind is for your eyes only. It’s your mental sigh of relief. We go the extra mile to protect the privacy and integrity of your mind. Our company is independently run by a passionate team. We have no investors or stakeholders to distract our vision. The only people we report to are you. Compared to most companies, we don’t track your activity and we don’t use intrusive ads. Your mind should be a place you can trust. 85% of notes we capture are less than 140 characters long. They’re quick ideas and reminders, often written on the go. This makes large documents, folders or categories useless.

1 Rating

Starting Price: Free

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remio

Everdent

remio is an advanced AI-powered note tool designed to revolutionize the way users capture, organize, and utilize information. By integrating intelligent search capabilities with seamless note-taking features, remio helps users streamline their workflow and enhance productivity. Features & Highlights ● Auto Capture & Organize: Seamlessly highlight and save information from the web with just a click. ● AI-Powered Search & Ask: Find answers fast using intelligent search combined with your personal knowledge base. ● Create with Ease: Summarize, rephrase, and generate content (coming soon). ● Local-First: All captured information is stored locally on your own device, ensuring privacy and control over your data. remio is shaping up to be an essential tool for students, researchers, writers, and professionals looking to simplify knowledge management. With its AI-driven approach, it transforms scattered information into well-organized insights, making research, writing, and learning

1 Rating

Starting Price: $19.90/month

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Dynalist

The best outlining app for your best work. Where brilliant ideas are captured, fleshed out, and realized. Dynalist is featureful yet simple. Without bloating the interface, tools show up only when you need them. See for yourself in the demo; all panes can be closed for focusing on outlining and organizing. So don't let the features scare you! They are all here to help you do your best work.

1 Rating

Starting Price: $7.99 per month

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Write! App

Write! is an elegant workspace to create notes, to-do lists, writing projects and texts of any kind. It has all features of a good word processor packed into a clutter-free interface. Writing tools like configurable autocomplete, intelligent spellchecker, unlimited Ctrl+Z and productivity counters will improve your productivity. Your work will flow smoothly with the help of minimalist writing interface. Your documents will never ever be lost again. You can use Write! on any computer and continue writing from the point you left. You can store unlimited number of documents at no additional cost. Easily manage any writing project structuring it in tabs, Sessions and folders. Switching between writing sessions changes the group of tabs you are working on, allowing you to quickly change the context. Publish documents to the web with a unique URL and share a link to it via email or to social media. When you make changes to a shared document, they are immediately updated online.

1 Rating

Starting Price: $24.95

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Joplin

Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organized into notebooks. The notes are searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified either from the applications directly or from your own text editor. The notes are in Markdown format. Notes exported from Evernote via .enex files can be imported into Joplin, including the formatted content (which is converted to Markdown), resources (images, attachments, etc.) and complete metadata (geolocation, updated time, created time, etc.). Plain Markdown files can also be imported. The notes can be synchronized with various cloud services including Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV or the file system (for example with a network directory). When synchronising the notes, notebooks, tags and other metadata are saved to plain text files which can be easily inspected, backed up and moved around. The application is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS.

1 Rating

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Milanote

Simple text editing and task management make it easy to add your thoughts to a board. Milanote supports all common file types including JPGs, PDFs, Word, Excel, common design files and many more. Anything you save in the Milanote app will be ready to organize as soon as you're back at your computer. Add text notes, photos from your camera and links from your browser—then organize them into beautiful visual boards. Milanote's mobile apps for iPhone and Android are fully native and designed for speed. Photos you take in the Milanote app are automatically synced to the cloud and available as soon as you're back at your computer. Keep your workflow organized with simple to-do lists. Tasks sync instantly across all of your devices so things stay on track wherever you are. The Milanote app integrates with your web browser, which means that you can instantly send any website, video or image that you're viewing to your boards.

1 Rating

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Bear

Shiny Frog

Bear is a beautiful, flexible writing app for crafting notes and prose. Bear works on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, so you can write wherever inspiration strikes. Use todos to stay on task across every device. Link notes to each other to build a body of work. Add hashtags to organize the way you think. Use Face/Touch ID to protect sensitive notes. Bear is perfect for everything from quick notes to in-depth essays. A focus mode helps you concentrate, and advanced markup options are an online writer's best friend. Full in-line image support brings your writing to life.

1 Rating

Starting Price: $1.49 per month

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DEVONthink

DEVONtechnologies

Focus on your work and let DEVONthink remember all the details. Collect, organize, edit and annotate documents of any kind. Have them automatically analyzed, connected, and filed. Sync them between your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. DEVONthink keeps all your documents in easy-to-backup databases and presents them to you in a variety of ways. Many documents can be viewed and edited without opening them in another application. Read web pages as if they were local documents. DEVONthink Pro scans paper documents and makes them searchable, imports email, and even downloads complete web sites. Don’t fight the information flood alone. Let DEVONthink for Mac categorize documents based on how you filed similar documents before. Add smart rules to file documents, rename them, or process them in other ways automatically. Later retrieve the data you need using DEVONthink’s fast and flexible search. Find similar documents with keywords extracted from the document.

1 Rating

Starting Price: $99 one-time payment

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Noteshelf

Noteshelf, the acclaimed note-taking app that has millions of users across the globe, is revolutionizing the way students, professionals, and creatives take notes digitally. Noteshelf empowers users to enhance their productivity and creativity with its wide-ranging features, including organized note-taking, document annotation, sketching, bullet journalling, and many customizations. A standout highlight within this version is the Noteshelf AI, a note-taking assistant designed to help students take better notes faster and understand new concepts easily. Its ability to generate beautiful handwritten notes on any topic stands as a unique hallmark of this app and has garnered praise and positive reviews from the worldwide note-taking user community.

1 Rating

Starting Price: $9.99

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TiddlyWiki

TiddlyWiki is a rich, interactive tool for manipulating complex data with structure that doesn't easily fit into conventional tools like spreadsheets or wordprocessors. TiddlyWiki is designed to fit around your brain, helping you deal with the things that won't fit. The fundamental idea is that information is more useful and reusable if we cut it up into the smallest semantically meaningful chunks – tiddlers – and give them titles so that they can be structured with links, tags, lists and macros. Tiddlers use a WikiText notation that concisely represents a wide range of text formatting and hypertext features. TiddlyWiki aims to provide a fluid interface for working with tiddlers, allowing them to be aggregated and composed into longer narratives.

1 Rating

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Amanote

Amanote has been especially designed to offer a solution that is adapted to the students’ needs. It aims to increase their productivity and efficiency during lectures and study session. Amanote finally improves note taking during presentations, lectures and conferences. Take clear, structured, and comprehensive notes directly on your course material. Take clear, structured, and comprehensive notes directly on your course material. Be more productive with Amanote and get more time for yourself. Share your notes with other students and get ready for the exams. Amanote is delivered with a large set of features that ease your note taking and your study. When you listen to the recording, Amanote tells you what slide we're talking about. Export your notes below each slide/page to PDF. Amanote let you insert mathematical or chemical formulas (LaTeX), drawings, charts, code, etc.

Starting Price: €3.99 per month

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Boost Note

Boost Note is a powerful, lightspeed collaborative workspace for developer teams. Built to empower developers productivity with the most solid note taking experience for developers. Not just a GitHub flavored markdown. Put diagrams with Charts.js, Mermaid, and PlantUML in documents to maximize visibility. Choose from keymaps like Vim, over 150 themes, and more to create your own Markdown editor. Manage your documents programmatically. Grab an authentication token and access Boost Note's APIs via simple HTTP requests. Automate your documentation work with over 2,000 external tool integrations via Zapier. Collaborate with your colleagues and share information your way. Have all your teams in one shared workspace. Write documents as a team with Boost Note's realtime editing. Check revision history of a doc. You can easily roll back to one of the previous versions in one click. Keep your important data safe through granula access control based on workspace.

Starting Price: $3 per member per month

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Hypernotes

Axonic Informationssysteme

With Hypernotes you can finally express your knowledge in a natural way – easy to create, easy to expand, and – maybe most importantly – easy for others to understand. Your notes, tutorials, wikis, intranets, books, scripts, articles, research activities – from now on, they have a new home. Everything is connected. So is your knowledge: It forms a network. With Hypernotes you easily create a semantic network of your knowledge. The result? Less text, but more understanding. When your projects get bigger and more successful, you need your team. That’s also true for knowledge bases. Hypernotes has powerful task management features in place: Share and assign writing-related tasks with your colleagues, friends, and family. Some of the most important steps of the content creation process happen not at your desk – but when you are out there, in the real world.

Starting Price: Free

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Bluenote

Some data is always relevant. Notes, to do lists, passwords, things you reach for every few minutes. Bluenote helps to connect Instagrowing.NET followers and control all passwords and notes for photos of your Instagram account. Wouldn't it be great to have all that data in a single, beautiful app? Bluenote's soul is its user interface. It saves things as you type them. Everything is encrypted on the fly. Cloud sync is a hotkey away. The data you need is readily accessible. Everything else is a click or keyboard shortcut away. Smart search that finds data as you type. Intelligent password strength algorithms that tell you whether your passwords are really dependable. And there's a lot more. Dropbox and Tweet Boost (for Twitter) connectivity, password lock, distraction-free full screen. And it all comes with automatic security and encryption, so your data is bullet-proof without any extra work.

Starting Price: $4.99 one-time payment

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Pear Note

Useful Fruit

Record everything. By integrating traditional text notes with audio, video, and slides, Pear Note ensures that you never miss a thing. Pear Note can jump straight to the point in the recording where you typed that note, so you can listen to what was going on at the time and use the recording to interpret your notes. Pear Note lets you navigate to the end of the notes you did take, so you can listen to or watch what was going on when you zoned out and fill in the gaps. Pear Note records audio, video, and what you do, including typing notes and changing slides, on a timeline. Since keystrokes and slide changes are kept on this timeline, you can easily find what was being said during typing or a particular slide. Pear Note supports Auto Save and Versions when running on Mac OS X Lion or later, which means you never have to worry about saving or losing data again. If you find that you lost something, easily browse through history to find what's missing.

Starting Price: $39.99 one-time payment

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Supernotes

Supernotes is your new home for ideas, records, tasks, and lists. Enjoy efficient note-taking without the hassle. No more bloated files for taking notes. Create simple yet powerful digital note-cards with rich and varied content, like math equations, tables, images, checklists, and emojis. Organise your note-cards into a hierarchy that suits you. Use filters, search and sorting to find any note, anywhere. Establish links between your thoughts, something never possible with a traditional document. Your content is stored securely on our servers, making them accessible from all of your devices. You can keep your cards to yourself, or collaborate on them with friends & colleagues in real time! We understand that you don’t have much time on your hands, Supernotes takes care of lots of things for you, so you can focus. No formatting, no downloads, no loading screens. It just works!

Starting Price: $8.32 per month

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Tinderbox

Eastgate

Tinderbox helps you visualize, analyze, and share your ideas. Download and try it. Taggers help your agents keep everything organized. Highlighters scan for key names and phrases. A gallery of saved views, more AI, smarter actions, and lots more! Whether you’re plotting your next thriller or writing your dissertation, designing a course, managing a legal practice, coordinating a campaign or planning a season of orchestral concerts, Tinderbox 9 will be your personal information assistant. Tinderbox is a workbench for your ideas and plans, ands ideas. It can help you analyze and understand them today, and it will adapt to your changing needs and growing knowledge. Your Tinderbox documents can help organize themselves, keeping your data clean. We believe in information gardening, as your understanding grows, Tinderbox grows with you. Tinderbox maps your notes as you make them. Tinderbox gives you maps, timelines, charts, outlines, and more.

Starting Price: $83 per year

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Standard Notes

Your notes are encrypted and secured so only you can decrypt them. No one but you can read your notes (not even us). Keeping our app simple means you'll spend less time fighting and more time writing. It's faster and lighter than most notes apps. Our apps are built carefully to optimize overall lifetime and long-term survivability. Standard Notes is free to use on every platform, and comes standard with cross-platform sync and end-to-end privacy. For those wanting a little more power and flexibility, we created extended, which unlocks powerful editors, themes, and automated backups. All your data — no matter if you’re using a PC, a phone, a tablet or a gaming system — is encrypted everywhere you don't control. On our servers. On our network. On a public network. In the cloud. On mars. Whenever your information moves anywhere away from your direct control, it will be seriously encrypted with a passcode that no one else in the world knows but you.

Starting Price: $2.48 per month

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Inkdrop

Organizing your Markdown notes made simple. With 100+ plugins, cross-platform and encrypted data sync support. Get a low-friction personal note-taking workflow and accomplish more. With your notes well-organized effortlessly, you can stay focused on doing your best work. It comes with multi-language code highlighting, multi-cursors, line numbers, scrolling beyond the last line, showing invisible characters and more. An intuitive and clean user interface and 'Distraction free mode' don't distract you from the text. With nestable notebooks, pin-to-top, tags and workspace view, it allows you to flexibly organize your notes. Track your work progress with note status and task progress view in the note list. Your notes can be shared on the web with a public link. It also supports exporting as HTML, PDF and Markdown file format. Whenever, even while in offline, you can read and write notes.

Starting Price: $4.16 per month

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Best Note-Taking Apps for Mac

Compare the Top Note-Taking Apps for Mac as of August 2025

What are Note-Taking Apps for Mac?

Plottr

Microsoft OneNote

Notion

Zoho Notebook

Apple Notes

Notability

Outline

Obsidian

GoodNotes

Notejoy

NotePlan

mymind

remio

Dynalist

Write! App

Joplin

Milanote

Bear

DEVONthink

Noteshelf

TiddlyWiki

Amanote

Boost Note

Hypernotes

Bluenote

Pear Note

Supernotes

Tinderbox

Standard Notes

Inkdrop

Best Note-Taking Apps for Mac

Compare the Top Note-Taking Apps for Mac as of August 2025

What are Note-Taking Apps for Mac?

Plottr

Microsoft OneNote

Notion

Zoho Notebook

Apple Notes

Notability

Outline

Obsidian

GoodNotes

Notejoy

NotePlan

mymind

remio

Dynalist

Write! App

Joplin

Milanote

Bear

DEVONthink

Noteshelf

TiddlyWiki

Amanote

Boost Note

Hypernotes

Bluenote

Pear Note

Supernotes

Tinderbox

Standard Notes

Inkdrop

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