24 Notetaking apps RANKED (2021)

I placed some of the best and worst note-taking apps on a tier list!

LINKS

GEAR

OTHER AWESOME YOUTUBERS:

Every App Mentioned:

**Old School Apps**
pencil and paper
Zettelkasten

**Simple Apps**
Apple Notes
Google Keep
Simplenote
Standard Notes

**Nerd Apps**
emacs
vi
nvalt

**Apps for students**
Goodnotes
Notability
Remnote

**Folder Based Apps**
OneNote
Evernote
Devonthink

**Writing Apps**
iAWriter
Ulysses
Bear

**Power Apps**

Notion
amplenote
memdotai

**Overpowered Apps**

Roam
Athens Research
Obsidian

[trocha]

When Evernote first came out. It was very solid. Over the years, it’s changed so much for the bad in my opinion.

[mi-c]

Counterargument on Google Keep is that it is cross-platform: you can access those notes on every device on any platform as long as you have an internet connection, while on Apple Notes if i don't carry my iPad with me and at work all machines use Windows, you can't access those notes unless you share them somewhere else.

[petesky]

you didn't mention the name of the apps in the video description, it would help a lot.

[nerf]

I think you should make separate tier list for each function like following
note-taking (with mind map, folder management, brainstorming, etc.)
calendar + reminder
to-do list / task manager

[ThomasAT]

Used evernote for years until a few days ago. Always been great for notes and tasks and shopping lists and so forth, but especially after I started to learn more and more things, I missed more and more things in evernote. Thankfully there's great apps/programs out there! Thanks for the video James.

[Whigu]

Notion seems to be something what mostly YouTubers like. I have tried it few times but every time I used more time to configure and design ui and so on than wrote actual notes so I have used basic apple notes because it does what I need best and I don't care other features what I don't need or use.

[DelightfulGem]

2022 is a year of discovery of many new apps. Hope you can consider doing an updated tier list that includes (eg) logseq, upnote, taskade, clickup, craft, confluence, slab...

[nicholaskarr]

No way OneNote isn’t A or S tier. Making class notebooks have been a significant clutch considering it’s cross-platform, compatible with all my devices (even the Apple Watch kinda), and I have the ability to type and write with my Apple Pencil. I also disagree with Apple notes being A tier. Not good enough considering what’s in B tier.

[reza]

Genuinely surprises that you dont have more subscribers, both content and quality of your video is great and its relaxing as well

[Later_Nerd]

I used to use Evernote in college a decent amount. I haven't had too much use for note taking the past few years. Most of my work stuff is done in BaseCamp and I love Trello for organizing personal stuff (from Travel to tech projects to job hunting, it's great.)

My use case for notes has increased a lot lately so I thought I'd poke around and wow I love Obsidian. It can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. The UI is absolutely perfect and the community plugins are great. More people really need to know about it. I'm not sure what more you could really want out of a note taking app.

It feels like a similar experience to VSCode but for note taking which is a great thing imo. So far I only have the "Editing Toolbar By Cuman" plugin installed and it adds some handy rich text editor functionality to the top of the app which works great.

[Feynman.R]

I use Google sheets for to-do and Docs for knowledge base. It is simple, but very effective for me. You can drag n drop in sheets, create custom views like in Notion, color coding everything like you want, conditional formatting, so i think Sheets is more customizable than Obsidian with plugins and CSS editing, and I don't talk about macros even. With macro's you can do whatever you want in Sheets.

[smexyapman]

Great vibe, and a ton of great info with no filler. Instantly subbed

[robinrai]

Unfortunately despite its shortcomings nothing has beaten OneNote for me - its sync, its folder and infinite canvas page structure, its simplicity (the UWP version) and its pen and PDF support is just such a hard combination to beat

It's a shame its missing some really useful features and is quite buggy (the UWP version anyways), but I cannot replace it

[VMSelvaggio]

Hello James!

Honestly, I like OneNote better than to give it a "B" tier. It saves to the Cloud, and when my Computer died in November last year, (On Thanksgiving after 12 years of noble service) I had to go out and purchase a new computer, and when I downloaded and opened Microsoft Office 365, which I have a Family membership for, all of my Dungeons and Dragons fantasy world was still safely in the cloud, as were all of the pdf files I used to teach my Worldbuilding course for an Online K-12 Institution.
- Saved my bacon! (in more ways than one)

[.m.rt]

Google Keep ain't that bad, it's simple, but it's simple to use too, it also connects to your Google account, has access to your Google calendar and you can access it from any phone, computer or browser

[leifashley]

Depends on what you consider a note, and what the intended purposes are. But you'd listed in comments "*Writing Apps*", and it's a power writing and authoring tool, though I wouldn't use it for notes such as study summaries, study guides, family planning, brainstorming etc., but would exclusively use it for novels, short stories, poems, and screenplay scripts..

For me, Milanote + Apple Notes + Apple Reminders + Google Drive is my new core toolset for notes, collections, habits, and reminders. But once I'm further down the road, I'll use Scrivener exclusively for writing.

I was just curious, just from the category as I said, but over all the video was good for me in particular. Evernote started strong and has gone stale.

[MarcKoenig]

This was dope and I learned things

Biggest surprises were Remnote, Apple Notes, and MSOneNote ranking as high as they did (minimal experience with any of those three) - would have expected A, B/C, C just based on hearsay.

[hckrun]

I don't know how good is Athens Research, but based on what you say about it, I would definitely put a FREE clone of Roam Research to S tier.

[indaskylvyx]

Obsidian, Notion and EverNote...for me apps i need for my notes, works/proyect idea or personal writing ❤

[MariaLuiza-rewr]

I've tried all apps from this list except for the ones without free versions or limited to Apple. And the one that really stands out for me is Standard Notes. Simple and private.