Best note taking apps - The only ones you need

Why did I start looking for best note taking apps?

I have been a student who always preferred to take notes in the traditional way, that is, handwritten notes on physical paper notebooks. With time, I found out many issues associated with physical paper note taking and then I started searching what are the best note taking apps that could help me go digital without missing out the taste of handwriting the notes.

Why isn’t taking notes on paper notebooks a good idea anymore for me?

• Storage space for physically storing the paper notebooks: it’s a lot of hassle to physically store the paper notebooks safely in your house or room or any place where you would want to keep them. With time, the quantum increases, so does the requirement for physical space to keep them increases.
• Difficulty to search your notebooks or topics, when needed: Having a lot of physical notebooks makes it difficult to search the exact notebook which you need. It also becomes difficult to search for a particular topic whenever you need it urgently.
• Mobility: Let’s face it. We don’t want to carry a bag full of notebooks for different subjects everywhere. It increases the weight of your bag.
• Loss of notes: When keeping notes on a physical notebook there is a possibility that you might lose your notes while travelling or at the time of shifting your residence etc.
• Cost: Over the period, your number of notes is going to increase, and you will require more notebooks as well as stationaries. Of course, a different opinion is possible on this point!

How digital note taking is more beneficial?

• Storage: You can keep as many notes as possible you would want to in your laptop, phone or tablet or a cloud storage service. You can keep thousands of notes and still have enough space for more at the end of the day.
• Accessibility from anywhere: If you are using cloud storage for saving notes then it can be accessed from anywhere on your phone (as everyone carries their phone with them anywhere). Even if you are keeping your notes on your laptop or tablet. It’s easier to carry them anywhere rather than carrying a pile of paper notebooks.
• Searching your notes has never been easier: You can search your notebooks or topics in seconds without any hard work put to it. Just type and search!
• Very less or maybe zero chances of losing your notes: As you are going to save your notes on device, and you are likely to save them on a cloud storage. There’s hardly any possibility of losing them unless you forget your password or face a hardware failure on your device.
• Cost: Over the period, the cost of using the digital note-taking system goes down. The life of devices like a laptop is far longer for a student’s use case or anyone who uses them for taking notes.

Best note taking apps that I found as per my requirement which is handwritten notes as well as typed notes:

1. OneNote: Price: Free

Onenote handwritten notes - Best note taking app

It’s by far the best for android, mac, iPad and windows and the most used note taking app available for students. It’s an auto saving feature. Every word you type keeps saving as and when you type. Cloud saving is available.

You can create different notebooks in it.

Each notebook can be further divided into pages and subpages.

It has search functionality.

It also has a web clipper extension available for chromium based browsers so that you can clip web contents directly from your browser.

You can insert plenty of tags to make your notes more organized and accessible.

The app has inking capabilities so that you can handwritten notes by using a stylus.

2. Notion: Price: Free | has paid plans as well

Notion databaase

It’s one of the best note taking apps for android, mac, iPad and windows. The best part about this app is, it has a database feature. Which you might find remarkably interesting and useful. You can create a database of your own and have everything inside it. It’s like having your personal digital assistant that acts like a second brain for you. All the notes are synced automatically into cloud.

It has a bit of a learning curve. You might take a bit of time to get familiar with it. But once you get used to using this app you will never want to switch to any other. This is an advanced level note taking app for those who are serious about note taking in their business or profession or college/school. The free version is more than enough for most people out there. This app doesn’t have any handwritten notes functionality.

3. Google keep: Price: Free

Google Keep dashboard

Ever experienced a situation where you came up with an idea suddenly? or you came across something interesting but would want to look at it later? Well, this is the app for you. I used to note down ideas that come up in my mind or things I come across randomly. You can access the notes from any device and from anywhere. Everything is synced across all the devices.

Conclusion

I personally use onenote as it has all the features which I need like proper note organization capabilities as well as handwriting capabilities.

Do let me know by a comment which one do you prefer?