Nothing beats the convenience of jotting down quick thoughts whenever they happen, and a note-taking app on your top Android phone is the perfect place to put them. Whether you’re looking for a simple note-taking app to replace your sticky notes or an advanced solution with better organization for meeting details, voice recordings, and interesting articles from the web, we have you covered with the 11 best note-taking apps for your phone.
1. OneNote
OneNote is a powerful cross-platform note-taking solution from Microsoft. The app comes with Windows Sticky Notes integration and mimics a traditional notebook with sections and pages to organize notes. You can add text, attach media, record your voice, and use a rich text editor to complete the formatting. OneNote for Android also offers an option to enable a badge that shows an app shortcut on your screen. Tap the OneNote badge and take notes without opening the app. Microsoft recently redesigned the OneNote app on Android with a new homepage that shows your frequently used notebooks and sticky notes.
You can password-protect a notebook section, invite others to a notebook for real-time collaboration, and export a page as a PDF to share with others. OneNote uses Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage to save and sync your data. OneNote is free and available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and the web.
Price: Free
2. Bundled Notes
If UI design is on your priority list, look no further than Bundled Notes. It’s one of the few apps to adopt the Material You theme, and the implementation is flawless. Apart from notes and to-dos, Bundle Notes offers a markdown editor with rich formatting and Kanban-style boards to manage small personal projects. The app relies on tags to organize notes, tasks, and projects. We have a detailed breakdown of Bundled Notes. Check it out for more information.
The app’s free version limits you to six bundles and 150MB of account storage. You can unlock 15GB account storage, a 400MB file upload limit, and access the web app by paying for a pro subscription.
Bundled Notes is available on Android and the web (pro users only). The developer has promised an iOS and Mac app in the future.
Price: $1.89 per month or $18 per year
3. Evernote
Evernote has been around for ages, and its mobile and desktop apps recently received a redesign. The popular note-taking app offers a new customizable home dashboard to check your recent notes, web clips, images, documents, and frequently used notebooks. It also has a scratch pad to take notes quickly. You can customize dashboard widgets and place a wallpaper at the top to start your day. The usual Evernote goodies include a robust tag system to organize notes, a search function to find text in PDF files, a browser extension to save snippets or web pages, and a rich text editor.
Evernote was recently sold to Milan-based Bending Spoons. The exchange of hands hasn’t affected the pace of new features. The company announced backlinks to move back and forth between relevant notes from a single page. It’s a must-have feature for power users, and it’s good to see the green elephant stealing some ideas from rivals like Notion.
Evernote has also introduced native task management to check your to-dos from a single place. The software is available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and the web.
Price: Evernote Personal ($8 per month or $70 per year), Evernote Professional ($10 per month or $100 per year)
4. Google Keep
Google Keep, the default note-taking app on Android, gets the job done with basic note-taking options. You can create a new note with different theming options, set a background, and add tasks, media, drawings, and voice recordings. Like Gmail, Google Keep uses labels to organize notes in different folders. You can pin notes and set reminders, but there is no way to protect your sensitive notes with a password. As for collaboration, you can invite others and work as a group to plan the next trip in Google Keep.
Besides the recent Material You makeover, Google Keep has remained mostly the same all these years. It’s time Google brings rich text formatting and new features to Keep. The free app is available on iOS, Android, and the web.
Price: Free
5. Standard Notes
Standard Notes is open source and secures your notes with industry-leading encryption. Standard Notes’ free plan includes cross-platform syncing, an offline function, a passcode feature to lock notes, tag organization, and unlimited device support. You must upgrade to the Productivity or Professional plan for rich text formatting, task management, up to one year of note revision history, and better organization through nested folders. The latter is worth considering if you store many photos and videos in notes, as the plan comes with 100GB of encrypted cloud storage.
Standard Notes has native apps on every mobile (iOS and Android) and desktop platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux).
Price: Productivity ($70 per year), Professional ($100 per year)
6. Simplenote
If you are overwhelmed by the dozens of features in other note-taking solutions, Simplenote declutters the experience with a simple note-taking offering. Created by WordPress developers, Simplenote offers markdown for rich formatting, to-do lists, password protection for private notes, and helps you stay organized with tags. Simplenote misses basics like media attachment, voice notes, PDF file support, and web clipping.
Price: Free
7. Nimbus Notes
Nimbus is a feature-packed note-taking app on Android. It offers a rich text editor, markdown support, photos, videos, PDF attachment, a web clipper, and a built-in scanner to digitize your physical documents. Nimbus also allows you to create multiple workspaces for different purposes. For example, you can store personal information in a specific workspace and share the office workspace with co-workers. Nimbus’ search is as good as Evernote’s. You can search text in PDF, image, Word, and HTML files.
Nimbus Pro unlocks unlimited notes, blocks, 5GB uploads per month, advanced search, and more workspaces. Nimbus is a cross-platform solution with native apps on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and the web.
Price: $7 per month or $60 per year
8. Obsidian
Don’t dismiss Obsidian as a standard note-taking app. Obsidian offers a unique approach to note-taking with internal linking and a graph view to check connected notes. Apart from full markdown support, a customizable toolbar, and several themes, you can explore community plugins to add missing features to your Obsidian experience. We hope to see UI updates in the future, as the current one feels dated.
Price: Different add-on packs. $8 per month for Obsidian Sync and $16 per month for Obsidian Publish
9. Notion
Notion is more than a standard note-taking app on Android. The company used to offer a web-wrapper app on mobile. Notion recently redesigned its mobile offering with native elements on iOS and Android. It feels and looks better now. Apart from standard notes, you can add tables and explore the calendar, timeline, list, and board views to manage information. The app works flawlessly with other third-party services like Slack, OneDrive, Asana, GitHub, Figma, and more.
Notion shines with a rich template library. You can pick one of the built-in templates or explore templates from the Notion community to get started. You can create multiple workspaces and share your business workspace with other team members and employees to manage notes, track projects, and plan the next summer picnic.
Notion is available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and the web.
Price: The Personal plan is free to download and use. Subscription plans start at $4 per month for the Personal Pro plan, which offers unlimited file uploads and 30-day version history for pages.
10. Squid
Unlike the standard note-taking apps on the list, Squid is geared toward Android phones, tablets, and the top Chromebooks with stylus support. Squid helps you write just like you would on paper. It turns your phone into a virtual whiteboard.
You can also mark up PDFs, fill out forms, edit grades, sign documents, import images, and do annotations. Squid comes with Chromecast support and lets you stream the note to a nearby smart TV or an external display or projector. Squid Premium unlocks features like PDF import, highlighter, eraser, shapes, text, and cloud backup solutions on Dropbox and Box.
Our only gripe with Squid is its UI (user interface). It still uses an age-old hamburger menu for navigation. We look forward to major UI changes in future updates.
Price: $1 per month or $10 per year
11. UpNote
UpNote is a no-nonsense note-taking app on Android. You can play with dozens of note-taking tools and check note info like created and updated date, word count, a table of contents, and more.
UpNote uses tried and tested methods like notebooks and tags for note organization. It has full markdown support and lets you export notes in various formats, including PDF, Text, and HTML. With favorites and the ability to pin specific notes, finding relevant text and information is easier than ever.
UpNote is a cross-platform solution and has native apps on Windows and Mac. You can use the dedicated web clipper to save links and content to UpNote when browsing and researching on the desktop. The web clipper extension is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
Price: $1 to $30 per item
Take digital notes on the go
It isn’t always convenient to use a physical notebook and a pen to keep your notes. We have a few tips and tricks for going paper-free, and a digital note-taking app is a good place to start.
