There are plenty of great note-taking apps, but not all of them run well on a Mac. Productivity apps that don’t fit your workflow can trip you up, which is why finding an actual Mac note-taking app matters.
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Keyboard shortcuts, notifications, and user interfaces that don’t fit in can be distracting, and that’s the last thing you want to be thinking about when it’s time to take notes.
I’ve been writing about macOS for over a decade, and I’m passionate about finding the best Mac apps. I considered 20 note apps for Mac, and after extensive testing, this article includes the best of the best.
The 5 best note-taking apps for Mac
What makes a great note-taking app for Mac?
How we evaluate and test apps
All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. 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. 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. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
You can take notes using just about any app, or a piece of paper for that matter. For the purposes of this article, though, we only considered apps built with note-taking in mind. Typically this means a primary window you can use to browse all of your notes, sorted into notebooks and usually arranged by dates.
But that’s the bare minimum. What makes a Mac notes app truly great? In our opinion, the best Mac note-taking apps:
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Make it quick to add new notes. The best notes app for Mac should take moments to open the app and start writing. Bonus points if there are tools for quickly clipping information from websites or pushing text over from other apps.
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Organize your notes. There should be ways to sort things: folders, tags, and/or notebooks.
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Offer fast and useful search. You’re going to take a lot of notes—you need to be able to find the right ones quickly.
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Are easy to use. The best Mac note-taking app is designed with the user in mind and is easy to navigate for a beginner. Power users matter too, though, which is why features like keyboard shortcuts and flexible preferences are also valuable.
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Are actual native Mac apps. To be a solid notepad for Mac, it’s not enough to put the web version of your application in a window and call it a day.
All of the note-taking apps for Mac below meet all of these criteria—and excel at many of them. One of them is right for you.
Best simple Mac note-taking app
Apple Notes (macOS, iOS, Web)
There’s a saying in photography: the best camera is the one you have with you. If you have a Mac, you have Apple Notes, and that alone makes it the best note-taking app for many people. I don’t say this to put Apple Notes down—it’s a very effective tool. But the fact that you don’t need to install it, pay for it, or create a new account to get started is, for most Mac users, more than enough of a reason to try Apple Notes first.
This app loads instantly, and creating a new note couldn’t be faster. You can drag images to your notes, and they will show up instantly, and there’s also support for embedding audio files. You can also attach any document to a note, if you want, and it all happens very quickly. This is a native Mac app, after all, so you don’t have to wait for an upload before things show up.
Notes are organized into notebooks and arranged by date. There’s also support for tagging—just add a #hashtag to the text of a note, and the tag will show up in the sidebar—and a quick search feature that searches every note. The main downside here is the limited exporting options. You can export any note to PDF…and that’s it. There’s also no official way to export entire notebooks.
Still, if you’re looking for a notes app for the Apple operating system, try Apple Notes first. It might fit you perfectly, or you might learn which missing features matter most. Either way, it’s a win.
Apple Notes pricing: Free with 5GB of iCloud storage. Paid plans start at $0.99/month for 50GB of iCloud storage.
Best traditional Mac note-taking app
OneNote (macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Web)
OneNote first came out in 2003, making it by far the oldest app on this list. Notes are organized in multiple notebooks, which are divided into sections. This is a structure many other apps would go on to copy, but in many ways, OneNote still does it best—all while offering a significantly more generous free option than you can find anywhere else.
OneNote is particularly easy to recommend to Microsoft Office users, who will immediately find the user interface familiar, but it works for everyone. The core metaphor is that of a paper notebook. Most apps in this list work like a text editor, but OneNote is more like a piece of paper: you can click anywhere to start typing in that exact spot. There’s also support for drawing, though this is probably easier to use on a tablet than a Mac, and images and documents can be added inline or as attachments.
And the search is very complete, giving you a way to find notes across every one of your notebooks. There’s even optical character recognition (OCR), meaning if you attach an image or PDF, your search applies to the contents of those files. No other app on this list offers that. You can also clip articles and recipes from the web using the OneNote clipper for your browser.
OneNote syncs to every kind of device you can imagine, well outside the Apple ecosystem. So if you ever use Windows or Android, it’s a great choice. And you can make OneNote even more powerful using Zapier’s OneNote integration, which connects OneNote with thousands of other apps. For example, you could automatically make new notes for all Google Calendar events, so you’re ready to go when the meeting starts, or you could automatically migrate notes from other apps.
Try out OneNote if Apple Notes doesn’t give you quite as much freedom as you’d like. You might find the interface a little cluttered, but the flexibility is well worth the tradeoff.
Microsoft OneNote pricing: Free with 5G of OneDrive storage. Microsoft 365 starts at $9.99/month and includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outline, and 6TB of OneDrive storage.
OneNote’s closest rival was, for a long time, Evernote. A recent update means the Mac app is essentially the web version of Evernote in a window. That’s why we’re not including Evernote in this specific list, even if we still think it’s one of the best overall note-taking apps.
The best note app for Mac with local storage
Notebooks (macOS, Windows, iOS)
Notebook apps tend to either store their files in proprietary formats (Apple Notes, OneNote) or basically require you to learn Markdown (the other apps on this list). Notebooks is different. This app stores every note as an HTML file on your computer, but you don’t need to know what that means in order to use it. It’s flexibility and simplicity in one beautiful package.
Notebooks, in many ways, reminds me of what Evernote was like before they shuttered their native Mac version. There are three panes: one for your notebooks, another for documents in the notebook, and a third for the current note. You can double-click any note to open it in its own window, allowing you to work on multiple notes at once or to have a small window to the side as you research online. The interface really belongs on the Mac, with all of the nice touches that you expect.
But the real power here is flexibility. You can easily import Evernote notebooks, or folders full of plaintext, HTML, and Markdown files. You can export any note to Word, PDF, or plaintext file. By default, notes are simple HTML files in folders, which you can browse directly using your Finder. iCloud is the most straightforward syncing option if you’re syncing to other Apple devices. But if you’d rather use another cloud service for syncing, you can simply store your notebook in the folder for that service—which is ideal if you plan on syncing to the Windows client.
Notebooks works the way you want it to work, all without compromising ease of use. If you haven’t found a notes app that works for you, I highly recommend you try out the 14-day free trial.
Notebooks pricing: $40 one-time purchase
The most powerful notes app for Mac
Obsidian (macOS, Windows, Android, iOS)
Obsidian is the first app I’ve come across that quotes John Locke in its help document. That alone speaks to how ambitious this app is: it wants to change the way you think. I’ve got to say, it’s my kind of crazy.
Obsidian’s notes are literally just text documents, formatted using Markdown. This means if you stop using Obsidian, you can keep all of your notes. But don’t let the simplicity of the file format fool you—Obsidian aims to be a database of your life.
The app offers all kinds of structure, giving you a sidebar full of folders you can use to organize in but also emphasizing internal hyperlinks. A core idea here is that you will create new notes frequently, then link back to them in other documents. This creates a web of knowledge you can easily browse, and there’s also a quick keyboard shortcut for pulling up notes by name or contents. It’s almost like a personal wiki, but better.
This sounds strange, but start using it, and the concept makes a lot of sense, quickly. You can make it work exactly the way you want. Everything about the interface is customizable, and you can have multiple notes open in the same window. But the real power comes from the community plugins, which let you add features like a calendar for daily journal entries or a full-blown kanban board.
Obsidian pricing: Free for most features; from $25 for exclusive features. There are also add-ons for things like syncing ($8/month) or turning a collection of notes into a public website ($16/month).
The best open source Mac note-taking app
Joplin (macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS)
Notes are intensely personal, and I understand if you don’t want to trust them all to a company that has its own agenda. Joplin is a free and open-source application, which among other things, means that all of your notes live on your computer under your control. You don’t need an account to get started, and you can sync your notes between devices using any service you want: Dropbox, OneDrive, or the open source Nextcloud are all supported, and you can enable end-to-end encryption if you don’t want third-party services to have access.
The interface is that of a traditional note-taking app, with notebooks and notes organized in the left column. You can also organize notes using tags, and you can clip articles from the web using the web clipper. The main editor is in Markdown, but there’s an optional rich text editor if you’re not comfortable with that. There’s also support for opening notes in external apps, so if you’ve got a favorite Markdown editor, you can use that instead.
It’s the most robust open source option I found, and there’s support for importing notebooks from Evernote. I recommend it if you’re looking for a OneNote alternative for Mac and want full control over your notes.
Joplin pricing: Free
What’s the best note-taking app for Mac?
The best notes app is the one you like the most—but not all notes apps play nice on Mac. There are plenty of good note-taking apps for Mac, so give these ones a whirl and see which ones feel the most at home on your Mac.
This article was originally published in March 2019 by Tim Brookes. The most recent review of apps was in June 2022.
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