Best Note-Taking Apps for Mac

Microsoft OneNote is your all-in-one digital notebook for capturing ideas, organizing thoughts, and collaborating seamlessly. With Copilot in OneNote, you can draft plans, generate ideas, and structure your notes using simple natural-language prompts. Sketch, annotate, and highlight freely using digital ink that feels as natural as pen on paper. Share notebooks in real time to brainstorm, plan, or learn together with teammates, classmates, or family. Built-in voice transcription ensures you never miss key details from meetings or lectures. Whether at home, school, or work, OneNote helps you stay organized and creative across all your devices.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Make by native macOS technology, the pursuit of the perfect combination with the system. In principle, the first is to pursue a simple interface and high performance, and then it is powerful, easy to use, and full-featured. Use Github Flavored Markdown syntax (GFM). Supports Table, TOC, LaTeX, Fenced code block, Task lists, Footnote, etc. The Markdown graphics supports mermaid, viz, echarts, plantuml, sequence, flow. Exporting as Image, HTML, Epub, PDF, RTF, Docx. Publishing to Wordrpess, Metaweblog API, Wordpress.com, Evernote, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr. Support screenshots and paste, copy and paste, drag and drop Insert images and display them directly in the editor. Support for setting the image width when compatible with Markdown syntax. A powerful document library supports category trees and tag management documents. Documents can be categorized into multiple categories. You can export a category to Epub, PDF, and generate static websites.

The Ultimate Writing App for Mac, iPad and iPhone. A pleasant, focused writing experience combined with effective document management, fast syncing and flexible export options make Ulysses the first choice for writers of all kinds. Many writers praise the way Ulysses encourages immersion with the text, and testify how using it has considerably increased their productivity. Although it’s a fully-fledged writing tool, Ulysses manages to stay completely out of your way – and can therefore rival any distraction-free writing app. Ulysses’ unified library holds everything you’ll ever write, and is equipped for managing writing projects of all sizes and ambitions. Be it love letters, simple notes, daily blog posts or the Great American Novel – with Ulysses, your writing is in the best of hands. Thus, you can focus on getting the words down. On the sofa, at a coffee shop, or while waiting for the bus: Work wherever you are, and whenever inspiration hits.

Leave brain for thinking, let WizNote to remember. Webpage collected, full text search, folders and markdown. Get the Docker image of WizNote Server, for free! Clip webpage, and blog, import variable files, conquer the fragmentation. Checklist, handwriting, photos, voices, attachments, more than just text. Light editing tool, markdown supported, upload data to the server. Historical version, once saved, permanently saved. Groups, folders and tags. Get data organized, full-text search, shortcut of notes. Locate folders and notes, create and collaborate, boost your work. Create shared workplace, connect people with comments. Improve work by jointly editing, and move work forward. Keep work organized, stay in same version, same pace. Get rid of repetition and work better together. Hosted on your own infrastructure, scaled to your needs. Get WizNote on mobile, tablet and computer.

Notes stay updated across all your devices, automatically and in real time. There’s no “sync” button: It just works. Add tags to find notes quickly with instant searching. Share a to-do list, post some instructions, or publish your notes online. Notes are backed up with every change, so you can see what you noted last week or last month. Write, preview, and publish your notes in markdown format. Apps, backups, syncing, sharing – it’s all completely free. You can browse the notes you want to import or drag and drop a file into the import window. The app takes care of the rest. If you’re importing notes with markdown formatting and you’d like to keep them that way, check the enable markdown on all notes box and they’ll be automatically configured as markdown notes in simplenote.

Laverna has a simple and robust markdown editor, which can help you write faster than ever before with our live markdown preview. The editor can be switched to distraction free mode where you can focus solely on writing notes. Make your notes available on any device with your Dropbox & RemoteStorage account. Keep simple to do lists organized in notes and notebooks. You can manage your notes without ever lifting your hands from your keyboard. Keep snippets of code to have access to them anytime and anywhere. Do you prefer to stay anonymous? You do not need to go through registration process to start using Laverna. You can export your notes from Laverna and import them back anytime. You are not tied to using it forever. Every line of code can be reviewed on GitHub and is available under MPL-2.0 license. Available anytime and anywhere, keep your notes private.

Craft is a rich text editor that is easy and frictionless to use. It also supports markdown, code blocks, images, videos, and attaching PDF files or rich link previews. Adding content is very simple - just tap on an empty area and start typing. You can also drag and drop the input field on both Mac (from the sidebar) and iOS (from the bottom bar) in order to drop content at a specific location. If you are using a keyboard, you can also just press space when a block is focused to insert a new block below. You can also add Code, Math Formula (TeX), and plaintext snippets. To do so, you can use the same methods as you would do when adding images. Craft allows you to style your content in a beautiful and simple way. We've created a set of styles that won’t overwhelm, but by combining these, you can still perfectly express yourself - and all of these work great both in dark or in light mode.

Where do you keep your private remarks like ideas, personal plans, exam preparation notes, gift tips, how-tos, dreams, business visions, finance strategies, meeting minutes and auto coaching notes? Loads of documents, sketches and remarks spread around the file system, cloud, web and Post-it notes? Are you affraid of your knowledge privacy? Are you able to find particular remarks once you create them? Do you know how are the remarks mutually related when you browse, read or write them? MindForger aims to mimic human mind, learning, recalling, recognition, associations, forgetting, in order to achieve synergy with your mind to make your searching, reading and writing more productive. MindForger ensures that you own your personal data. It respects privacy and enables security of your knowledge. MindForger seeks knowledge hidden in your remarks to enable its mining. MindForger starts where editors and search engines end. It thinks as you search, browse, read and write.