Have you noticed how the best ideas always come when you’re in the middle of something? You might be working on a crucial project when you get an idea that leads to a solution you’ve been looking for all along. While I was working on our blog strategy the other day, I had a brilliant idea—or so I thought—to boost search engine rankings. Naturally, I desired to keep it. However, there is a limit to how much I can recall. I rely on note-taking apps to capture and revisit these floating thoughts once I finish what’s at hand.
These apps act as a second brain, helping me turn stray ideas into action items.
I have compiled a list of free and paid alternatives based on my experience and the testing carried out by our ClickUp team. I hope this helps you find the app you want for keeping a list of notes.
What Should You Look for in Note-Taking Apps?
Prioritize features that enhance productivity and complement your professional routine when choosing an app. In order to feel more productive and less burdened by the information I need to remember, I am particular about how I work and the numerous routes I take. Here are some key aspects to consider:
Features for organization: Note apps with powerful search capabilities, folders, tags, and organizational tools make it simple to organize and retrieve notes (this is extremely important to me; bi-directional linking or dependencies are my favorite features). It helps me comprehend how my work is interconnected with other priorities or ideas. Capabilities for integration: To streamline your workflow—again, crucial for my personal and professional productivity—check that your note-taking app seamlessly integrates with other tools you frequently use, such as calendar apps, project management software, and collaboration platforms. I’ll often save my notes from Kindle to push to my project management app as something I’d want to reference, and usually, when I read something on the web, I’ll want to add a related idea as a potential topic to cover on the ClickUp blog)
Ease of use: Look for an app with an intuitive interface that makes it simple to add, edit, organize, and retrieve notes quickly
AI assistance: Look for note-taking apps with AI capabilities that can assist you in summarizing your notes, creating video and meeting transcripts, editing or creating notes intuitively, and organizing your notes more effectively. (This has had the biggest impact on my note-taking. Previously, I would spend time summarizing my poorly written rough notes, but now I let AI do that, saving me a ton of time. I can now start with my polished notes right away.) Access across devices: Choose an app that syncs across all of your devices so you can access your notes from anywhere, whether you’re at work, at home, or traveling. I was able to narrow down the numerous note-taking apps on the market and select the best ones for you thanks to these essential features. The Top 10 Apps for Taking Notes We’ve compiled a list of apps that aren’t just popular with professionals but can also be used by students, freelancers, business owners, and office workers. Let’s start with the in-house favorite.
1. The best AI-powered free note-taking app is ClickUp
Over the past few years, ClickUp has been my go-to note-taking app for good reason. I use ClickUp Docs to jot down notes and tasks and build my knowledge base and wikis. I can easily assign tasks and work with other team members in real time thanks to this. Rich text formatting options, such as bullet points, checklists, banners, headings, highlights, and code blocks, let me customize my documents and make particular sections of my notes stand out (a bonus for visual learners!). You can also add and embed multimedia elements to Docs.
These features work flawlessly everywhere I’ve used them, on both the web and mobile versions. Using relationships, ClickUp also allows for bidirectional linking within ClickUp Tasks. This makes it simple to connect tasks that are similar and gives me a complete picture of my workflow. My method for taking notes now includes ClickUp Brain as an essential component. This AI tool helps me summarize long notes, create tables with accurate data, get automated task updates, and quickly find information from anywhere in my Workspace.
I use ClickUp Brain to summarize Tasks comment threads in a hurry so that I can comprehend what’s going on without reading the more than 200 comments. (I use this a lot to track the signal from the noise and quickly see what my team is up to).
However, if your note-taking woes are specific to meetings, call in the ClickUp AI Meeting Notetaker! It captures every single detail from the meeting and delivers it to you as a structured ClickUp Doc, so you can focus more on what’s being said rather than scrambling to take notes. Simply ask ClickUp Brain to create tasks from the notes or use ClickUp Chat to send a summary to your coworkers once you have the document.
Learn more here
I also use the Notepad feature of ClickUp to take quick notes on my desktop or phone. It has unintentionally evolved into my preferred writing app. I do many of my first drafts here with simple formatting before moving them elsewhere.
The best part is I can turn these entries into trackable Tasks as well, if I need to.
For example, if the note reads ‘Email quotations to Sam,’ I can swiftly create a Task out of it with a deadline and other details.