Do you ever need to jot a quick note down while at your MacBook computer? Maybe you need a better way to create and organize notes for meetings or projects. Whatever your reason, you can use the best note taking app for Mac to stay organized and on-task.
But what is the best way to take notes on Mac? Fortunately, there are many good note taking apps for Mac. In this article, we will cover the 5 best note taking apps for Mac. These include both free and paid notes apps, so you can find a good solution regardless of your budget.
The Best Note Taking Apps for Mac
Evernote is known as one of the best notes apps for Mac available, and for good reason. The app lets you create and customize thousands of notes and share them with others. You can use custom templates to design your notes according to their purpose, such as meeting notes, and save them to different notebooks. Then, you can add images, videos, audio, PDFs, and even clippings of web pages to your notes. You can annotate these PDFs and web pages within the Evernote app. When you need to find an old note, you can search for them by tag, title, date, content type, and keywords found in the note (including words in handwriting and images).
For teams, Evernote lets you create shared spaces to work on projects together. Account admins can make a virtual bulletin board and post team-wide announcements and projects. If you’re part of a business account, you can also make your personal notes searchable to anyone else in the business. This way, you can get feedback from any teammates.
You can get Evernote for free with a 25MB maximum note size and 60MB monthly upload limit. For a higher Evernote note size limit, you can purchase a premium account for $7.99/month. Premium accounts also add in PDF annotation, offline access, unlimited device syncing, and custom templates. You can purchase an account for business teams starting at $14.99/user/month with the above features alongside shared spaces and a higher monthly upload limit.
Don’t want to download a new notes app? Fortunately, Apple Notes comes pre-installed on all Mac computers! Notes is the best free note taker for Mac. It supports notes with checklists, images, videos, and file attachments. You can divide these notes into folders and pin your most important notes to the top of the app.
To find your notes, you can search by keyword, images, or attachment type. Apple Notes can identify the content of images even if they are unlabeled. If you need to share your notes with others, you can upload them to your iCloud account. You can store 5GB of notes and other files for free in iCloud. From there, you can share notes and note folders directly with others via iMessage, email, or a shareable short link.
Bear is a writing and note taking app made for Mac products. You can use Bear on Mac to create to-do lists, jot down quick notes, or even write essays. Bear includes editing tools, stylistic features, and in-line image support so you can customize your writing how you want. You can also export your notes as a PDF or Word doc for maximum accessibility. Bear’s advanced markup editor supports over 150 programming languages.
Bear also includes a unique system for organizing notes. You can link notes to one another to build a body of work. You can add hashtags to your notes for further organization and easy look-up. If you need to secure your notes, you can add face/touch ID to protect them from others. Finally, sharing notes is easy with automatic syncing with iCloud, so you can share your notes over the internet with ease.
Bear’s base features, such as note creation, hashtags, and note export are available for free. You can purchase Bear Pro for only $1.49/month or $14.99/year to unlock device syncing, themes, and more export options.
Boost Note provides a collaborative note taking app for teams on Mac, Windows, and Linux. You can create and edit notes as a team in Markdown. Boost Note also supports Charts.js, Mermaid, and PlantUML so you can add diagrams to your documents and create presentations. You can even embed 3rd party content like YouTube videos or GitHub issues.
Teams can organize notes and connect them to one another by linking related documents. Notes can be linked through embedded document blocks that preview the other document. Viewers can then click on these blocks to access the other document. If you want to share notes with people outside of your workspace, you can generate a public URL to share.
Note taking on Boost Note Mac is free for individuals on local networks with an unlimited number of documents as well as for teams with an unlimited number of members in the cloud for up to 10 documents. Teams that need more documents can pay $3/user/month for an unlimited number of documents and 1GB of storage per member or they can pay $8/user/month for 10GB of storage per member.
Google Keep is Google’s note taking app for Mac and Windows. You can access Google Keep on Mac in your web browser or as a Chrome extension. You can use Keep to create to-do lists, notes, and voice memos, and store images. When you need to find your notes later, you can color-code them and add searchable labels. Best of all, you can set location reminders on notes so that they appear on your screen once you’re at a given location.
You can easily share Google Keep notes with others through link sharing. You can also use a shareable link to invite others to collaborate on notes with you for easy group planning. Regardless of how you use Google Keep, it is 100% free with a Google account. Keep notes are saved on your Google Drive, so you get up to 15GB of space for free as well. If you need more storage space, you can upgrade your Google Drive plan.
Bonus: Take Notes with Droplr
If none of the above apps work for you, or you’re looking for a more simple notes experience, then check out Droplr! Droplr is primarily a screenshot and screen recording app, but it also can be used as a note taking app for MacBook. You can start a new note directly from the Mac app or access your notes from the Droplr dashboard. Once you’ve saved a note, you can share it with others via a shareable short link that can be copied and pasted into any messaging platform, making Droplr a collaborative note taking app as well. You can organize your notes using boards and tags.
Droplr is the perfect easy-to-use, no-hassle no app for quick note takedown and business meetings. If you’re interested and would like to check out more of our features such as annotated screenshots and GIF recording, check out our website or schedule a demo with one of our experts. You can also sign up for a 3-day free trial to try Droplr’s note taking app out for yourself.