Taking notes is the best way to organize your life, and thanks to smartphones it is very easy now to jot down a quick note. When you carry your smartphone with you, it acts as a handy note-taking device to keep track of all your thoughts, reminders, and information that you do not want to miss.
Although most smartphones come with a basic note app, usually its features are not enough to fulfill all your note taking needs. If you need advanced features, you should definitely check out some Android note taking apps that will help you organize your important notes.
There are many applications available on the Play Store to create notes with your Android device. Most of them equipped with very user-friendly features that allow you to make notes, sort them, and always keep on hand, and sync it with other applications. To help you organize yourself, we are listing down the 7 Best Note Taking Apps for Android and they range from intuitive to interactive, so there is an app for everyone.
1. Google Keep
Google Keep is a note-taking app offered by Google and it is arguably the most popular note taking app right now. It uses a very colorful, Material Design-inspired interface that both looks great and is highly functional. It lets you take both text notes and checklists for to-dos. As Google Keep focuses on simplicity, you will find its interface to be very clean, which makes finding the notes you need a breeze.
It uses Google’s powerful search features to let you find the right note, plus you can also color-code notes to make it easier to organize and find the note you are looking for. Additionally, you can label notes into categories and Google Keep will also automatically divide notes by topics to ensure you do not get lost in notes realm.
The app has Google Drive integration so you can access them online if you need to. Additionally, it has voice notes, to-do notes, OCR to grab text from images, and you can set reminders and share notes with people. There is just enough to be super useful without being bloated. It also has Android Wear support if you need that.
2. Microsoft OneNote
OneNote is a powerful note taking app offered by Microsoft that is feature rich and completely free. It allows you to create up to 500 text notes or images that can be added from your gallery or directly from the camera of the smartphone. The application also supports traditional lists accompanied by the usual checkboxes and to add formatted text and hyperlinks.
OneNote offers multiple ways to take notes, including text notes, audio notes, video notes, handwritten, draw notes, clip sections from web pages and ability to use built-in OCR technology to extract data from images. It organizes notes in a notebook-like interface with the ability to place notes anywhere you like. On top of that, it comes with attractive themes to differentiate notes from each other and its powerful search features make it further easy to quickly access the note you need.
OneNote comes with powerful collaboration tools that allow you to share notes with other people and edit them in real-time and also use tags and comments to make collaboration easy. Furthermore, it lets you add a widget on the home screen to quickly write down notes right from the home screen and access important notes. OneNote integrates with Microsoft OneDrive to save and sync data across all your devices and enable you to access the data from anywhere.
Competing as an Evernote alternative, it is available for free as a web app, as well as natively on iOS, Android, OS X, and Windows. You can also use OneNote for free on as many devices as you want.
3. Evernote
Synonymous with note taking across all platforms, Evernote deserves to be on every list of the best note-taking apps for Android. The only reason Evernote does not top the list is the fact that the service is not entirely free and you need a subscription to use it on more than two devices. This makes it less accessible for users who are looking for a free solution and also makes it a bit expensive for premium users.
You can use this app to write any kind of note, also for recording voice notes or store pictures if they contain text that can be recognized by the OCR servers for future searches. With its cross-platform integration, store your files in the cloud and access them from any of your mobile devices, and background note taking capabilities, you can use this app for anything.
Apart from things most Android note taking apps can do, it lets you take notes as photos, audio, video, sketches, clipping web page sections, PDFs, speech to text and more. Its collaboration tools are quite amazing as well and you can share and work on notes with multiple people, annotate pictures, show notes as presentation, add comments, discuss and more. Evernote’s home screen widget is also very productive and lets you put important functions of Evernote right on your home screen, such as text editor, camera, important notes, search bar, reminders and more.
4. ColorNote
ColorNote is a simple and awesome note-taking app and it has been around for longer than most of the apps on this list. As the name suggests, ColorNote lets you color-code your notes to identify each note quickly — a feature many other note-taking apps borrowed. This makes it extremely easy to organize your notes and access the one you might have tucked between hundreds of other notes.
It gives you a quick and simple notepad editing experience when you write notes, memos, e-mails, messages, shopping lists and to-do lists. Some other features include calendar support, backup support to both internal storage and cloud storage, and more. ColorNote also has to-do list features as well.
The ColorNote widget makes it a snap to access and edit important notes. Other notable features of ColorNote include note reminders, password protection, online backup and sync, autosave, quick search bar, share notes, take notes on the calendar, multiple view modes, archive notes and more.
Get the ColorNote app if you need nothing more than a mini-scheduler or a checklist for work and home and it is completely free.
5. Simplenote
True to its name, Simplenote is a very light note-taking app with a clean and simple interface to quickly jot down notes. You can create simple notes, tag and set the notes to appear on the top of the list. In the navigation bar, you can see all the notes or filter by tags, and use their search engine to locate a note.
Although it focuses on simplicity, that does not mean it lacks any of the core features. If you have an account with the service, you can enjoy the synchronization between all your devices through its application for Android, iOS and web version. Furthermore, it also has some basic collaboration features that you can use to share and edits notes with friends. The application is very easy and simple to use.
6. Zoho Notebook
Zoho Notebook is a card-based alternative to Evernote and is similar to Google Keep. You start by creating notebooks that resemble physical notebooks. Inside those notebooks are cards. Those cards can be lists, drawings, maps, images, audio, or web clippings. You can stack cards on top of each other to form groups or leave them as individual pages.
The Notebook has a simple but beautiful interface and it has a visual organization that lets you choose covers for your various notebooks and group related notes into stacks. While the company is typically known for its corporate tools, the Notebook apps are far from what you think of when you think of corporate apps. The mobile apps were introduced midway through last year, but since then they have matured into something much more usable. Best of all, it is FREE. No Ads. No catch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTAJy1DG5z8
7. Omni Notes
Omni Notes is an open-source note-taking app with a Material Design interface that is simple and offers all the required features for taking notes. Since the app is open source, you need not worry third-parties accessing your data.
It lets you use categories and tags to organize notes. You can take text notes, audio notes, video notes, sketch notes and even speech-to-text notes using Google Now.
It has a vertical card layout that is both easy to scroll through and easy to keep track of. It also has the ability to merge, sort, and search through your notes for better organization and discovery. On top of that, it has DashClock support, widgets, and a sketch-note mode where you can draw and doodle if you want to.
The only drawback is that Omni Notes does not offer any online backup or sync feature, which could be a good thing if you are privacy conscious and a bad thing if you are looking access your notes on other devices as well. However, you can still create offline backups, to move it to other devices. It has enough features to be competitive, but not so many that it is bloated. It is one of the great note taking apps for those on a budget as well.
A few last words
A large number of note saving apps are available on Google Play store but, these best free Note taking apps are powerful enough to handle all your note taking demands. With these Android apps, you can take down notes in multiple ways, access them from any device and quickly find the required note. My personal favorite is Google Keep for its simple interface and working, although OneNote gives it tough competition.
Which is your favorite app for taking down notes on your Android device? If we missed any of the best note-taking apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments!
See Also
- 11 Uses Google Keep Note-Taking Android App
- 10 Best Alternatives To Evernote
- 11 Best Keyboard Apps For Android
