22 Best Note-Taking Apps for Android In 2022

Digital note-taking is a must-have skill these days. Taking notes is serious business, and having the right note-taking app for your Android device can make a world of difference in your ability to stay organized.

That’s because a good note-taking app doesn’t just help you take notes, it also makes it easy to find what you’ve saved later, regardless of where you are or what type of device you’re using at that point.

Android devices usually come with their own built-in note-taking app, but sometimes, it’s best to turn to a more full-featured program if you need to take notes during a meeting or lecture, tick off a checklist, brainstorm ideas.

But figuring out which note-taking app makes the most sense for you isn’t always easy.

There are so many Android note-taking apps to choose from and they aren’t all equal, which is why it’s important to pick the right one if you want to be an efficient digital note-taker.

So we’ve drummed down the list, and have picked 22 Best Note-Taking Apps that are actually worthy of being called the best note-taking apps for Android.

1. Material Notes

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 4.5
  • Downloads: 100K+

Material Notes is a streamlined app that allows you to create notes, to-do lists and reminders.

These are all color-coded and stored within a card-style interface to keep things better organised, and to make it easy to find relevant information. You also get the ability to mark important notes with stars, and these are saved within a category based on the urgency of projects.

To ensure you never misplace an important note or list, you can easily locate anything by making use of the app’s search function.

Plus you can create and place widgets on your home screen, which give you quick access to your notes. In terms of security, you can create a four-digit pin for all your notes, ensuring that sensitive information doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

And the app allows you to easily and swiftly import content stored on other devices. Material Notes is free to download, with additional features available as an in-app purchase.

2. FairNote

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 4.5
  • Downloads: 50K+

FairNote is one of the newer note taking apps.

It features a simple interface, Material Design, and a tag system for easier organization. The app tries to focus a bit more on security. Note encryption is optional and it uses AES-256 encryption.

Additionally, pro users can set up their fingerprint to encrypt and decrypt notes as needed. Other than that, it has most of the features you’ll need. The free version comes with most of the features.

You can unlock everything with the premium version. Thankfully, it’s reasonably priced.

3. TickTick

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.5
  • Downloads: 1M+

TickTick is technically a to-do list app, but it has some neat features that allow it to be used like a notes app if you want. Namely, each item in one of your to-do lists has a “Description” field that you can use for storing notes related to that item.

Combined with folders, subtasks, tags, sorting, and search, TickTick can be a supremely powerful app for note-taking and notes management. Other useful features include a built-in calendar view, task reminders, voice input, white noise generator, productivity timer using the Pomodoro technique, and real-time collaborative editing.

Anyone who needs powerful to-do list capabilities in addition to note-taking features.

TickTick can serve as a two-in-one app, allowing you to keep all of your digital data in one place and declutter your phone of unnecessary apps.

4. Bundled Notes

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 4.5
  • Downloads: 50K+

If you take most of the great things about Google Keep, throw a different UI on top, and add Markdown support, then you’ll end up with Bundled Notes.

This is a relative newcomer to the note-taking parade, but it’s definitely one that is worth taking a look at.

It offers a streamlined interface, with different “bundles” of notes to use and take advantage of. As someone who has learned to rather enjoy writing in Markdown in my time at Android Central, finding a notes app that also uses Markdown has been a taxing adventure.

After stumbling across Bundled Notes, I’ve been using it much more.

The only real potential limitations are that it’s not available everywhere just yet, and the web app is only available in beta for premium subscribers.

5. Notion

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.5
  • Downloads: 5M+

Notion aims to be your personal and team productivity hub.

The app allows users to create customized private or shared workspaces where they can then add versatile “blocks” that act like text snippets, bookmarks, images, toggle links, files, code snippets, discussion sections, and more. As a result, you can customize your workspace as you see fit, dragging and dropping blocks of content to where you want, without disrupting an entire document.

Whether you’re doing note-taking, spreadsheeting, or building a Kanban board, Notion’s powerful building blocks make things a snap to set up. The free version of Notion allows you to save and sync up to 1,000 blocks of content, while premium subscription plans remove that content limit and add admin tools, permission settings, and other features, depending on which tier you opt for.

6. MyScript Nebo

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 4.0
  • Downloads: 10K+

MyScript’s Nebo is a feature-rich note-taking app built with handwriting and active stylus devices like the Apple Pencil and the Samsung S Pen for the Galaxy Note (and now the Galaxy S21 Ultra) in mind. Using MyScript’s Interactive Ink tech, Nebo parses your handwritten notes into text, while allowing you to easily format your notes, add extras like emphasis, underlining, bullet points, mathematical notations, and picture annotation.

Users can write equations and calculate or export to LaTeX, export into Microsoft Office documents or text files, and search through your notes to find something you’ve scribbled down.

If you’re more about jotting down notes as opposed to typing them down, MyScript Nebo is an incredibly versatile note taking tool. Originally an iPad exclusive, MyScript Nebo has since expanded to include other platforms (Windows 10 if you’ve got a Surface Pen, and Android devices that use active stylus peripherals).

Download the app for free, with in-app purchases adding packs that expand your note-taking tools; a full pack costs $7.99.

7. Keep My Notes

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 4.4
  • Downloads: 10M+

Keep My Notes is a note-taking app for Android that comes with a number of neat features.

For starters, you can create handwritten notes using a finger or stylus, plus there’s also the option to create notes using a built-in text-to-speech feature. There are also various formatting options available to bold, underline, or italicize among other things plus the ability to add audio to your notes. Even better, for added security, you can password protect notes.

Notes can be set up like sticky notes on your home screen, and notes can even shared with other apps.

There are different light or dark themes available, and the display can be changed to portrait for phones and landscape for tablets. Additionally, you can also change the text size and color when inputting text for your notes in the first place, which can be very handy.

Altogether, Keep My Notes is a handy little package that backs up to the cloud.

You can run the app for free with ads, but there are in-app purchases, not least to run ad-free.

8. LectureNotes

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 4.6
  • Downloads: 100K+

LectureNotes was one of the first really good note taking apps for students and academics.

It was one of the earliest apps to include stylus support and continues to be one of the best with that feature now. There is support for OneNote and Evernote along with PDF support, audio and video recording capabilities (for recording lectures or meetings), and a lot more.

It employs an open layout that’s great for writing notes or typing them if needed.

There are enough tools there for almost any college student or anyone else who needs to take detailed notes. We recommend checking out the free trial before buying it.

It’s not great for general use, but it’s definitely great for academia.

9. Dropbox Paper

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.1
  • Downloads: 1M+

Lately, I’ve come to think of Dropbox Paper as the best note-taking app for Android.

Microsoft OneNote still wins in terms of sheer power and features, but Dropbox Paper strikes a delicate balance between usability, intuitiveness, collaboration, appearance, and performance. Dropbox Paper is a notes app that stores every note on the cloud in your Dropbox account.

Cloud storage means your notes are accessible on any device, anywhere, as long as you have internet access. If you don’t have internet access, you can still edit while offline and the changes will sync once you’re back online. Yes, you’ll need a free Dropbox account to use Dropbox Paper! But it’s totally worth it.

Other notable features include notes sharing and online collaboration (so your friends and family can view and edit notes with you), folders for organization, checklists, due dates, annotations and comments, and integration with other productivity tools like calendars and Google Docs. Pretty much anyone except power users and those who prefer to take notes via stylus or pen.

Dropbox Paper is both simple yet powerful, and is perfectly suited for most users.

10. Microsoft OneNote

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.3
  • Downloads: 500M+

For some people, a note-taking app is more than just a searchable virtual notepad. it’s a finely organized system with mountains of features and intricate options.

Well, if you’re someone who needs a little extra oomph in your note-taking hub, Microsoft OneNote is the Android note-taking app for you. OneNote does almost everything Keep can do and then some. In addition to the above-mentioned basics, the app features a notebook-based system for categorizing and organizing your memos.

It lets you easily export any note as a PDF or plain text file so you can share it with someone else without requiring them to sign into the service. And it makes it easy to add both emails and web pages into your notebooks via a unique address for forwarding messages and a desktop-based browser Web Clipper extension for capturing content on your computer.

Speaking of content, in addition to providing an account-wide search function, OneNote allows you to search within individual notes as you’re editing them.

And unlike Keep, it has a bevy of advanced text-formatting tools for making your notes look any way your structure-loving heart desires. You can even combine regular typed-in text with finger- or stylus-made writing and markups in practically any arrangement imaginable. If you want to switch to something simpler, OneNote includes a separate Sticky Notes section that’s almost like a miniature, scaled-down version of Keep within the app.

It allows you to make quick Post-It-like notes without any frills or complications and then later find them in that same section. OneNote is fully capable of working offline, and everything you do in the app automatically syncs with OneNote on the web, on iOS, or in the dedicated Windows or Mac apps.

And all of those apps, of course, integrate nicely with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem a major plus if you’re already invested in that universe. For all of its positives, the OneNote Android app does have some noteworthy downsides. First, given the service’s complexity, it’s just not as intuitive as Keep.

Navigating through the app’s layers of menus can get rather confusing, and its “canvas” system for formatting notes which lets you place text and other elements in individual, moveable boxes all throughout the screen — can be a little overwhelming to wrap your head around.

The phone app, rather surprisingly, also lacks some basic-seeming elements such as a built-in reminders system, support for searching handwritten notes, and perhaps most vexing of all, access to OneNote’s multiuser collaboration system and note-tagging system (both of which are available in OneNote’s other editions).

Still, if you can live with those compromises and want the extra bells and whistles Keep doesn’t provide, OneNote offers an exceptional set of features and a polished experience along with a level of ecosystem integration you won’t find in any other fully featured Android note-taking app.

Most other serious contenders have even more compromises along with weaker ecosystems and a fair amount of clutter-creating and efficiency-reducing bloat — and they often come at a not-insignificant cost, too, compared to OneNote’s completely free nature.

11. Standard Notes

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 4.6
  • Downloads: 100K+

If you’re looking for an app that offers end-to-end encryption, then Standard Notes fits the bill.

The app offers a free version and is available to download on many platforms, along with Android. There’s automatic sync without any data limits, and Standard Notes even offers offline access. If you want to add a few extra features, Standard Notes does offer a premium subscription, starting at less than $2.50 per month.

With Standard Notes Extended, you’ll be able to encrypt attachments shared from Dropbox or Google Drive, along with providing access to different themes and extensions.

Plus, you’ll be able to take advantage of Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive for your backups. All the while, keeping everything encrypted and private.

12. Joplin

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.3
  • Downloads: 100K+

Joplin is an ambitious app that attempts to replicate an open source, decentralized version of Evernote.

That gives users a Markdown formatted note-taking interface organized by notebooks and using your cloud storage services as the sync backbone. Users can import content from Evernote through .enex files, as well as Markdown content.

Sorting and search filters help keep you organized, and there’s even an option for end-to-end encryption of your notes. Joplin can sync your notes between devices through Dropbox, OneDrive (One Drive Business not supported), NextCloud or WebDAV.

13. Evernote

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 3.7
  • Downloads: 100M+

Evernote is a well-respected and powerful productivity app.

It’s described as an organization and planning app that lets you take both typed and handwritten notes, create to-do lists, scan documents using your camera, and collaborate on content with others. The great thing about Evernote is that it makes use of a variety of media.

For instance, you can create notes in text form, or as sketches, photos, audio, video, PDFs or web clippings. Just like Microsoft’s OneNote, this app is underpinned by cloud technology.

That means you can sync content across all your devices from computers through to tablets and phones. In other words, if you start a task on one device, you can complete it on another. With Evernote, you can create, share and discuss content with your colleagues as well.

The app is currently free to download, but the premium plan which offers a wider range of features is available for a monthly or yearly subscription.

14. SomNote

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 4.3
  • Downloads: 1M+

SomNote is a bit of a wildcard in the note taking apps space.

It caters more to the long-form note taking style. That makes it great for things like journals, diaries, research notes, story writing, and others.

It has a folder system for easy organization, a locking mechanism to keep things secure, and theming options. There is also a syncing feature so you can go back and forth between devices.

The free version has ads and limited cloud support.

The premium subscription gives you 30GB of cloud storage, no ads, and more. You do have to subscribe to get rid of the ads, but that’s about the only downside. There is no single payment option.

15. Squid

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.0
  • Downloads: 5M+

Squid is a unique note-taking app. It’s a vector-based notes app for Android that eschews typing for handwriting.

Using an active pen, stylus, or even your finger, you can write out your notes instead of cramping your thumbs on a keyboard. (But typed notes are possible if you need them.) Squid can import PDFs, allowing you to mark them as you wish and then save them again.

You can also cast your notes to a TV or projector using a Chromecast or another device that supports wireless streaming with Miracast.

If you hate typing and prefer to write your notes by hand, this is the perfect app for you.

Infinite paper size, vector-based strokes, and lots of flexibility. An active pen or stylus with a tablet is highly recommended.

16. Simplenote

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.2
  • Downloads: 1M+

The last official recommendation in our list is for anyone who wants a clean and minimalist space to take notes without any extras or unnecessary distractions.

Simplenote lives up to its name and offers a refreshingly pared-down environment for writing and thought collection. The app, made by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress, presents you with a sparse list of text-based notes and a blank page for editing them no image or audio attaching, no formatting, no fuss whatsoever.

Simplenote does have a handful of features beyond the absolute basics, including a simple system for tagging notes an option for publishing notes to shareable URLs and a slider for viewing a note’s history and restoring old versions.

And the app keeps your data synced and accessible across multiple platforms and devices, with versions available for Windows, macOS, iOS, Linux, and the web. Other than that, though, there’s really not much to say about Simplenote and that, notably, is kinda the point.

17. Google Keep

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.2
  • Downloads: 1B+

Google Keep has been around since 2013, and it continues to be one of the most useful apps you can download.

There’s an app for just about every platform, and if not, you can just use the web client. From jotting down your grocery list to making a to-do list or saving articles to read later on, Google Keep is the ultimate note-taking app. It’s difficult to put into words just how useful Google Keep can be, as many folks haven’t even heard of this Google app.

Having everything you need in a single location from note-taking to creating a task list or saving links can really help your mental wellbeing.

Keep is not just one of the best note-taking apps, but it’s one of the best Android apps that we have ever seen. And of course, you’ll have the easy integration with other Google services, so you can export notes from Keep into something like Google Docs.

And if you want to use it as a to-do app, you can do that too and will have the ability to set timed or location reminders so you never forget what’s on your docket for any given day. Oh, and the best part? It’s completely free.

18. Notebook

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.6
  • Downloads: 1M+

Zoho’s Notebook app is a multipurpose note taking app that works great for jotting down notes, checklists, to-do lists, and and more detailed journal entries. Your entries in Notebook can be simple text, or they can include images, checklists, and recorded audio.

A variety of gesture commands and batch operations make it easy to sort and group notes together and organize them into notebooks.

Multi-device syncing makes sure that your notes are on every device you own.

19. BlackNote

  • Price: Free and Premium
  • Rating: 4.9
  • Downloads: 1M+

BlackNote has a minimalistic interface that makes note taking very straightforward.

Similar to other Android notes apps, BlackNote contains a variety of typical features that make it easy to use.

In BlackNote you’ve got all your preferred features in one intuitive dark themed user interface that reduces eye strain. Within BlackNote, you can organize notes, make to-do lists, use widgets, and much more.

You can also search for your notes, lock the app for enhanced privacy, and even star notes as favorites for quick access.

If you are looking for a decent Android notes app with a simple interface, then BlackNote could be your preferred choice.

The free version of BlackNote contains ads, but you can get rid of them through in-app purchases.

20. Omni Notes

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.4
  • Downloads: 100K+

Omni Notes reminds me of Evernote’s mobile app from several years ago: simple but not minimal, clean and delightful to use, complete with all the fundamental features you’d expect from a note-taking app but not much more.

In a word, Omni Notes is solid. Some of its more notable features: the ability to merge notes, batch editing of notes, quick access widgets, color coding, sketch-note mode for drawing, and Google Assistant integration that lets you write notes just by saying “write a note [text].”

It’s a lightweight app designed to be quick and fast without sacrificing too much organizational ability.

Its also one of the few notes apps for Android that’s open-source, which could be a big draw for some users.

21. ColorNote

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.7
  • Downloads: 100M+

ColorNote is a lot like Google Keep: simplicity is the name of the game and its main focus is offering the same kind of quick convenience you’d get from real-life sticky notes.

Jot down a brief message, color code it, and you’re done. What I like best about ColorNote is its widgeting options. You can have a widget with direct note-editing access, or you can have shortcut widgets that open up specific notes.

Two note types are supported: lined notes and checklists. This app only serves one purpose. If you need quick notes that are temporary, it’s perfect. If you need to build up an archive of notes for long-term storage, skip it.

ColorNote is too simple for that.

22. FiiNote

  • Price: Free
  • Rating: 4.5
  • Downloads: 1M+

FiiNote is a multipurpose note-taking app that’s similar to both Microsoft OneNote and Evernote, but nowhere near as popular.

It has support for both typed and handwritten notes, along with a number of other advanced features. Calender? Check. Multimedia attachments and audio recording? Check. Deep organization? Infinite canvas? Note templates? Revision history? All check.

The interface is a little bland but extremely functional.

Very easy to use, even on a small-screen smartphone. We consider FiiNote to be a lesser version of both Microsoft OneNote and Evernote.

If those two offer too much for you, then you may be happy with this one instead.

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it! So, there are Best Note-Taking Apps for Android.

If you have any other favorite Best Note-Taking Apps for Android then don’t forget to share them with us in the comment below. Also, if you liked this article, Share on your favorite Social media platform.

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