10 Best Note-Taking Apps for Mac of 2026

Bear is the app to pick if you mainly write notes and want them to look good while you do it. It is a native Mac app built around Markdown, so headings, lists, tables, photos and to-do items live in the same note and format as you type. Instead of folders, Bear organizes notes with tags that can be nested, given one of more than 250 icons and pinned for quick access. Headings can be folded so you can focus on one section of a long note. Bear Pro adds the parts most people end up wanting: iCloud sync between Mac, iPhone and iPad, OCR search inside photos and PDFs, extra export formats, more than 28 themes and 15 app icons. Shiny Frog says your notes stay between you and iCloud, and individual notes can be encrypted. At $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, Pro is cheap. The limits are the Apple-only platform list and a tag-based system that does not suit everyone.

Obsidian is the strongest pick for Mac users who want their notes to outlive any single app. Everything sits in a folder of files on your Mac, which Obsidian describes as open formats, so the notes stay readable in any text editor and work offline. On top of that sits a linking system: you connect notes to each other, see backlinks, and browse the result in a graph view, while Canvas gives you an infinite board for laying out research or plans. Thousands of community plugins and themes let you add task lists, calendars or different layouts. The app costs nothing and needs no account. Paid services are optional: Sync is $4 per user per month billed annually and adds end-to-end encrypted sync, version history and shared vaults, and Publish turns notes into a website for $8 per site per month. The trade-off is effort, because a new vault starts empty and the best setup depends on plugins you choose yourself.

Apple Notes is the baseline every other app on this list has to beat, and for many people it is enough. It comes with macOS, costs nothing and syncs through iCloud with an iPhone and iPad. Apple's Mac user guide lists a broad feature set: drawings with the Markup palette, tables and lists, attachments including PDFs and scanned documents, tags and Smart Folders, pinned notes, password-locked notes and shared notes and folders for collaboration. Newer additions include recording audio inside a note with live transcripts you can search, and Math in Notes, which solves expressions and works with variables as you type an equals sign. Quick Note lets you capture text from any app. The reasons to move on are specific: Apple Notes does not store notes as Markdown or plain files, has no backlinks or graph for building a linked knowledge base, and does not run on Windows or Android, which matters if you use a work PC.

Notion is the pick when your notes are really structured information: meeting notes tied to projects, reading lists with ratings, or a wiki you share with colleagues. Its building blocks are pages and databases, and Notion lists subtasks, dependencies and custom properties among database features, plus charts, forms and published sites on paid plans. The free plan already includes unlimited pages and the core docs, wikis and databases, with a trial of Notion AI, and Notion Calendar connects multiple calendars to the same workspace. Notion offers a desktop download for macOS in Universal, Apple Silicon and Intel versions, along with a Web Clipper for Chrome. Paid plans start at $10 per member per month billed annually. For a Mac user who only wants to jot quick notes, Notion is heavier than Bear or Apple Notes, and your content sits in Notion's cloud rather than in files on your Mac, so it is less suited to private, offline-first note-taking.

Craft sits between Bear and Notion: it builds pages from blocks like Notion but feels like a native Apple app. Craft's App Store listing describes structured documents, Collections for organizing knowledge, built-in tasks with target dates, due dates and reminders, and Daily Notes with a calendar view. Whiteboards add a canvas for sketching ideas, and the AI Assistant can find notes, answer questions from your content and rewrite or summarize documents. Work stays available offline and syncs across Mac, iPhone, iPad and the web. Pages can be shared by link or published, and export covers PDF, Markdown, Word and PNG. The free tier is useful for trying the app but capped at 1,500 blocks, 1 GB of storage and 7 days of version history. The Plus plan removes those limits for $9.99 a month or $95.99 a year on the US App Store, which is noticeably more than Bear Pro.

OneNote is the obvious choice for a Mac user who also works on a Windows PC or inside Microsoft 365 at the office. The Mac app is free on the Mac App Store and organizes content the way a paper binder does, with notebooks, sections and pages. Pages are a free-form canvas, so you can type anywhere, drop in pictures and files, or draw with digital pen colors, and Convert to Shapes tidies hand-drawn shapes into clean polygons and circles. Important and To Do tags flag items to follow up, and notes can be protected with a password. Notebooks sync through OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint, and shared notebooks support real-time collaboration. You do not need to pay for OneNote itself; Microsoft 365 Personal at $99.99 a year on the US Mac App Store adds Word, Excel and the other Office apps. The downsides are the need for a Microsoft account, no Markdown and a layout that feels less native than Bear or Craft.

Joplin is the open source alternative for Mac users who care about privacy and portability more than polish. The app is open source, saves notes in an open format and uses end-to-end encryption, so synced notes are unreadable to the storage provider. You can sync through Joplin's own Joplin Cloud, or through Dropbox or OneDrive, and the app runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS, with a terminal version as well. Notes handle images, videos, PDFs and audio, along with math expressions and diagrams, and a web clipper for Chrome and Firefox saves pages or screenshots as notes. Plugins, custom themes and a choice between a Rich Text and a Markdown editor let you adjust the app. Joplin Cloud adds note publishing, notebook sharing and Email to Note, with a 14-day trial; we could not confirm a USD price because the plans page shows euros from our location. The interface is functional rather than Mac-native.

NotePlan is for Mac users whose notes and to-do list are really the same thing. Every day gets an automatically created daily note where you capture tasks, events and ideas, and you can time-block tasks onto your calendar by typing. NotePlan reads iCloud, Google and Exchange calendars, so meetings and notes sit side by side. Beyond the daily page, you can build a network of notes with bi-directional links, use folders, P.A.R.A. or a Zettelkasten setup, tag with #tags and @mentions, and switch projects between list and Kanban views. Notes are stored in plaintext Markdown and sync through CloudKit or iCloud Drive, which keeps your data portable. The cost is the main hurdle: there is no free plan, the annual plan is $99 a year with a 7-day trial and the monthly plan is $12. For people who already run their day from a calendar, that price buys one app instead of three.

Evernote is still one of the most complete archives for saved information. Its compare page lists a Web Clipper, document scanning, tasks with reminders, Evernote Calendar with connections to Google or Microsoft calendars, and advanced search with Boolean, geographic and filtered queries. Newer AI features include an AI Assistant for working with notes in chat, Semantic Search for related notes, AI Transcribe for meetings and AI Edit for rewriting and summarizing, and notes can be connected to AI tools through MCP. Evernote runs on Mac, Windows, web, iOS and Android, and offers in-note encryption on Mac and Windows. The problem is the plan structure. The free plan covers only 50 notes, one notebook and one device, Starter allows 1,000 notes on 3 devices, and unlimited notes need Advanced or higher. We could not confirm USD prices from the compare page from our location, so pricing is marked as pending. Paid trials last 7 days.

Ulysses is not a general notes app, but it earns a place for Mac users whose notes are drafts of something longer. It uses a markup-based editor that keeps formatting out of the way, and every text lives in one library that syncs through iCloud across Mac, iPhone and iPad, with the same tools on every device. Ulysses describes managing projects of any size, from novels to study notes. A built-in grammar and style check covers more than 20 languages and flags punctuation, redundancy and style issues. When a draft is ready, Ulysses exports to PDF, Word, ePub and HTML, and publishes directly to WordPress, Ghost and Micro.blog. The subscription is $39.99 a year or $5.99 a month in the US, includes Family Sharing for up to five other people and offers student pricing. If you want to save web clippings, tasks or quick lists, Bear or Apple Notes will fit better.