9 Best Note-Taking Apps for Students of 2026

Goodnotes earns the top spot for students because it handles the most common lecture setup: slides imported as a PDF, handwriting on top, and a recording running in the background. Essential removes the free plan's 3-file and 20-minute audio caps for $11.99 per year, and it adds audio transcription with a basic summary plus Goodnotes AI for Math. Handwriting stays searchable and can be converted to text, so notes from week one are easy to find before finals. Typed Text Documents and an infinite Whiteboard live in the same library, which helps when an essay outline or a group diagram sits next to class notebooks. The weak points are around sync and AI. Moving the same library between an iPad and a Windows laptop needs Pro at $35.99 per year, and the full AI experience is an extra $9.99 per month. Students who only type should look at Notion or OneNote first.

Microsoft OneNote is the best free note app for students who already live in Microsoft tools. The app is free on iPhone and many other devices, and many students can sign in with the account their school assigns. Microsoft donates Office 365 A1, which includes web versions of apps such as OneNote, to eligible schools. OneNote pages combine typed notes with digital ink for sketching, annotating and highlighting, so a student can type during a lecture and sketch a diagram on the same page. Notebooks can be shared for group work. The paid layer is mostly about Copilot: Microsoft 365 Personal costs $9.99 per month and adds desktop Office apps with Copilot. OneNote lacks the study features of RemNote or Notability, and its iPad app now requires iPadOS 26.0, which rules out older tablets.

Notion is the strongest choice for students who type and want their notes connected to everything else in a course. Its free plan already includes unlimited pages, docs, wikis and databases, and the Plus plan, normally from $10 per member per month billed annually, is free for students and educators who sign up with a school email. Notion says thousands of school domains qualify, not only .edu addresses. Databases with custom properties, filters, subtasks and dependencies make it practical to keep lecture notes, reading lists and assignment due dates in linked tables. The downsides are about style rather than power. Notion has no documented handwriting canvas, so stylus users will want Goodnotes or OneNote alongside it. A blank workspace also takes some setup before a semester starts, and the student Plus plan is limited to a single member, so group projects run on guest access.

Notability is built with the lecture hall in mind: its pricing page sums the product up as importing and annotating documents, recording lectures while taking notes, and creating custom templates. The free Starter plan includes all editing tools but stops at 5 notes, which is enough to try it and not enough for a semester. Lite, discounted to $11.99 per year from $14.99, removes the cap and adds third-party backups on iOS. Plus at $15.99 per year is the more interesting student plan, adding limited AI quizzes and flashcards, audio transcription, YouTube link-to-note conversion and 30 days of version history. Pro costs $79.99 per year, a big jump from Plus. Compared with Goodnotes, Notability leans further into study aids, while Goodnotes offers a broader platform list and typed Text Documents.

Apple Notes is the easiest place to start for students who already own Apple devices. It is free, preinstalled and synced through iCloud, and its App Store listing covers more than a basic notepad: attachments such as PDFs and photos, audio you can record and transcribe directly into a note, a document scanner for paper handouts, locked notes and checklists. Search reaches into typed text, handwriting and scanned documents, which helps when an exam covers material from months back. Folders, subfolders, tags and rule-based Smart Folders give enough structure for a few courses, and shared folders support group work. What it lacks is study tooling and cross-platform reach. There are no flashcards or quizzes, handwriting tools are simpler than in Goodnotes, and classmates on Windows or Android cannot open shared notes in the app.

RemNote is the most study-focused app on this list. Instead of copying notes into a separate flashcard tool, students write notes and mark parts of them as flashcards, which RemNote schedules with spaced repetition. The free plan is generous where it matters, with unlimited notes, flashcards and synced devices, but it caps annotated PDFs at 3, image occlusion at 5 images, handwritten documents at 1 and the Exam Scheduler at 1 exam. Pro, at $8 per month billed $96 yearly, removes those caps and includes 1,000 AI credits. Pro with AI, at $18 per month billed $216 yearly, adds a Lecture Recorder, AI flashcards, quizzes and summaries from PDFs, and 20,000 credits. Its pricing page features testimonials from medical students, but it is a heavier tool than Notion or OneNote for general class notes, and the card syntax needs some practice.

Obsidian takes a different approach from the cloud apps above: it stores notes on your own device as plain text Markdown files, and the app itself is free without limits and needs no account. Students link notes to each other to build a personal wiki, which works well for subjects where ideas connect across courses, such as history, law or philosophy. Community plugins extend it with a calendar of daily notes, Markdown-backed kanban boards, Dataview queries and task tracking across the vault. The cost appears when you want the same notes on a phone and a laptop: Obsidian Sync is $4 per user per month billed annually, or $5 monthly, and adds end-to-end encryption, version history and shared vaults. Obsidian asks more of the user than Notion or OneNote, and it has no built-in lecture recording, so it suits students who enjoy tuning their tools.

MyScript Notes, the app previously called Nebo, is the specialist for students who think best with a pen but need typed text at the end. Its App Store listing says it understands handwriting in 66 languages and converts handwriting and shapes into typed text and precise forms. Responsive documents let you handwrite math calculations and diagrams, freeform boards provide an endless canvas, and imported PDFs can be annotated. You can write, type or dictate in the same page, sentence or word. New users get a 7-day free trial of the full app and can then upgrade or continue with a free limited version. We could not confirm a single current USD price from the App Store listing, so pricing is marked as pending. It lacks audio recording in the documented feature list and has no study tools, so it pairs best with a flashcard app such as RemNote.

Evernote remains a capable research notebook, with a Web Clipper for saving sources, document scanning, tags, reminders, offline notes and an advanced search that supports Boolean, geographic and filtered queries. Tasks and a calendar live alongside notes, which helps students track readings and deadlines in one place. The problem for students is the free plan, which now allows only 50 notes and a single notebook, far short of one semester of lecture notes. The Starter plan raises that to 1,000 notes and 20 notebooks, and Advanced removes the caps. Evernote offers eligible college students 40% off a one-year Advanced subscription. We could not confirm USD list prices from the plans page as fetched, so pricing is marked as pending. Unless clipping and search are central to your work, Notion, OneNote or Obsidian give more for free.