Save anything that crosses your mind and store all useful information.

A note-taking app is a must-have app for every smartphone user to increase productivity. A good digital note app should add notes with ease, the ability to insert images, voice recordings, or even short video clips, sort notes, sync notes across all devices. Some top note-taking apps even offer more advanced features like collaborating with teams and colleagues, a document scanner function, presentation features, or even AI-enabled automatic suggestions to make note taking effortless.

What are the best free Note apps for android?

Here is a list of the best android note apps suitable for adding personal notes, endless shopping lists, to-do lists, and business or work-related notes to help you organize yourself.

Evernote

Evernote is a leading note-taking tool that takes care of all note-taking tasks. It lets you create all sorts of notes by adding texts, insert attachments, recording voice notes, and organizing notes with tags. Also, you can take photos directly and start a new note with images, add reminders, draw and sketch, scan documents to convert into pdf files, and more. The app can also recognize texts on pictures with OCR functions to extract information in plain text and search for an image by text on it. With its cross-platform integration, ability to store your files in the cloud and access them from computers, mobile devices, and web browsers. In short, Evernote is one of the most powerful note-taking apps for android smartphones. With a paid subscription, you can take advantage of more productivity features like Artificial Intelenge (AI) suggestions, presentation features, and collaboration features for work.

Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft offers its dedicated note taking app that focuses on business users. It offers sticky notes, text notes, voice notes, photo notes, crate sketches, along with more pro features and cross-platform support. Perhaps the best advantage is integrating with Office 365 apps, and real-time collaboration for project works so everybody can stay up to date. The application also supports traditional lists accompanied by the usual checkboxes and to adds formatted text and hyperlinks. It’s also a great notepad for android with useful organizing features such as the ability to separate notes by theme for study, home, or work. You can add custom levels and select the most important note to bring upfront, type or jot down notes, record audio or snap a picture, and OneNote saves it. OneNote is the best Evernote alternative out there without paying extra money.

Squid (formerly Papyrus)

* Editors’ Choice * Price: Free/ Offers IAP

Squid is arguably the best note taking app with handwriting recognition. Now we can take handwritten notes naturally on a tablet or phone like you would on paper using an active pen, passive stylus, or just your finger. Besides, it lets you add regular texts and draw geometric shapes. It’s a vector-based application that preserves your notes as high-quality images, making them suitable for doing presentations and zoom in to a specific part. Also, sharing the screen wirelessly with casting to a TV/projector using Miracast or Chromecast makes it great for use in class, meetings, or conferences. Furthermore, it is also a good pdf editor app that lets users import and markup PDFs to fill out forms, edit text, or sign documents. The developer also recently partnered with Google to bring incredibly fast, low-latency inking on Google Pixelbook and Samsung Chromebook devices.

Download Squid

Simplenote

Simplenote is all about taking a quick note, make to-do lists, capture ideas, then tag and pin notes to appear on the top of the list. You can filter by tags and use the search function to locate a note. With a simple note account, your notes get synchronized between all your devices through its application for Android, iOS devices, and web versions of the desktop app. Additonally you can password protect notes with a passcode.

Google Keep – notes and lists

Price: Free

Google Keep is the default notebook and organizer app from Google with every android smartphone. Keep note app stands out for its simplicity and effectiveness and has an elegant interface based on Google’s “Holo” standard. It lets you write down your thoughts, objectives or goals, or store various photos pictures in one place. Google Keep has a few useful homescreen widgets to view and create quick notes, lists, notes using voice recognition (audio per note) or capture notes taking a picture with the camera.

Overall, Keep is a perfect note-taking app for all kinds of users who want to take quick notes, add reminders, and access them anywhere. It works offline on all your devices, and your notes are uploaded and synced as soon as the device has an internet connection. Users can also view and take notes directly from an android wear smartwatch.

Download Google Keep

Bundled Notes

Bundled Notes is a recent release note taking app on the play store. It has a grid-like view for easier navigation but offers many useful tools, options, and customizations. Unlike other note apps, it groups up similar notes and shows them as bundled notes on the main screen like a folders view. For note taking, you have tons of text formatting, the ability to create regular text notes with a list inside, and add color tags. Users can also build custom swipe gestures for various actions on notes, pin notes in the notification panel, add reminders with a custom alert system. Bundled Notes has a board-style interface that lets you see notes with to-do tags and custom to-do actions, so you always know which tasks need attention. The app’s pro version adds more handy features and lets you access your notes through a web version of the app.

Idea Note

Price: Free / Offers IAP

Idea Note is a unique note app for android that has some interesting features. You can add floating notes behind a sliding window accessible with a simple swipe on the home screen. This is a very handy tool as a web clipper or taking notes while browsing websites or other apps. After opening the floating window, you can swipe a note to the left will delete it, and swipe to the right will archive a note. There are also various themes to customize your experience. You can hide a particular note with a pin code. Taking notes is also very straightforward with the support of voice input and widgets.

Download Idea Note

Easy Notes

Easy Notes is one of the best notepad apps for creative persons. It has many pencils, pens, brushes, color selectors, custom fonts for beautiful texts, and other tools for better note-taking in a personalized way. It’s a decent note app to draw and paint. It has a clear interface for regular note-taking, lets you add photo notes and audio memos, pin notes, set up note reminders, checklists, and reminders. It also saves notes automatically while writing, so an accidental exit will not waste your time.

LectureNotes

Price: Free trial/ $6.99

LectureNotes is a good note taking app for students and academics, bringing stylus support for writing on android devices before others even thought about it. This best note taking app with stylus will cost you a few bucks. You can get a similar experience with free apps like the easy note we mentioned earlier. However, LectureNotes offers a bunch of other organizing tools that make it worth the price. For example, you can add multiple layers in notebook pages, apply paper sizes and patterns, quickly capture images, import PDF files, annotate and export notes as compressed PDFs.

It also has many plugins for additional features like export to Evernote and Microsoft OneNote, audio/video recording, presentations, sharing, and creating a backup. Students can organize notebooks in the folder as well. LectureNotes is the best alternative for iPad note taking features with apple note for android devices.

Download LectureNotes

ClassUp

ClassUp is another good note taking apps for students. It helps students to manage classes, take and organize notes, track assignments, and exchange messages with other students in the same group. You can quickly create a class timetable and customize with background colors and boxes for different classes, lecturer or courses. Easily add dates, pictures, hashtags notes with autocomplete suggestions for classes. It’s one of the best notes apps that lets you have a personal calendar with memos, events like exams, presentations, and to-dos related to your class. There is a widget to view the deadlines for essays, presentations, or other homework.

ColorNote Notepad Notes

* Editors’ Choice * Price: Free

ColorNote is a simple and awesome notepad app which has been long around and continues to challenge other android note app from big companies. It gives you a quick and simple notepad editing experience when you write notes, memos, e-mails, messages, shopping lists, and to-do lists. The app originally introduces the Sticky note memo widget, which allows putting your notes on your home screen as a widget for quick access. You can organize notes by color-coded them with different background colors, sort by schedule on the calendar app, add a diary/journal, and password-protect notes. Users can create a backup of notes upload to the cloud storage service or share notes via email, SMS, or Twitter.

Get ColorNote

BlackNote Notepad

BlackNote Notepad is a newer android notes app that looks modern with its dark mode and minimal UI. The note taking app comes with all the standard note features for creating notes, searching through old notes, mark favorite notes, plus widget options. The black theme and sleek UI offer greater readability.

FiiNote, note everything

Price: Free/ Offers IAP

FiiNote is a convenient note app designed for smartphones and tablets. It comes with a unique hybrid model for taking notes combining handwriting and keyboard input. You also get an Infinite canvas to write or doodle and use DIY templates. The app supports text, paint, handwriting, importing media files, and other useful functions. The app even comes with a built-in audio recorder app.

Download FiiNote

Dropbox Paper

We wondered why Dropbox Paper was left out from the list of the best note taking apps on many app review websites. It’s not a traditional note taker app, but It turns out to be a decent option for the purpose. It actually a good option for people working in a team. The app offers a collaborative workspace where everyone from a team or projects can share ideas, add meeting notes, review suggestions from others, and keep track of progress. The app puts all the updates and comments in a nice timeline view and even sends notifications to the member for new notes. Dropbox paper is also beneficial with the options to access its main service for sharing files and documents and the ability to edit projects offline.

Cute Note – DDay Todo

Cute Note is a simple and beautiful app for taking notes and tracking todo-lists. It’s a fun-looking useful app for kids or younger pupils. Unlike other android notes apps, it has many cute characters and emojis to use for notes. Kids can set reminders, add memos, to-do lists, and customize with colors and funny characters. The note app is free to use and looks fantastic on the home screen, with the ability to adjust transparency.

Most of these note saving apps are available for free and powerful enough to handle all your note-taking demands. Try out them on your device then decide which one suits your needs. Did I miss out on any of the note saving app that should be mentioned?