The selection of note-taking apps is vast. Especially in the Apple world, various concepts are vying for victory. In this blog post, I try to outline some usage scenarios and help with the decision-making process.
This is a follow-up post to my personal setup, which might also be interesting for one or the other.
Do You Have an iPad with Pencil and are You Using the Apple Ecosystem?
Apple Notes – comes as a standard app and allows you to quickly and easily make all kinds of notes: text, sketches, bookmarks
Do You Have a Windows Tablet and are You at Home in the Microsoft World?
One Note – comes as a standard app and you can quickly and easily make all kinds of notes: text, sketches, bookmarks. You can also annotate PDFs and the web clipper is pretty good.
Do You like to Take Handwritten Notes?
Goodnotes – the digital version of notebook and pen, which you always have with you and can quickly jot down and sketch something. The handwriting can be converted to text, all notes are searchable and can be saved as PDF.
Do You Do a Lot of Research on the Web and Need the Best Web Clipper?
Evernote – the web clipper is unbeatable. Collecting, tagging, and organizing topics and articles is easier in Evernote than anywhere else. On all devices.
Do You Work a Lot with Text and Want to Use it in all Kinds of Apps?
Drafts – in Drafts you write your texts focused in one place. A good web clipper helps you collect content for your texts. When your text is finished, you can use it or parts of it in practically any other app via export plugins.
Do You Want to Structure your Notes and Build a Knowledge Database?
Notion – with a good web clipper you can bring content into Notion and then neatly structure, organize, and develop it there. Since Notion is also a database, you can describe notes with your own metadata / properties and always find the right entries on the topic.
Alternatively, Evernote or OneNote.
Are You Using many Platforms, Especially Android?
OneNote – This is the jack-of-all-trades that works on almost all platforms. You can’t really go wrong with OneNote, it masters all disciplines.
Here’s an overview of all tools again. The table is also available here as a PDF–download including links to the manufacturers.
