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The best note taking apps for Mac – markdown, open format, cross platform

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Published (updated: ) in Productivity.

With the release of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 in 2016, Apple introduced a new version of Notes. It added a number of new features for formatting, drawing and sync using iCloud instead of via IMAP. It was lightweight, fast and simple. I started using it shortly afterwards and now have almost 1,000 notes ranging from book highlights to saved web pages to meeting notes to journal articles.

Unfortunately, the iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 releases have been incredibly buggy. I have found that sync is inconsistent across devices (my MacBook, iPad and iPhone each register different numbers of notes) and some notes are not syncing at all. Search also stopped working before fixing itself, and now returns inferior results.

Considering how much information I have stored in Apple Notes, this made me reconsider what I wanted from a note taking app.

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Requirements for a note taking app

Simplicity

I only require basic formatting, images and tables. I’m not interested in fancy fonts or colours because the system is better at ensuring the formatting works across devices, screen sizes and rendering into the future e.g. if I ever need to increase font sizes. This means using Markdown formatting saved to a plain text file. Markdown is a well understood format that has many apps that can edit and render on any platform

Non-proprietary format

The “new” Apple Notes app moved away from IMAP to an iCloud based format. This made sync work better (until recently) but was necessarily a proprietary database format. I can’t easily see or edit the individual notes on disk to make backups or import to another app. They are contained in a SQL Lite database in ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes alongside attachments and images organised by internal note IDs. It’s usually dangerous to meddle with app files like this.

Apple Notes doesn’t have an export option except individual notes as PDFs. The only way around this is using the Apple Privacy data download service which allows you to export Apple Notes as HTML with their associated attachments. This is how I have been keeping a backup of all my Apple Notes to date.

Ideally the app will allow editing of individual files on disk. I can then choose my own sync service and run backup as part of my normal approach using Arq. Any app should at least allow export of content to multiple formats.

Regular updates / actively maintained

The problem with Apple software is that their main revenue is generated by the core OS, not any of the apps. They are there to compliment the OS but there is no competitive incentive to keep them up to date, add new features and fix bugs.

The annual update cycle is a legacy from the old days of shipping physical software. This makes sense for annual iPhone hardware refreshes but is totally outdated for shipping software. Microsoft updates Office every month and Windows every 6 months. How do you report bugs or get support for Apple Notes? You can’t.

My experience with the poor quality of these latest Apple releases has changed my approach – if I am going to rely on software then I want the developer to be properly incentivised to maintain it i.e. I need to pay them directly for it.

This is one reason why I use and pay for 1Password vs using Apple iCloud Keychain (as well as all the other features 1Password has). It’s also why I don’t mind the move to subscription business models for software.

Search

My approach to note taking is to save the full text and associated files of things I find interesting or useful so I can search them in the future.

Spotlight Search on macOS is very good (and has some advanced options). Even though I keep my files well organised, I regularly use it to find things because it is quicker and searches inside documents. For some reason, Apple Notes are not searchable from Spotlight though, so I have to search twice – in Spotlight and in Notes.app. I would prefer to have everything searchable from Spotlight, or any other search tool.

Cross-platform

This is not a requirement but rather a “nice to have” if the app I use on macOS also has an iOS equivalent. If all the above requirements are met, I can easily edit open file formats from different apps on different platforms.

My Macbook Air (13″ 2018) is only a year old so I have no plans to replace it soon, although have had to send it in for 1 keyboard replacement already. I don’t mind the feel of this keyboard but the reliability is poor.

Given the state of Apple software quality and the general problems with the Macbook keyboards, I have been following Microsoft’s Surface products with interest. The Surface Laptop 3 is very nice. I’ve been into the London Microsoft store to have a play and I’m eager to see the Surface Pro X when it is released. I’m just unsure about Windows. Over a decade ago it was Windows Vista that forced me to move to Mac due to the poor quality. I’m not quite there with macOS yet but am unhappy with it.

Evaluating note taking apps

All together I have been re-evaluating my choice of key software to ensure that I’m tied to the Apple ecosystem as little as possible. I already use Office365 for my email and calendar but have also started to move my files to OneDrive from iCloud Drive (I’m glad I didn’t try the recent macOS betas!). What’s the difference? I pay Microsoft for these services and they are regularly updated (unlike iCloud for Windows) and maintained, probably because they directly generate $billions of direct revenue.

Ultimately, my goal is to be flexible in which platform I use, selected based on the best core OS and hardware. I don’t want to be restricted by apps and file formats that only work on a single platform. macOS remains the best OS for now (including for privacy) but I don’t want to be locked to it.

My recommended note taking apps

Based on reviewing all the apps below, these are the best notes apps for Mac:

Bear: Simple, well designed UI, actively maintained, markdown export but proprietary database. Mac / iOS only.
iA Writer with your own cloud drive (I use OneDrive). Edits files on disk in Markdown format with simple, well designed apps for macOS, Windows, Android and iOS.
VS Code with several markdown extensions (see below). If you are a developer and comfortable with a more technical interface, and/or already using VS Code, then this is a great third choice to avoid installing yet-another-app.

Bear

Bear was my favourite app purely for Apple devices. Good tag support, Markdown rendering, strong search (including Spotlight integration), encrypted notes, embedded images and attachments, and multiple export options. I particularly liked the helper mechanism when linking between notes, which maintains the link even if you rename a note.

It is fully supported and actively developed for the Apple ecosystem. The entire company is based around the product and has a subscription business model, suggesting they are likely to be able to keep things going. The iOS and iPad apps work well and sync across from my Mac was always reliable. It actually uses iCloud behind the scenes which makes Apple Notes failure to sync more unusual.

Bear would be my recommendation for someone who was happy with staying on Mac/iOS. If needed, you can export to various different formats. I used it for a whole month (which is the length of the free trial – sync is not available in the free version) and it worked well.

The main reason I decided not to continue using it is that Bear uses a proprietary data format so it can sync with iCloud. This makes sense because their time is better spent on the app functionality rather than making cloud sync work, but I ultimately decided that I valued having open, plain text files more than the extra functionality. If I do eventually move to Windows then I would be unable to move my notes easily. Having an open format was the key to selecting iA Writer instead.

iA Writer

Although not designed for note taking, last year iA Writer added support for #hashtags (but only on Mac, not Windows) which makes it much more suitable as a notes app. /legacy-google-drive-app-mac.html.

I really like the UI on macOS because it fits in perfectly with the system design guidelines. It is very lightweight, simple to use and fits all my criteria for editing files on disk with Markdown. It is very minimalist with few settings, forcing you to focus on the task at hand. There are also apps for macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.

iA Writer does not support attachments and the embedded image support is limited, but that actually forces you to store those files on disk (so files like PDFs can be searched by Spotlight and edited directly e.g. for highlighting, which doesn’t work if you open PDFs from within a Bear note). Naming becomes important for binary files like images so they can be properly searched.

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If you use iA Writer on iOS with iCloud then deals with sync for you but there is a limitation with using external file sources such as OneDrive – you have to manually find and add files into the app to edit them, which is a hassle. Otherwise, files are stored on disk and so I can sync them with OneDrive and run my normal backups. Since they are plain text Markdown, I can edit them in any app.

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I would like to see the ability to nest tags and add emoji to them, plus helpers for Markdown formatting e.g. linking to other notes and improved image support. However, those limitations are minor enough to overlook and pick iA Writer as my Apple Notes replacement.

VS Code + Markdown extensions

VS Code supports markdown out of the box, including with a live preview, however there are several extensions which add extra functionality.

The final plugin is the crucial one because it allows me to take advantage of organising my notes by tag. Of course, VS Code’s command bar is excellent at search so I could just navigate files by name (or text search), but it is sometimes useful to be able to see and view all associated notes in a list.

Unfortunately, the tag format supported by iA Writer – #hashtags – is not part of the Markdown format. Instead you will need to use the Markdown metadata format by including tags in a YAML block at the start of each file. The advantage of using this format is that it is generally supported by other Markdown parsers, so if I wanted to switch to something new in the future there is a greater chance of it being supported with no changes.

VS Code does use Electron behind the scenes. However, unlike many Electron apps, VS Code ties into the native UX of the OS it is running on and has acceptable performance. This is a rare example of a well-built Electron app, most of which are slow and buggy.

Other note taking apps I tried

Evernote

Years ago this was the first notes app I ever used, however it was notoriously buggy and I gave up. The company has been through some challenging times but still uses a proprietary note format and database, which rules it out. I didn’t bother to try it because of the history of poor quality software.

Notable

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Notable is still very early in development, and the rough edges show e.g. when copy/pasting it would paste text 3 times. It also uses Electron and has many weird UI elements showing through the cross-platform layer, for example the popover menus for attachments don’t have the same behaviour as menus should on macOS.

The management of attachments was not as good as Typora – it would copy them to an ‘attachments’ directory but the management of those files was very basic. Removing the attachment from the note did not delete it on disk.

This app is too early to take over such an important use case and has no clear business model yet (donations and a pending application to Y Combinator).

Obsidian

Obsidian fits all the requirements – simple, works with Markdown and cross-platform.

It supports #hashtags, but they are shown in order of number of items rather than alphabetically and strangely there is no way to change the order.

It has some good functionality around linking to other notes and backlinks so you can see which notes reference each other. This makes it more like an organiser than a simple Markdown editor.

The app is nicely designed, but uses Electron so is slow to launch and doesn’t fit into the native OS design as nicely as Bear or iA Writer. When you are using an app regularly, performance and UI consistency matters.

OneNote

Included with my Office365 subscription, OneNote has been improving rapidly and now has a much simpler UI and fast sync. One of the great features is character recognition in images, allowing them to be searched as if they were in plain text.

Notes can only be in a single section or Notebook (like Apple Notes) whereas I feel that tags are more flexible approach to organising things. OneNote supports tags but they are hard coded to specific types, which suggests there’s still a lot of legacy cruft still behind the scenes.

OneNote on the web looks good with the new simplified UI and the Mac app also works nicely, particularly with dark mode. However, compared to all the other notes apps it is always slow to launch. I find this lag exists with all Microsoft apps on Mac – they are very heavyweight.

Using it with Office365 creates the Notebook file in your OneDrive but this is just a URL file that opens the web UI when you load it. There’s no actual content in the file which means that OneNote is using a proprietary database behind the scenes.

Although OneNote is a regularly updated application that works cross-platform (and has a decent app for iOS as well), the lack of open file format means I can’t back up the files and extract my data whenever I want. Like Apple Notes, there is no export functionality. I don’t want to move from Apple’s proprietary format to Microsoft’s, so this rules it out.

Typora

Typora was promising because it is a good Markdown editor with cross-platform apps that manages files on disk. I particularly liked how it managed attachments for notes, creating a .assets folder with the same name as the parent note. However, it doesn’t have very advanced file management features for the library/list of notes and there’s no support for tags.

It also uses Electron and I really hate Electron based apps. They remind me of Java apps that almost get the native OS style right, but not quite. They feel brittle, tend to have poor performance and I found that Typora was buggy (the macOS version is in beta). I understand why developers use Electron because it allows you to build cross-platform apps using web technologies, but I’ve had bad experiences with them e.g. the poor performance of Slack.

Worth a mention

Inkdrop is an app I’ve heard about because of the blogging of its main (Japan-based) developer. It fits most of my requirements and the UI looks great, but uses a proprietary format rather than files on disk. The format is JSON and you can set up your own CouchDB server to run the sync services, but that isn’t something I’m interested in doing.
nvALT hits all of my requirements except tag support, but is quite an old app (and looks it). The UI is why I excluded it, but I am keeping an eye on nvUltra which is the replacement in active beta now. It’s not open for public use at time of writing so I couldn’t try it yet. Since it supports Markdown, when it is released I will just be able to point it to the files I’m editing.
Scrivener might be great for complex writing projects but it is far too sophisticated for a notes app.
Simplenote is worth a look because they have well maintained apps and Markdown editing available for free. I excluded it because of the proprietary database format but generally like what Automattic do.
Standard Notes looks interesting because it pledges privacy and longevity with how it manages your notes files. It has options to store attachments in Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive as well as automated backups there, but ultimately stores notes in a proprietary format (even if that format is open and you can run your own server because the code is open source). It doesn’t use simple plain text files on the filesystem which is one of my requirements (and the desktop apps are Electron) – I don’t really want to be messing around running my own server and MySQL database for notes. Potential option for power users but not what I’m looking for.
Trilium Notes is another Electron app which is built around a hierarchical structure so you can build your own personal knowledgebase, whatever that means. It requires running a server, or has an unsupported Mac app. This makes it too complex for my requirements given the suitable alternatives above.

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#1. Evernote

Despite the cut-throat competition, “Evernote” remains one of the most appreciable note-taking apps both for macOS and iOS. The highlight of this app is the wide range of tools that provide more flexibility.

The option to make notes in several formats like video, audio, web clippings, sketch ensure you are able to give your thoughts the right shape. With easy-to-format word processor at your disposal, you can write your thoughts elegantly.

You can create an agenda to be discussed in a meeting, write a quick memo and transfer your Evernote notes to Apple notes.

Often forget to do some important tasks? Make a checklist of all the things you have to do. Besides, you will also create presentations to express your thoughts with the desired impact.

Price: Free
Download

#2. Microsoft OneNote

“OneNote” is a complete package. The app lets you capture your ideas in a variety of formats and offer you the needed freedom to keep everything in the perfect sync.

You can tag your notes to find them quickly. Make a list of to-dos and keep track of them so that you are able to do your tasks in time.

The collaboration features works immaculately, allowing you to work with your colleagues. For more security, you will also add an extra shield to your projects to keep them private.

Better still, OneNote for Mac is compatible with a ton of international languages including French, German, Greek, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish and more. So, a language should never become a roadblock to your note-taking.

Price: Free
Download

#3. Notebook

Zoho Corporation is well-known for producing powerful apps. And Notebook does have all the qualities to be highly efficient.

While there is a lot to like in this app, I find “Smart Cards” very adorable. What it basically does is automatically format the contents into specific cards like the recipe, video, and link.

The app provides several predefined note covers to let you design your stories elegantly. If you don’t like the readymade options, you can create a custom cover. Moreover, there is also an option to make public notes using shareable links so that anyone can view them.

With the dark-themed night mode, you will enjoy working till late at night. Plus, the reminders won’t let any of your tasks go out of your notice.

Price: Free
Download

#4. Bear

Should you want to have a top-notch writing-cum note-taking app for your Mac, give a close look to Bear. I’ve used this app for long and always found pretty neat.

The best thing about it is the simple interface coupled with the easy-to-use tools. Therefore, you can write amazing stories and give your wildest thoughts the ideal shape.

Bear has a good library of more than a dozen themes that make it a lot easier to design stories. Features like tagging, archiving and adding tasks to notes enable to take control of your stuff. Furthermore, you can export your projects in multiple formats such as HTML, PDF, DOCX, MD, JPG, and EPUB.

Lastly, after a free trial of one week, you will have to upgrade to Bear premium’s $1.49 monthly or $14.99 annually plan.

Price: Free
Download

#5. Agenda

If you want to streamline all of your projects and get them ready before the deadline, pick out “Agenda.” One of the notable features of this app is the advanced text editor.

Depending on the specific theme, you can give a befitting look to your notes. It allows you to convert your text into multiple formats like Markdown and HTML. Segregate your files into different categories so that will access them instantly.

The app lets you connect your sticky notes to the events in your personal calendar. As a result, you can plan your meeting perfectly.

Better still, you don’t have to pay any bucks to use all the features of Agenda.

Price: Free
Download

#6. Notability

For annotation and crafting rich notes, “Notability” is one of the better options. With a wide range of fonts, sizes, custom colors at your disposal, you can design your stories with complete peace of mind.

You will be able to import PDFs, DOCs, PPTs, images, GIFs to your projects and fine-tune them with more flexibility. Easily convert your stories into PDF to share them with your friends and colleagues.

Make the most of the super handy tools to annotate photos elegantly. Thanks to the automatic iCloud syncing, your tasks automatically sync across your devices.

Additionally, Notability works with multiple cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and OneDrive.

Price: $9.99
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#7. Simplenote

There are very few note apps for Mac that look as familiar as Simplenote. Its user interface is pretty clean, and you hardly have to spend any time to master the tools.

One of my favorite feature of this app is focus mode. Times when you want to write with maximum concentration, this feature comes into play really well.

You can use pins and tags to organize your notes. And with Markdown, you will ideally format your projects. To ensure your eyes don’t burn while working in the night, the app comes with the dark mode.

Price: Free
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#8. GoodNotes

I have picked out GoodNotes for a couple of main reasons. First, it makes annotating docs really fun. And if you are fond of giving your docs a creative look, this one can be your thing.

You can highlight or strikeout the text in your PDF documents. Easily move, scale and ideally customize the object color. There is also an option to add the bookmarks to your docs.

Courtesy the fast iCloud sync, you will find your notes on all of your devices. You can share your notes with others and also print them. The compatibility with a number of languages like English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese and more make it an evergreen tool.

Price: $7.99
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#9. Quip

“Quip” is a lot more than just a simple note app for macOS. To be more precise, this is what you should use to collaborate with your teammates. Thanks to the chat and messaging integration, it helps you work with your colleagues in a fun way.

You can use the app to note down your thoughts faster, create to-do lists, and edit your docs. It also lets you make comprehensive spreadsheets.

Another notable feature of this app is that it allows you to import your address book from several services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook, Google, and iCloud.

You will create insightful charts by using the data from spreadsheets and Salesforce records. The smart slides would not just make your presentation more impressive but also save your time.

Price: Free
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#10. BoostNote

If you are a developer, “BoostNote” should be your preferred option. The reason why I say it because the app has the support for code syntax highlighting in over a hundred languages such as Javascript, Python, HTML, CSS and more.

This open source markdown editor offers several tools that allow devs to take notes faster. The formatting features have semi-live previews so that you can quickly check your writing.

Besides, the text is automatically formatted as you type, which speeds up your task and also saves plenty of time. That’s not all, BoostNote works offline as well so that you can work anytime and anywhere.

Price: Free
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Bonus

Unclutter

“Unclutter” is really smart! It’s designed to be a multitasker and lets you organize your clipboard data, files, and notes. If you aren’t able to take control of them, give it a chance to sort out the mess.

You can keep an eye on your clipboard history and manage it with ease. Store all of your files at once place and access them quickly. And yes, make sticky notes to never forget to do essential things.

The easy editing tools allow you to make changes conveniently. Due mainly to the quick search feature, you will instantly find a list. Besides, the app can be set up with Dropbox to sync data across the devices.

Price: $13.99
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