Due to the popularity of android, you can find many note taking apps on Google Play Store, no matter which model of android tablet or smartphone you use.

On the other hand, This also makes finding the best note-taking app for Android as difficult as a jungle trek.

Finding the right note-taking app can make a big difference in how you organize your life, whether you’re in school, at work, or just keeping track of personal ideas.

Some people may need a simple way to jot down their thoughts, while others may want the best note taking app that features endless input options, from handwriting support to media attachmentsm and more.

Over the last two decades, Ive switched between countless note-taking platforms to fit my evolving needs.

In this article, I will look at the best note-taking apps for Android, highlight their key features, and help you decide which one fits your needs.

12 Best Note-Taking Apps for Android of 2026

Here are the 12 best note-taking apps for Android tablets and phones – including simple and free options, as well as comprehensive ones like GoodNotes.

1. OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is an extremely versatile free note-taking app, ideal for those looking for a comprehensive all-in-one solution to capture thoughts and ideas.

With powerful tools for organization, collaboration, and synchronization, OneNote offers a wide range of features that can elevate your productivity to a new level.

Users can draw, type text, dictate notes and checklists, create tables, attach photos or PDFs, send emails or clip web content. All content can be personalized – bold text, italics, strikethrough, lists, link, files, and photo attachments.

What I like most about OneNote is that with a suitable stylus for Android tablet, I can use a variety of pen colors and settings to create stylish handwritten notes and drawings.

Its notebook layout gives you a clear structure for lectures, meeting minutes, and project action items. You can sort your content through a notebooks system, with sections, tags and text search to help you easily keep track of your notes.

OneNote uses OneDrive cloud storage and connects to Outlook and Microsoft Teams, which syncs across devices, making it easy to access your notes anywhere.

Available on: Windows, Mac, iPadOS, Android, and Web.

Price: Free, To use it, you only need a Microsoft account.

2. Notion

Notion is an all-in-one workspace that combines note-taking, project management, and collaboration. It allows you to create highly customizable pages, databases, and templates, making it a favorite for individuals and teams who want flexibility in organizing their work.

You can create pages, link them together, and add tables that turn into lightweight databases. Collaboration is easy, making it a great use case for shared wikis, meeting notes, and team project tracking.

There are over 50 kinds of content you can embed in your Notion notes, from charts and spreadsheets to videos. Thats not all: you can integrate third-party services, like GitHub and Asana, to build live elements that update on their own and reflect the changes you make somewhere else.

One area where Notion shines is with its rich template library. You can pick one of the built-in templates or explore templates from the Notion community to get started.

You can create multiple workspaces and share your business workspace with other team members and employees to manage notes, create a project management workflow, and plan the next summer picnic.

For collaboration or team works it has real-time sync and it has a variety of modes to view your work or your teamwork. It integrates with Google Drive so that you can easily access and share your notes with other people.

In addition, its built-in AI tab helps with discovery. You can ask it to find particular data, summarize a collection of pages, or draft the note for you.

Available on: Web, Android, iPadOS, Windows, Mac.

Price: Notion is free with all the necessities and allows for collaboration (up to 10 guests), basic analytics, and third-party integration.

The Plus plan includes unlimited uploads and blocks and up to 100 guests.

The Business plan offers private team spaces, bulk PDF exports, advanced analytics, and up to 250 guests.

3. Google Keep

Google Keep is a free, lightweight, easy-to-use note-taking app on android, designed for capturing quick ideas, reminders, and simple to-do lists.

Its simple interface makes it perfect for capturing ideas on the go. That’s particularly handy if you’ve had a light bulb moment and want to get it noted down somewhere quickly.

You can create a note with different theming options, set a background, and add tasks, media, drawings, and voice recordings.

Notes show up as cards that you can quickly scroll through and select, just like a wall of colorful sticky notes. However, the absence of folders can make it difficult to manage and locate notes.

It syncs automatically with your Google account, so you can access your notes from any device.

And of course, youll have the easy integration with other Google services, so you can export notes from Keep into something like Google Docs.

Available on: Web, Android, iPadOS.

Price: Completely Free

4. Obsidian

Obsidian is more than just a tool for jotting down ideas; it’s also for connecting thoughts and expanding knowledge.

You can create basic notes, and link them together using backlinks, visualize them in a graph view, and add plugins to extend features, forming a network of knowledge.

This makes it ideal for deep thinkers, writers, researchers, and anyone who likes to think in connected ways.

Obsidian offers many useful features, such as markdown support, graph and canvas views and powerful search options. You can sort your material notes into folders and sub-folders and customize your own theme.

Unlike other apps, you cant sync your notes to OneDrive or Google Drive. It also requires a learning curve. But you wont look back after learning the basics and exploring the plugins library.

Available on: Android, iPhone, iPadOS, Windows and MacOS.

Price: Obsidian is free for personal use, very robust with most core functions included, including access to the plugins and the API.

Certain additional features, like cross-device syncing and web hosting, can be purchased separately.

5. Joplin

Joplin is the ideal note-taking app for users who value simplicity, local storage capabilities, and dedicated apps on every major platform.

On the user interface side, Joplin is built around a series of notebooks, each of which can be subdivided into individual notes.

It supports markdown and syncing across devices and offers various features like live view, webclipper, tagging, searching, encryption, and plugins for that extra missing functionality.

You notes can be shared in a text message, email, or social media, no matter how or where it was created in Joplin. You can add attach items like photos or files.

Joplin stores files on your local device by default, though you can optionally sync between devices using a cloud platform of your choice, such as Joplin Cloud, Dropbox or OneDrive.

Joplin works well for what it does and is good enough for regular note-taking. But it lacks advanced features like OCR capabilities, drawing, PDF annotation, or scanning tools, which its competition offer. Whether those omissions are a big deal depends on your note-taking habits.

Available on: Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, and iPadOS.

Price: Joplin is completely free to use. The free tier is very generous.

Joplin Cloud starts at €2.99/month and adds syncing and 2GB of storage.

6. Standard Notes

Standard Notes operates quite impressively as a note-taking app, but the biggest benefit is that all of your notes are encrypted and kept private.

It secures your notes with industry-leading encryption and hefty security like end-to-end encryption, password protection for individual notes, and two-factor authentication.

Avaible On: MacOS, Windows, Linux, iphone, IpadOS, and Android.

Price: Youre limited to plain text notes without a subscription, but you have access to tags and unlimited cross-platform syncing.

The Productivity subscription, starting at less than $2.50 per month, unlocks all the features youd expect from a note-taking app, like rich text, markdown notes, checklists, to-dos, folder organization, and revision history. You can use Standard Notes as a 2FA authenticator for other services.

Upgrade to the Professional tier unlocks 100GB of cloud storage, a shared subscription with five accounts, and no limits on file sizes.

7. SimpleNote

Simplenote is a clean and minimalist note-taking app that syncs across all your devices in real time.

It’s built for speed and simplicity, perfect for jotting down ideas, making to-do lists, or capturing quick thoughts without distractions.

It doesnt comes with the advanced features youll find on other apps, such as images, attachments and voice notes. You can only add text-only notes, and if youd like to format them, youll have to do so through the Markdown syntax.

For organizing notes, youll have to add tags to your entries—you can add multiple to create makeshift sub-folders.

The best part is it lets you access your notes on the web and your other devices so you can always keep your ideas close to you.

Simplenote isnt for everyone, But for quick thoughts and information, Ive found it to be the most reliable. For everything else, you can use a more elaborate solution like Notion, Obsidian, OneNote, etc.

Available on: Windows, macOS, iPadOS, iPhone, Android, Web.

Price: Completely free

8. Evernote

Evernote once dominated the note-taking space before we had all of these other note-taking apps, but no longer.

However, Its still a powerful note-taking platform, thanks to its AI-enabled plain language search tool, OCR features, and support for voice notes.

Whether youre trying to plan things out, draw some sketches, or use it to store pictures, videos, or even audio, Evernote fits the bill.

You can add various types of content to your notes, such as text, documents, PDF files, sketches, photos, audio, and web clips.

It has stylus support for those who prefer to handwrite their notes. QCR function allows to scan handwritten notes, and drawings through the camera of your androd tablet or phone.

Evernote has a robust tag system to organize notes, and a powerful search function to find text in handwritten notes, PDF files, and even images.

Evernote also offers the ability to manage to-do lists using tasks. This allows you to set due dates and reminders to ensure that no deadlines are missed.

You can share notes with others and even collaborate on them in real time. Moreover, Evernote syncs across devices, making all your notes accessible everywhere.

Available on: Android, iPhone, iPadOS, Windows and MacOS.

Price: There is an Evernote free plan, but it’s quite limited — You can create up to 50 notes and one notebook, connect up to two devices, and have a max note size of 25MB. You can upgrade to a Personal plan at $15 per month to unlock such restrictions.

Evernote also offers a Professional plan for $18 per month. It offers AI Edit to draft and edit your notes like a pro. AI Search is another neat add-on that allows you to pin down essential notes in no time.

9. Squid

Squid is one of the best note taking apps on Android for those who prefer to handwrite their ideas. You can either write with an active pen, stylus, or finger.

It takes full advantage of all types of styluses, and keeps track of the pressure being used when actually writing. This provides a smooth writing experience across the board.

Everything is vector-based, so you have control over zooming in and changing the color or size of previous pen strokes.Plus, you can switch between different "paper" sizes, or opt for an endless canvas if you want one enormous scratchpad.

Users can import images into their notes, and export the notes themselves as PDF, PNG or JPG files, and notes can be organized into notebooks so you can keep track of them.

You can share and collaborate your notes with your colleagues or friends and even can store them on the cloud! which is ideal for group projects.

What’s more, it’s a great solution for e-whiteboard. You can use it to present ideas to team members, either in the form of an in-office presentation or through an online presentation via video conference.

Available on: Android, and Chromebook.

Price: Its free to use, but youre limited to note-taking and a few background and paper types (wide-ruled, college-ruled, and graph paper).

Upgrade to Premium subscription ($1/month) to access more advanced features, such as bulk exporting of notes to the cloud, PDF annotation and import, different pens and stamps, as well as more paper types (isometric, polar, music, sports, and planners).

10. Samsung Notes

Samsung Notes is the default, free, but powerful note taking app on Samsung devices, and is an Android-only app.

It lets you type, handwrite, draw, add voice recordings, and annotate PDFs, all in one place. If you use an S Pen, you benefit from versatile writing and drawing options.

Samsung Notes comes with an array of templates, including grid, lined, to-do, etc, allowing for structured and efficient organization of your notes.

Whether you’re planning your day, outlining a project, or jotting down meeting minutes, the right template can transform your approach to note-taking.

You can benefit from some advanced AI features: Note Assist for summaries and formatting, plus Transcript Assist for transcribing voice recordings into your notes.

Final, You can effortlessly sync your notes across various Samsung devices through your Samsung account, ensuring your thoughts and tasks are always within reach.

Available on: Android.

Price: Completely Free

11. Notesnook

Notesnook is a privacy-focused, and open source note taking app for Android that is well designed and easy to use. It has almost every feature you could want in a note-taking app and then some.

As with many open-sourced products, the app is extremely minimalist— which is familiar for every Evernote user. You can figure out its interface and functionality in a few minutes.

Notesnook has great formatting options and markdown support. Youhave the freedom to choose different font sizes, headings, bullet points and add bold/italic/underline formatting to texts to emphasize them.

It uses notebooks to organize your different notes, and there are tags as well. It also supports backlinking, web clipper, Offline Access as well.

Where Notesnook shines is when it comes to privacy - end-to-end encryption, which is their main selling point and a big part of the company’s ethos.

With seamless cross-platform compatibility and end-to-end encryption, it ensures your notes are secure and accessible anywhere.

Available on: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iphone, and iPadOS.

Price: Free plan has Robust functionality for personal use.

Premium plan priced at $4.99/month, which includes unlimited storage, advanced formatting, and collaboration tools—cheaper than Evernote.

12. Notebook

Notebook by Zoho can be confidently called the Swiss Army knife of note-taking apps. It is a multipurpose note taking app that works great for jotting down notes, checklists, to-do lists, and and more detailed journal entries.

Notebook uses a card-style design that keeps notes organized and visually distinct. You can add text, checklists, sketches, photos, files, or audio cards and group them into notebooks.

A variety of gesture commands and batch operations make it easy to sort and group notes together and organize them into notebooks. Multi-device syncing makes sure that your notes are on every device you own.

Web Clipper allows you to clip text, images, or articles and links from the web. Password-protected notes add privacy, while Offline mode means you can still take notes when traveling.

Available on: Windows, macOS, iPad & iPhone, Android, Web

Price: Free Basic version comes with full features.

The Pro version is offered for $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year and provides additional premium features: You can save emails as note cards, edit documents, record up to 60 minutes of audio in one go, create a smart card for your flight tickets, and much more.

In Conclusion

Every note-taking app has the same core functionality: to capture notes and organize them, freeing your mind from having to remember everything. However, the differences between apps are in their use cases and unique features.

These apps cover different use cases, whether you need a free app for simple note-taking, an app with advanced tools for organizing class notes, or a platform that works across Android, iPad, iPhone, and desktop.

All of the apps I selected are free to start, which gives you a lot of flexibility in testing them before you pick one—or more than one, as the case may be.

You can even use multiple apps to help you jot down and organize your notes, each with its own unique purpose. No matter what, you now have plenty of options to choose from to take digital notes quickly and efficiently.

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