Digital notebooks have a limitless number of advantages over traditional paper notebooks. First, they are very much available on a wide variety of devices – from mobile gadgets (Android devices, iPads, iPhones, Tablets) to Personal computers (Windows or MacOS).
They are also always at hand and are equally suitable for taking text notes, storing voice notes, photos and videos, making to-do lists, recording momentary thoughts and fresh ideas.
With these note taking apps, you can easily organize and structure information, find necessary notes quickly, plan tasks, create reminders, and combine all records in one application.
On the other hand, non-digital method of note taking can be very stressful and definitely not the best option when you have a lot to do and hence, the way your note is organized becomes a priority.
In fact, that is one of the common reasons why students seek help from dissertation writing services to complete their assignments. That way, they can work on other projects while also meeting their deadline.
On this page, we have compiled a list of the best note-taking apps for students. Whether you are looking for note taking options for your lecture notes, assignments or to-do lists, you’re sure to find one that works for you.
Best Note Taking Apps for Students in 2023
OneNote
OneNote allows you to create an unlimited number of notebooks, which, in turn, can be broken down into pages and sections, all of which help you build a layered data structure and organize information intelligently.
Handwriting and drawing functions are supported, you can insert videos from the Internet and screenshots, record audio notes, and add Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations both as attached files and as virtual printouts (images).
Important and relevant notes can be tagged for easy access, and notebooks with sensitive information can be password protected. OneNote is also highly searchable and allows you to share notes with employees, friends, and family.
OneNote features include a convenient ribbon menu, the ability to write in any place on the page, and the ability to combine handwritten and typed fragments. Special mention should be made of the built-in OCR engine, which allows extracting texts from images, and integration with the Microsoft Translator translation service.
Finally, an interesting feature of the program is the ability to solve mathematical equations (including those written by hand) with a step-by-step explanation aloud of all the steps of the solution of the problem. This feature can be a great help for high school and college students.
It is no coincidence that Microsoft actively promotes OneNote in the educational environment and offers free licenses for schools and colleges.
Speaking of licenses. Without a Microsoft 365 subscription, users are offered only the basic OneNote feature set and 5GB of cloud storage space. The free version won’t support local notebooks or handwriting recognition, and the ability to solve mathematical equations will be kept to a minimum.
Even in this configuration, however, OneNote is a great option for taking notes and organizing personal information.
Evernote
Evernote is in no way inferior in functionality to the OneNote described above, but it loses out slightly in terms of the organization of the user interface, which has to be adapted to the classic design.
Evernote also supports notes of various types (text, drawings, photographs, audio files, video, PDF, copies of web pages, screenshots, and much more), allows the attachment of Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, and other files to notes, and can recognize printed documents, drawings, and handwritten text.
You can arrange your notes in any way you like, add tags to them, and share them with others.
The strengths of Evernote include the ability to search text in PDF and Office documents, scan and extract data from business cards, integration with Google Drive, Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other services, setting different levels of permission to access content and collaborative editing of notes in real-time.
Especially for corporate users, the program provides a set of templates for the quick creation of notes in a suitable format and design.
Keep
Notes organizer, the main advantages of which are high speed, optimal functionality, and well-balanced minimalism of the interface without unnecessary frills. Perhaps, sophisticated users of paid software development Google seems too simple and frivolous, but for the modest needs of the average user (storage of texts, audio recordings, photos, drawings, task lists, links) opportunities Keep is enough.
Information in the program is recorded on separate note-stickers, which can be coloured in different colours and tagged to simplify the search. It is a great app for your college purposes.
For example, you could easily make a list of top essay companies so when you need to get help with your writing assignments you will not waste a lot of time looking for a reliable writing service. Such lists save your time and make your life more organized.
Keep supports voice input of text data, allows you to create reminders, share information with other users, and recognize text from photos of printed documents. For convenience, notes can be sorted by colour, content, or sharing. All functions are implemented as intuitively and simply as possible – in the spirit of Google software solutions.
Among the Keep’s peculiarities, we should mention the limit of 20 thousand characters (with spaces) for the size of the notes. You should keep this in mind if you’re going to operate with large amounts of data or, for example, write a book with Keep.
Simplenote
Notebook manager from the “it couldn’t be simpler” category. Simplenote allows you to work only with texts – it does not support illustrations, attached files, and other data formats.
It is ideal for quick notes and for those who are not used to being distracted by pictures and other tinsel while expressing their thoughts.
Simplenote is quite functional despite its simplicity. The application can synchronize books between devices, supports interaction with tags and full-text search in the database, allows you to operate with a lightweight Markdown markup language, allows you to work together on notes, and publish individual records online for all to see.
In addition, Simplenote automatically captures all changes you make to your notes and, thanks to the editing history, allows you to roll them back to a previous version at any time.
Apple’s Notes app
Apple’s Notes app is not just for social media apology posts. Yes, you can use it to take notes and create to-do lists, but don’t let this simple interface mislead you.
You can do much more than just type notes and lists. You can also share your notes, add photos or other files to your notes, search for a particular note, scan documents, add tables, and even draw pictures and add shapes.
The best part is that it’s free and already included on iOS and macOS devices, no download is required.
Notion for Education
Students and teachers can use the free Notion app, Notion for Education. Notion is known as a robust, all-in-one workspace, a comprehensive product that usually requires a paid subscription. (There is another free version called Personal, but with limited features.)
But students and teachers with valid college email addresses are in luck because Notion for Education gives them free access to a premium Personal Pro subscription.
With Notion, you can organize your lecture notes, to-do lists, and task lists, and add other elements to your notes, such as code, images, videos, or equations. You can also post your notes online and create to-do lists and reading lists. A Personal Pro subscription also includes unlimited pages, blocks, and file downloads, as well as version history and unlimited guests.
This app will help you to organize your student life better and get the most from it by planning all your activities and doing more within the same time.
Notion is available for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.
WorkFlowy
This is analogous to Simplenote, which allows you to structure information using lists of any nesting and purely text data. WorkFlowy is unlikely to appeal to a wide audience, but those who are used to thinking logically and organizing related data will like the tree-like system of records implemented in the program.
There is no point in promoting WorkFlowy and talking about all of its features because this product is one of those whose originality can only be appreciated in practice. Who knows, maybe you will like the concept of a hierarchical representation of data in the form of multi-level lists so much that you will want to buy the full version of the program.
Nimbus Note
And finally, there is another software package that is coming on the heels of Evernote. Nimbus Note is not inferior to its competitor in terms of capabilities, while costing half as much and, according to subjective impressions, working much faster.
Nimbus Note supports audio and video recording, thanks to the built-in OCR engine it can extract text data from scanned documents, allows creating nested notebooks and reminders, as well as viewing the contents of Microsoft Office and PDF files.
In addition, you can set colour marks for your notes, protect your confidential notes with a password, share your notebooks with other users, and perform other tasks.
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Now, it’s up to you
Which of these note taking apps is your favourite and what do you love the most about it? Feel free to share using the comment section below.
Also, don’t forget to share the content with others by using the share buttons below.
In Apple Notes i keep my research notes and drafts. The app is super simple but in fact it has all I need for day-to-day note-taking. As a kind of helper, when I need to note down something quickly, I use SideNotes. It’s simple and lightweight app for all kind of quick notes: links, pictures, snippets. Anything that i need to save right away and what I like to keep at hand for later use.
That’s good to know Elen, thanks for sharing your feedback.