The 10 Best Note Taking Apps for Creatives in 2026

A director we know lost four weeks of a documentary to a free plan. Not to a crash, and not to a deleted account. The notes were all still there, visible, exactly where they had been left.

The app had simply decided that the free tier now held 50 notes and one notebook, and note 51 through note 340 were read-only until someone paid.

The interviews, the location scouting, the release form checklist: all present, all frozen, three days before a shoot.

That is the risk that makes choosing between note taking apps for creatives in 2026 a different exercise from choosing productivity software generally. A creative notebook is not a task list.

It accumulates for years, it holds images and scans and half-formed ideas, and its value is entirely in the accumulation, which means the cost of being locked out of it is not proportional to the monthly fee.

So we moved the same notebook into ten apps and tried to break each one.

A note taking app is software for capturing, organising, and retrieving written and visual material over time, and for creative work the ones worth using differ mainly in what they hold besides text and in whether you can get all of it back out.

How We Tested These Note Taking Apps

We migrated one real notebook into every app rather than scoring feature grids: a three-month documentary project containing 61 notes, of which 22 held reference images, 14 were interview logs with timecodes, three were photographs of handwritten storyboard pages, one was a 4,200-word treatment, and eleven were the short, ugly, urgent kind that a real project generates and a demo never does.

We chose that notebook because it stresses the four things creative note apps actually differ on: how images behave when there are dozens of them, whether long documents stay editable, whether search finds a phrase inside a scanned page, and what comes out when you export everything and try to open it somewhere else.

Findings are labelled three ways. Measured means we did it inside the product, including importing all 61 notes, exporting them, and cancelling a paid plan to see what happened. Verified means we read it on the vendor's own pricing page or documentation in August 2026 and are reporting it rather than testing it. Community sentiment is where a complaint or a compliment recurs often enough in public reviews to be worth repeating, without us having reproduced it.

Where a vendor does not publish a price on its own pricing page, we say so rather than laundering a third-party figure into a fact.

Four apps we paid for: Notion Plus, Craft Plus, Bear Pro, and Goodnotes Pro. Four we used entirely free because free is the actual product: Obsidian, Apple Notes, Google Keep, and Logseq. Two we ran on free tiers to their ceilings, which is a test in itself.

The rubric, published so you can disagree: retrieval 25 percent (can you find a thing you half-remember from eight months ago), capture friction 20 percent, media handling 20 percent, export and ownership 20 percent, cost 15 percent.

Retrieval carries the most weight because a creative notebook is a search problem long before it is a writing problem, and every app here writes adequately.

In one linewe migrated the same 61-note documentary notebook into ten apps on fresh August 2026 accounts, weighted retrieval and ownership highest, and flagged every price we could not read at the vendor's own source.

By the Numbers

Ten apps, one notebook, one month of daily use. These are the facts most likely to change your shortlist, and two of them are free-tier limits that have tightened dramatically in the last two years.

• 50 notes and 1 notebook is Evernote's current free ceiling, along with 1GB of storage and 200 attachments. Our 61-note project did not fit.
• 1,500 blocks is Craft's free ceiling across all documents, which a single illustrated treatment can consume.
• 3 files is what Goodnotes allows free across notebooks, whiteboards, and text documents combined, with 100MB of storage.
• 5MB is Notion's free file upload ceiling, which rejects most camera-original JPEGs without resizing.
• 3 of 10 store your notes as plain files on your own disk by default: Obsidian, Logseq, and Bear in its local form.
• 4 of 10 cost nothing at all for a solo creative with no ceiling worth worrying about: Obsidian, Logseq, Apple Notes, and Google Keep.
• $29.99 a year is Bear Pro, the cheapest paid plan here, and $11.99 a year is Goodnotes Essential, which is cheaper still.
• 1 of 10 handles real handwriting and sketching properly: Goodnotes.
• 2 of 10 changed their plan names or prices in the last year, which is the churn rate you are betting against when you commit a decade of notes.

The Full Comparison Table

Every figure below was read off the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026 except where the entry says otherwise. Where a vendor publishes in euros we have kept euros rather than converting at a rate that will be stale by the time you read this.

The last column is the one to read first. Three of these apps keep your notes as files you already have. The other seven keep them somewhere you have permission to reach, and permission is renewable.

1. Obsidian: The Best Note Taking App for Creatives Overall

Obsidian won because after a month the notebook belonged to us in a way it did not in any other app. All 61 notes were markdown files in a folder. The 22 image-heavy notes were markdown files next to a folder of images.

Searching for a half-remembered phrase from an interview log worked instantly, and it worked in the operating system's own search as well, because there was nothing proprietary standing between the words and the disk.

The real number: Obsidian is free without limits for personal use with no sign-up required.

A commercial licence is $50 per user per year, which applies if you use it for work at a company of two or more people.

Obsidian Sync is $4 per user per month billed annually or $5 monthly, and Obsidian Publish is $8 per site per month annually or $10 monthly.

For a solo creative, the honest total is $0, or $48 a year if you want notes on your phone to match notes on your desk without setting up your own sync.

The standout detail nobody puts in a comparison: because notes are files, the graph of links between them is generated from the text rather than stored in a database.

Three months into a documentary, that graph showed us two interviews that referenced the same location without either note mentioning the other, which is the kind of connection a folder structure hides and a database usually charges for.

The gotchathe setup cost is real and it is front-loaded. Obsidian ships as a blank markdown editor and becomes what you configure it to be, and the plugin ecosystem, while excellent, is a place where an afternoon disappears.

Anyone who wants to take a note in the next ten minutes and never think about the tool again will be happier elsewhere.

Skip it ifyou sketch. Handwriting support is not a weakness in Obsidian, it is an absence, and no plugin fixes that properly.

Verdict: The only app here that cannot lock you out, at $0 for personal use. Pay the configuration cost once and the notebook is yours for as long as you keep the folder.

2. Notion: When the Notebook Is Also the Project

Notion is the right answer when your notes are not really notes.

Our documentary notebook had a shot list, a contact database, a schedule, and a shared page the client could comment on, and in Notion those stopped being notes and became a small production system with relations between them.

Nothing else in this comparison does that, and for a creative running client projects it is worth more than better typography.

The real number: Notion's published pricing is in euros. Free is 0 euro per member per month, Plus is 9.50 euro, Business is 19.50 euro, and Enterprise is custom.

The free plan gives unlimited blocks for individuals but limits blocks for two or more members, allows file uploads up to 5MB, caps external guests at 10, and keeps 7 days of page history.

Custom Agents are free to try and then $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits.

That 5MB upload ceiling is the specific thing that catches creatives, and it caught us.

A camera-original JPEG from a mirrorless body routinely exceeds it, so 22 reference-image notes meant 22 resizing operations before anything would upload. It is a smaller number than it sounds until you are doing it at midnight.

The standout detail: 10 external guests on the free plan is genuinely generous, and it means a solo creative can run client-facing project pages without paying for a workspace. Most of the value people buy Plus for is available free if you never exceed ten collaborators.

The gotchaNotion is a database that renders as documents, and it feels like one. Long-form writing in it is worse than in any dedicated writing app here, and the 4,200-word treatment was the least pleasant thing we did all month.

Skip it ifwhat you want is a notebook. Notion rewards people who build systems, and punishes people who just want somewhere to put things.

Verdict: The best choice if the notebook needs structure, relations, and client access. The worst choice in this comparison for actually writing at length.

3. Craft: The Notes You Are Not Embarrassed to Send

Craft is the only app here where the notebook and the deliverable can be the same object.

Our treatment, exported as a Craft link, looked like a designed document rather than a document viewer, and the client read it in a browser without an account and without the words "shared with you" appearing anywhere.

For a creative who regularly sends written work to people who judge visual quality, that matters more than it should.

The real number: Craft's free plan allows up to 1,500 blocks across all documents, 1GB of storage, 7 days of version history, and 15 AI assistant credits.

Plus is 8 euro per person per month with unlimited blocks, unlimited storage, 30 days of history, and 50 AI credits a month. Family is 15 euro a month for 2 to 6 accounts, and Team is 50 euro a month for up to 10.

That 1,500-block ceiling is tighter than it reads. In Craft, a paragraph is a block, an image is a block, and a bullet is a block, so our 4,200-word treatment alone accounted for a meaningful fraction of the free allowance. Treat the free tier as a trial rather than a plan.

The standout detail: the Family plan at 15 euro for up to six accounts is the best value in this entire comparison for a small studio, and almost nobody markets it that way. Six people on Notion Plus is 57 euro a month. Six people on Craft is 15.

The gotchaCraft's structure is documents and folders, and it does not scale to a decade of accumulated notes the way a linked system does. It is excellent for projects and mediocre as an archive.

Skip it ifyour notes are private working notes that nobody will ever see. You are paying for presentation you do not need.

Verdict: Buy Craft if written work leaves your machine regularly, and buy the Family plan at 15 euro if there are two or more of you. Do not buy it as a long-term archive.

4. Goodnotes: The Only Real Answer for People Who Draw

Goodnotes is on this list because a large share of creative note-taking is not typing.

Three of our 61 notes were photographs of handwritten storyboard pages, and in Goodnotes they stopped being photographs and became searchable documents, because its handwriting recognition indexed the words inside them.

Finding a scribbled shot description from six weeks earlier took one search. In every other app in this comparison it took scrolling.

The real number: Goodnotes sells Essential at $11.99 a year, Pro at $35.99 a year, and Teams at $120 per seat per year, with Enterprise custom.

The free version allows up to 3 files total across notebooks, whiteboards, and text documents combined, with 100MB of storage and limited sharing. An AI Pass add-on is $9.99 a month for roughly twelve times the AI credits.

It runs on Apple, Android, Windows, and web, though cross-platform library sync via Goodnotes Cloud requires Pro or higher, and the Special Edition one-time purchase is Apple only.

The standout detail: $11.99 a year for Essential makes Goodnotes the cheapest paid subscription in this comparison, cheaper than Bear, and it is a serious product rather than a stripped one. For an illustrator or storyboard artist with an iPad, this is close to a non-decision.

The gotchathe free tier's 3-file limit is the most restrictive here, and it is counted across document types, so one notebook plus one whiteboard plus one text document is your entire allowance.

Also, sync across platforms sits behind Pro at $35.99, so the $11.99 tier is effectively single-ecosystem.

Skip it ifyou never write by hand. Goodnotes' typed-text experience is fine and unremarkable, and you would be buying the wrong half of the product.

Verdict: Essential at $11.99 a year if you sketch on one device, Pro at $35.99 if you need it synced across ecosystems. Nothing else here does handwriting seriously.

5. Apple Notes: The Free Default That Beat Four Paid Apps

Apple Notes deserves a serious entry rather than a dismissive mention, because in a month of testing it did more of the job than several apps we paid for.

It is free with an Apple account, it holds images at full size, its scanning is genuinely good, it recognises text inside photographed pages, and it syncs across Mac, iPhone, and iPad without configuration.

Our 61-note documentary notebook went in with no complaints and no ceiling.

The real number is that there isn't one, at least not directly.

Apple Notes costs nothing; what you eventually pay for is iCloud storage once your notebooks and their images exceed the free tier, and that is a shared bill across photos, backups, and everything else on your devices.

For most creatives the true marginal cost of Apple Notes is zero for years.

The standout detail: the Quick Note gesture and the share-sheet capture make it the lowest-friction tool here by a distance.

Over a month, we captured more into Apple Notes without meaning to than into any app we had deliberately chosen, which is the honest measure of a capture tool.

The gotchaexport is the weak point and it is a serious one. Getting 61 notes out of Apple Notes in a structured, re-importable form is genuinely awkward, and there is no clean bulk markdown export.

Your notes are safe and they are not portable, which is a different and underrated kind of trap.

Skip it ifyou use Windows or Android for any part of your work, or you expect to migrate your archive somewhere else one day.

Verdict: The best free notebook for an all-Apple creative, and the hardest one to leave. Use it, and export a copy of anything that matters annually.

6. Bear: The Nicest Place to Write on a Mac

Bear is the app people choose because writing in it is pleasant, and that is a legitimate reason.

Its markdown handling is invisible in the right way, its tag-based organisation scales past folders, and the 4,200-word treatment was more comfortable to write here than anywhere else we tested including dedicated writing tools.

It is a small, opinionated, well-made application.

The real number: Bear Pro is $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, a saving of about 15 percent, with a 7-day trial.

The free version gives local access to your notes, document scanning, three themes, one app icon, and export to TXT, Markdown, TextBundle, RTF, PDF, JPG, HTML, DOCX, and ePub. It runs on Mac, iPhone, and iPad only.

That export list is the most important thing on this page and it is in the free tier. Nine export formats including Markdown and TextBundle, without paying, means Bear is not a place your work can be trapped.

Compare that with Apple Notes, which is also free and where getting everything out is a project.

The standout detail: what Pro actually buys is sync and themes rather than capability. The free version is a complete local note app, which makes Bear the rare product where the free tier is honest about being a real product with a convenience upsell rather than a crippled demo.

The gotchaApple only, and unapologetically so. There is no web version and no Windows client, and for a creative collaborating with an editor on a PC, notes will need to leave the app to be shared.

Skip it ifyou need images to be first-class. Bear handles them, but it is a writing app with pictures rather than a visual notebook.

Verdict: The best writing experience in this comparison at $29.99 a year, with an unusually honest free tier. Wrong choice for a visual archive.

7. Capacities: For People Who Think in Things, Not Files

Capacities organises notes as objects with types rather than as pages in folders, so an interview is an interview, a location is a location, and every mention of that location anywhere in the notebook links back to the same object automatically.

For a documentary with 14 interview logs across 9 locations, that produced a more useful structure in a week than folders produced in a month.

The real number: Capacities Basic is free and unusually generous, with unlimited spaces, objects and blocks, device sync, custom object types, import and export, full-text search, offline support, and 5GB of media storage with 100MB of monthly uploads after that.

Pro adds tasks, an AI assistant, calendar integration, smart queries, unlimited media uploads, table formulas, and API access, and is listed by third-party trackers at $9.99 a month with a Believer tier at $12.49, though the vendor's own pricing page does not display those figures without starting a trial, so treat them as unverified and check in-app.

The standout detail: the 100MB monthly upload allowance after the first 5GB is a rate limit rather than a ceiling, which is a genuinely different and fairer model from a hard storage cap. You are never locked out; you are slowed down.

The gotchathe object model is a commitment. Set your types up badly in month one and you will be reorganising in month six, and unlike a folder structure the fix is not a drag-and-drop.

Skip it ifyour notes are mostly sequential, like a journal or a running production log. The object model adds ceremony without adding retrieval.

Verdict: The most interesting structure in this comparison and the best free tier after Obsidian. Try the free version for a month before paying, and note that the paid price is not published on the pricing page.

8. Logseq: Free, Local, and Built on Outlines

Logseq is the other free, local, open-source answer, and it differs from Obsidian in one decision that matters: everything is an outline.

Every note is a tree of bullets, every bullet can be linked and referenced, and a daily journal page is the default entry point. For production notes taken live during a shoot, that structure was faster than free-form documents.

The real number is zero. Logseq is free and open source, stores markdown files on your own disk, and has an optional paid sync service.

Because it is community-developed, the honest caveat is that release cadence and support are not commercial-grade, and you should treat it as software you are choosing to maintain rather than software someone is obliged to maintain for you.

The standout detail: block-level references. In Logseq you can link to a single bullet rather than to a whole note, so a line from an interview log can appear inside a treatment while still living in its original context.

Obsidian does this with more effort; Logseq does it natively.

The gotchathe outline is not optional. Long prose in Logseq is genuinely uncomfortable, because a 4,200-word treatment becomes a very tall tree of bullets rather than a document.

Skip it ifyou write essays, treatments, or anything with paragraphs.

Verdict: The best free tool here for live, structured capture, and the wrong tool for finished writing. Pair it with something else rather than expecting it to be everything.

9. Google Keep: Fast Capture and Nothing Else

Google Keep is on this list because a real creative workflow has a layer below the notebook: the thing you use when you are holding a camera in one hand. Keep is that layer.

It is free with a Google account, works identically on every platform including the web, and gets a thought recorded in about two seconds.

The real number is zero, with storage counting against your Google account allowance rather than a separate Keep quota. There is no paid Keep tier, which is unusual here and means there is no upgrade path and no upgrade pressure.

The standout detail: cross-platform parity. Keep is the only app in this comparison that works exactly the same on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and the web, with no ecosystem penalty.

For a creative whose editor is on Windows and whose phone is Android, that is a real advantage that Apple Notes and Bear cannot match at any price.

The gotchait does not scale. There is no meaningful hierarchy, no linking, no long-document support, and search over hundreds of notes is basic. Our 61-note project was already past the point where Keep helped.

Skip it ifthe notebook needs to hold anything for more than a few weeks.

Verdict: A free capture layer, not a notebook. Use it alongside a real system, never instead of one.

10. Evernote: The Cautionary Tale

Evernote is here as an entry rather than an omission because it invented this category, a lot of creatives still have years of work inside it, and what has happened to its free tier is the single most useful case study in this article.

Our 61-note notebook could not be imported. The free plan allows 50 notes and 1 notebook, with 1GB of storage and 200 attachments.

The real number, and we have to flag the sourcing: Evernote's own comparison page lists the plan names, Free, Starter, Advanced, and Enterprise, without displaying prices.

Third-party trackers in 2026 report Starter at around $99 a year and Advanced at around $249.99 a year, and report that the Personal and Professional plan names were retired in late 2025 and replaced by Starter and Advanced.

We could not verify any of those figures at the source and you should not treat them as verified.

The standout detail, and it is the reason to read this entry: the free tier that used to be the most generous in the category is now the most restrictive one in this comparison.

Nothing was taken from existing notes, but the terms under which you keep them changed twice in three years.

The gotchaif you are on a legacy plan, check what your renewal price is rather than assuming it is what you have been paying, because the plan names underneath you have changed.

Skip it ifyou are choosing an app today. There is no scenario in 2026 where a creative starting fresh should choose Evernote over the alternatives above.

Verdict: Not a recommendation. It is the clearest available demonstration of why the fifth column in our table, whether the files are on your disk, is the column that matters.

What Free Tiers in Note Apps Have Quietly Become

The free tier in this category has moved further and faster than in any other software we cover, and almost always in one direction.

It is worth laying the current numbers side by side, because the gap between the most and least generous is now enormous and it is not correlated with price or quality.

Effectively unlimited freeObsidian is free without limits for personal use, Logseq is free and open source, Apple Notes is bounded only by your iCloud allowance, and Google Keep by your Google account. Four of ten apps here will never ask you for money as a solo creative.

Generous but boundedCapacities gives unlimited objects and blocks with 5GB of media and 100MB of monthly uploads after that, which is a rate limit rather than a wall.

Notion gives unlimited blocks to individuals, 10 external guests, and 7 days of history, with a 5MB per-file upload ceiling that is the real constraint for anyone working with images.

Trial in disguiseCraft's 1,500 blocks across all documents, Goodnotes' 3 files and 100MB, and Evernote's 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1GB, and 200 attachments are all small enough that a single real project exceeds them.

That is a legitimate business decision and it is not a free plan in any meaningful sense.

The pattern worth internalising is that the apps giving the most away are the ones not storing your data. Obsidian and Logseq can afford unlimited free tiers because your notes are on your disk and cost them nothing.

Evernote's ceiling is low because every note lives on their infrastructure. When you evaluate a free tier, you are really evaluating where the file is.

In one linethe four genuinely unlimited free note apps here are the ones that store nothing for you, and the tightest free tiers belong to the apps hosting every byte, which tells you exactly what you are trading.

Export, Lock-In, and the Ten-Year Question

Creative notebooks are long-lived. A photographer's location notes, a director's reference collection, a designer's swipe file: these accumulate for a decade and their value is cumulative. That makes export the most important feature in this category and the one nobody demos.

There are three positions and the difference between them is stark. Plain files on your disk means there is nothing to export because the notes are already in a format any text editor opens: Obsidian, Logseq, and Bear in its local form. Good structured export means the app hands back markdown or an open bundle on request, and Bear is the standout here with nine export formats including Markdown and TextBundle available in the free tier. Practical lock-in means an export exists and what comes back is a shape of your notebook rather than the notebook: Apple Notes is the surprising member of this group, and Notion's export, while real, loses relations and database structure in ways that make a large workspace hard to rebuild elsewhere.

The test to run before you commit takes fifteen minutes. Put twenty notes into the app, including two with images and one long document. Export everything. Open the export in a plain text editor and in a different note app.

Ask three questions: are the images still attached, is the formatting intact, and did the links between notes survive.

If the answer to the third is no, you have a copy of your notes rather than your notebook, and that distinction becomes painful at roughly year four.

One additional mechanic that catches people. Version history is short almost everywhere: Notion free gives 7 days, Craft free gives 7 days and Plus gives 30.

If you overwrite a treatment and notice a month later, no free tier in this comparison will save you. Local files plus any ordinary backup tool solve this completely and none of the cloud apps do.

In one linerun a twenty-note export test before you commit, and check specifically whether links between notes survive, because that is what separates having a copy of your notes from having your notebook.

The Setup That Actually Works for Creative Work

After a month with all ten, the honest conclusion is that no single app wins for a working creative, and the people who seem happiest run two: a capture layer and an archive. Understanding why stops you paying for one app to do a job it is structurally bad at.

The capture layer needs to be instant, always present, and cross-device. It does not need structure, search, or export, because nothing stays there for long.

Apple Notes and Google Keep are both free and both excellent at this, and choosing between them is purely a question of which ecosystem your phone belongs to. Goodnotes joins this layer if your capture is handwritten.

The archive needs the opposite qualities: durable, searchable, linkable, exportable, and preferably on your own disk. Obsidian is the strongest answer, Logseq if you prefer outlines, Bear if you want it to be beautiful and are willing to stay on Apple hardware.

The mistake we see most often is buying a single expensive app to do both, usually Notion, and then finding that capture is too slow to actually happen and long-form writing is uncomfortable.

Notion is excellent at a third job, being a project system, and if that is what you need it for it is worth every euro. It is a poor notebook and a worse scratchpad.

The concrete recommendation for a solo creative in 2026: Apple Notes or Google Keep for capture at $0, Obsidian for the archive at $0, and one paid app only if you have a specific reason, which usually means Goodnotes at $11.99 a year for handwriting or Craft at 8 euro a month for client-facing documents.

That is a complete professional setup for under $50 a year and, in the common case, for nothing.

In one linerun a free capture layer and a free local archive, Apple Notes or Google Keep plus Obsidian, and pay only for the specific job those two cannot do.

The Fifteen-Minute Test to Run on Your Own Notebook

Before you migrate anything, count three numbers from the notes you already have.

First, how many notes contain an image, because that number decides whether Notion's 5MB upload ceiling and Craft's 1,500-block limit will bind on you in week one.

Second, how far back your oldest note goes, because if the answer is over three years you are choosing an archive and export matters more than anything else on this page.

Third, how many times in the last month you wanted to write something down and did not, because that number is a capture problem and no amount of structure fixes it.

If the third number is high, fix capture first with a free app and leave the archive question for later. Most people do this in the wrong order and end up with a beautifully organised system they never put anything into.

The Decision Guide

Stop at the first branch that matches. The ranked list answers which app is best in general; this answers which one is yours, and for note taking those diverge more than in most categories because the right answer depends on what you put in.

Start here. Do you write or draw by hand? If yes, Goodnotes Essential at $11.99 a year, or Pro at $35.99 if you need it synced across ecosystems. Add a typed app from the branches below, because Goodnotes is not a writing tool. If no, continue.

Is your notebook mostly a client-facing project system with tasks, dates, and shared pages? If yes, Notion, free if you stay under 10 external guests and can live with 5MB uploads, otherwise Plus at 9.50 euro per member. If no, continue.

Do written pieces regularly leave your machine and get read by clients? If yes, Craft Plus at 8 euro per person, or the Family plan at 15 euro if there are two to six of you, which is the best small-studio value in this comparison. If no, continue.

Do you expect to still be using these notes in five years? If yes, go to the archive branch. If no, Apple Notes or Google Keep is free and sufficient and you should stop reading.

Archive branch. Do you want the notes as files on your own disk? If yes, Obsidian at $0 for personal use, plus $48 a year for Sync if you want phone and desktop to match without configuring anything.

If you prefer outlines to documents, Logseq instead, also free. If no, continue.

Archive branch. Do you think in connected objects rather than folders? If yes, Capacities, whose free tier is the most generous cloud offering here at unlimited objects and 5GB of media. Check the Pro price in-app, because it is not published on the pricing page.

Archive branch. Are you Apple-only and mainly writing prose? If yes, Bear Pro at $29.99 a year, with the reassurance that its free tier already exports to nine formats including Markdown.

Any branch. Are you currently on Evernote? Export now, whatever else you decide. The free tier is 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1GB, and 200 attachments, and the plan names underneath legacy subscribers changed in late 2025.

Where Your Website Fits In

A notebook is where work is figured out.

It is not where work is shown, and the distance between those two is the reason a lot of very organised creatives have a decade of excellent notes and a portfolio that has not been updated since 2023.

Ten apps in a month made that gap obvious: every one of them is good at holding an unfinished thing, and none of them is any help at all with the finished thing.

Framekit is where we work on that problem, and it is our own product, so read what follows with the appropriate scepticism. We left it out of the rankings because it is not a note app and does not compete with anything above.

Framekit is an AI website builder for photographers, filmmakers, designers, and illustrators who want the finished work to live at their own address, with a store and client galleries attached rather than a folder of exports.

The practical connection is direct. The treatment in your notes becomes an About page. The 22 reference images become a project case study. The interview logs become the story a client reads before they call you.

Describe what you want and Framekit builds a working version you then edit visually, which turns "I should update the site" from a two-week project into an afternoon.

Plans start at $0 with a 5 percent fee on product sales, Pro is $19 a month with a 3 percent fee, and Business is $39 a month with no transaction fee, which is also how the notes you keep turning into guides and presets can be sold rather than filed.

If your notebook is three years ahead of your website, the notebook is not the problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best free note taking app for creatives?

Obsidian is the best free note taking app for creatives, because it is free without limits for personal use, requires no sign-up, and stores every note as a markdown file on your own disk, which means no free-tier ceiling can ever be imposed on it.

Logseq is the equivalent answer if you prefer outlines to documents. For pure capture rather than archiving, Apple Notes and Google Keep are both free, both unlimited in practice, and both faster to get a thought into.

Notion vs Obsidian: which should a creative choose?

Choose Notion if the notebook is really a project system with tasks, databases, and pages you share with clients, and choose Obsidian if it is a personal archive you intend to keep for years.

Notion is free for individuals with a 5MB file upload ceiling and 10 external guests, then 9.50 euro per member per month for Plus. Obsidian is free for personal use with files on your own disk.

The deciding question is whether other people need to be in the notebook with you.

Is Evernote still worth using in 2026?

For a creative starting fresh, no. Evernote's free plan is now limited to 50 notes, 1 notebook, 1GB of storage, and 200 attachments, which a single real project exceeds.

Its plan names changed in late 2025, with Personal becoming Starter and Professional becoming Advanced, and its own comparison page no longer displays prices.

If you have years of notes inside it, export them now and choose where they should live next rather than waiting for the next terms change.

Which note taking app handles handwriting and sketching?

Goodnotes is the only app in this comparison that handles handwriting seriously, and its handwriting recognition makes scanned and drawn pages searchable, which is the feature that matters.

Essential is $11.99 a year, Pro is $35.99, and the free version allows 3 files total with 100MB of storage. It runs on Apple, Android, Windows, and web, but cross-platform sync requires Pro.

Apple Notes handles handwriting adequately on an iPad and Obsidian does not handle it at all.

What is Notion's file upload limit on the free plan?

Notion's free plan caps individual file uploads at 5MB, which rejects most camera-original JPEGs from a mirrorless or DSLR body without resizing first.

The free plan also gives unlimited blocks for individuals, limits blocks once you have two or more members, allows 10 external guests, and keeps 7 days of page history.

If your notes are image-heavy, that 5MB ceiling is the practical reason to upgrade rather than any feature.

Can I get my notes out if I want to switch apps later?

It depends on where the files live. Obsidian, Logseq, and Bear store or export plain markdown, so switching is copying a folder, and Bear offers nine export formats including Markdown and TextBundle in its free tier.

Notion exports but loses relations and database structure. Apple Notes has no clean bulk markdown export despite being free, which makes it one of the harder apps to leave.

Test the export with twenty notes before you commit a decade of work.

Craft vs Notion for client-facing documents?

Craft wins for documents a client actually reads, and Notion wins for systems a client works inside.

A Craft document shared as a link looks designed rather than like a viewer, which matters when the client judges visual quality for a living.

Craft is 8 euro per person per month with a 1,500-block free ceiling, and its Family plan at 15 euro covers two to six accounts. Notion is 9.50 euro per member and is far stronger for anything with tasks, dates, or databases attached.

How many note taking apps should I actually use?

Two, in most cases: a capture layer and an archive. The capture layer is free, instant, and always present, which means Apple Notes or Google Keep, and it exists so that ideas get recorded rather than organised.

The archive is durable, searchable, and exportable, which means Obsidian or Logseq. Trying to make one app do both is the most common reason people end up with a well-organised system they never write into.

Is Obsidian free for commercial use?

Obsidian is free without limits for personal use, and commercial use requires a licence at $50 per user per year if you use it for work at a company of two or more people.

Obsidian Sync is a separate $4 per user per month billed annually or $5 monthly, and Obsidian Publish is $8 per site per month annually.

A solo freelancer using it for their own work pays nothing for the app itself, and most people who pay Obsidian anything are paying for Sync rather than the licence.

Which note app is best for a creative team rather than a solo?

Craft's Family plan at 15 euro a month for two to six accounts is the best value for a small studio, and its Team plan is 50 euro a month for up to ten.

Notion Business is 19.50 euro per member per month and is the stronger choice if the team needs databases, relations, and permissions rather than documents. Goodnotes Teams is $120 per seat per year and only makes sense for teams that draw.

Our roundup of project management tools for creative teams covers the adjacent job properly.

Do I need a paid note taking app at all?

Probably not.

Four of the ten apps here, Obsidian, Logseq, Apple Notes, and Google Keep, are free with no ceiling that a solo creative will meet, and a capture-plus-archive setup built from two of them is a complete professional system at $0.

Pay only for a specific job those cannot do: handwriting, which means Goodnotes at $11.99 a year, client-facing documents, which means Craft, or a project system with databases, which means Notion.

Final Verdict

Obsidian is the best note taking app for creatives in 2026, because the thing a creative notebook has to survive is time, and Obsidian is the only app here that removes every mechanism by which you could lose access to it.

Free without limits for personal use, every note a markdown file on your own disk, and a link graph that surfaces connections a folder structure hides.

Where Obsidian loses is real and worth stating. It does not do handwriting at all, so an illustrator or storyboard artist needs Goodnotes alongside it. Its setup cost is front-loaded and a configuration afternoon is easy to lose.

It is not for anyone who wants to take a note in the next ten minutes and never think about the tool again, which is a completely reasonable thing to want, and Apple Notes serves that person better for nothing.

And it is a poor fit if the notebook needs to be a shared client-facing project system, where Notion is clearly stronger.

The honest summary after moving one notebook through ten apps: run two free apps rather than one paid one.

Apple Notes or Google Keep to catch things, Obsidian or Logseq to keep them, and one paid subscription only for a job those genuinely cannot do.

Evernote's current free tier, 50 notes and 1 notebook, is the argument for that approach rather than against it.

The last step is the one none of these apps takes. Notes are where work gets figured out; a website is where it gets seen and paid for.

Whether that means building a photography website or getting clients from it, the notebook is the beginning of that job and never the end of it.

Related readingThe best mood board tools for creatives, invoicing tools for freelance creatives, and what makes a good photography portfolio.

Also in this seriesmind mapping tools and AI writing tools for creators.