A note app is the one piece of software you might still be using in ten years, with a decade of notes inside it. That makes “free” a slightly different question here than for, say, a photo editor. The price you pay today matters less than two things that are easy to skip past: can you read your notes on every device you own without paying, and — the one almost nobody checks until it’s too late — can you get your notes back out if the app shuts down, hikes its price, or just annoys you into leaving?
We graded the popular note apps on the only thing this page measures: what the free tier actually gives you, held to the same line every app on this site has to clear. The green badge means a normal person can capture, keep and sync their notes indefinitely without ever entering a card. Three of the picks below clear it, two are real-but-bounded freemium, and one of those two has been squeezed close enough to a demo that it’s worth a warning.
How to judge a “free” note app
The test we’d actually apply is the one the r/ObsidianMD and r/productivity regulars keep circling back to, sometimes without naming it: portability beats features. A free tier that holds your notes hostage — readable only inside its own app, exportable only on a paid plan, syncable only if you subscribe — isn’t really free in the way that matters for something you’ll trust for years. A free tier whose notes are plain files you can open in any editor is free in the strongest sense, because leaving costs you nothing.
That single lens reorders the category. It’s why the app that wins here isn’t the flashiest or the one with the most features — it’s the one where the notes were never locked up in the first place.
Why Obsidian leads on “free”
Obsidian takes the top spot on the only axis this page grades, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of taste. Your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder on your own disk — no account required to use the app, no server that has to stay online, nothing to be locked into. Personal use of the app is free, with the full editor, the linking that the r/ObsidianMD crowd is evangelical about, the graph view, and a deep library of community plugins, all at no cost. If Obsidian vanished tomorrow your notes would still open in any text editor, which is the closest thing to future-proofing a note collection can have.
The honest limits, held at full weight. There’s a learning curve — the plugin ecosystem is a rabbit hole, and the blank-canvas freedom that power users love can feel like homework to someone who just wants to jot things down. Sync is the paid part: Obsidian’s own end-to-end encrypted Sync is a subscription, and while you can absolutely sync for free by putting your vault in iCloud, Dropbox, or using a community plugin, that’s a do-it-yourself step, and the free DIY routes occasionally have rough edges on mobile. So “free” here is real and complete for the app itself, with sync being the thing you either set up yourself or pay to have handled.
Who it’s not for: people who want to open an app and start typing with zero setup; anyone who’d rather pay a few dollars than configure their own sync; and teams who need real-time collaboration, which isn’t what Obsidian is built for.
The two built-ins that are genuinely free
For a lot of people the realistic free note app is the one already on their phone. Apple Notes has quietly become good — folders, tags, checklists, document scanning, handwriting, shared notes — and it syncs across iPhone, iPad and Mac through iCloud at no cost. It earns the green badge cleanly inside its world. The catch is that world’s borders: the moment a Windows laptop or an Android phone enters your life, Apple Notes stops being an option, and that’s a hard wall, not a soft one. Who it’s not for: anyone on mixed platforms.
Google Keep is the cross-platform answer to the same impulse — free on web, Android and iOS, syncing through your Google account. Where it beats Apple Notes is reach (it has a real web app); where it loses is depth. Keep is deliberately a sticky-note board: capture a thought, a list, a photo, a voice memo, color-code it, set a reminder. There’s no real formatting and no folder structure beyond labels, so it’s a capture tool rather than a place to write anything long. That shallowness is the design, not a bug — but it does mean Keep and a writing app often end up living side by side. Who it’s not for: anyone who wants to write or organize at length.
The generous one, and the squeezed one
Notion is the freemium pick that’s actually generous — for one person. A solo free account gets effectively unlimited pages and blocks, the database features that are its real draw, and apps everywhere, with no card. It earns 🟡 rather than ✅ for narrow, honest reasons: the free tier caps file-upload size and trims version history, the AI features are a paid add-on, and the whole product is pitched hard at teams who’ll eventually pay per seat. As a personal notes-plus-databases workspace it’s free and genuinely usable; the upgrade nudges are constant but not blocking. A fair warning the r/Notion threads raise often: it can be slow, and it’s heavier than a plain note app — some people want a notebook, not a workspace. Who it’s not for: people who want fast, simple capture, or who are wary of building years of notes inside a proprietary cloud.
Evernote is the cautionary tale, and we’d rather state it plainly than rank it on faded reputation. Its free plan was once the generous default everyone recommended; it has since been capped to a low total note count, so most real users hit the ceiling almost immediately. It stays a 🟡 by our definitions — there’s still a permanent free tier and no card up front — but it sits right at the border of 🔒, and on free alone it’s hard to recommend when Obsidian and the built-ins exist. Who it might still suit: long-time Evernote users with notes already inside it who’ll pay to keep them flowing. For everyone starting fresh, start elsewhere.
Where people genuinely disagree
The honest split here isn’t “which app is best” — it’s what you’re optimizing for, and naming it predicts your pick better than any feature comparison:
- Notes I own forever, and I’ll do a little setup → Obsidian. Plain files, no lock-in, sync is the part you handle.
- I live entirely in one ecosystem → Apple Notes or Google Keep, already installed and free.
- One app for notes, lists and databases, just for me → Notion’s free tier, generous for solo use.
- I want to write long-form and capture fast in the same place → this is where people split between Obsidian and Notion, and it really is a taste call.
There’s also a reasonable minority in r/productivity who argue the best note system is the simplest one you’ll actually keep using — a plain text file, the Notes app, whatever’s frictionless — and that elaborate setups become procrastination. For a lot of people that’s correct, and it’s the same logic that puts a portable, no-lock-in app at the top here: the best free note app is the one you can still read in ten years and never felt trapped by.