The 5 Best Note-Taking Apps For Organizing Your Thoughts8 minute read

Whether you’re a student attending classes, a business person who needs to take minutes, or just someone that wants a way to jot down thoughts and ideas on the fly, there is a mobile solution to help. We’re taking a look at five superb note-taking apps that offer a vast improvement over your iPhone’s native Notes app, and all of them are available now — for free. 

1. Bear

A clean and contemporary solution for Apple device owners

Bear is an advanced editor that supports over 150 programming languages and is far superior to the iPhone’s native Notes app. Many of the Bear app’s features are available for free on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Using the free version you can create notes, add tags and attachments, and export to a variety of formats. Bear Pro, which you can subscribe to monthly or annually, offers more advanced features such as the ability to sync between all your devices, improved security features, and more powerful export options. We like the Bear app for its incredibly clean and simple design, which makes it both easy to use and easy to view. 

It has three main sections. The first section is the Sidebar, which is where you’ll see a list of tags you’ve created within the app. The middle section is the Note List which offers a chronological list of all your notes (although you can choose to pin a note to the top), and then there’s the Editor area, where you create your notes. We love how clean the Editor is. You have a blank screen at the top and your keyboard view at the bottom. In the middle is a tidy, scrollable icon menu that offers one-touch formatting options such as text style, bulleting, link making, adding the date in different formats, inserting images, and adding attachments. 

Another thing we love about taking notes with Bear is that you can use your iPhone’s Spotlight search to look for words and phrases within your Bear notes. It also integrates brilliantly with Siri. You can ask Siri to create a new note in Bear, and even start dictating what you’d like the note to say.