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27 Comments

The Best Note Taking Apps, according to the IH Community

Last week I created a post asking the Indie Hackers community what the best note taking apps were.

The response was great.

130+ comments later these are the findings:

Sentiment
→ Everyone has different needs based on their workflows and finding a one size fits all Notes app is very difficult.

→ Many like to have multiple notes apps for different purposes eg: ideas vs writing vs workflow.

→ People want staying power and an app that will stand the test of time. Being able to access notes in the future is important.

→ People want control of their data and to know where it is being stored.

The Most popular Note Taking Apps

bytebase.io got a lot of praise from Indie Hackers very own @cara
Bear App was another very popular choice
Notion.so is used by many for all sorts of notes
evernote.com/ is a well established staple for others
roamresearch.com/ got some hype as a tool for networked thought
workflowy.com/ was praised for its simplicity
Simplenote.com is a favourite for many
Typora is popular for converting markdown

Others also like to stick to the more traditional note taking apps
→ Onenote
→ Google Docs
→ Trello
→ Google Keep
→ Mac Notes

Many Indie Hackers are working on creating their own Note Taking Apps.

Some Indie Hackers Community Honourable Mentions

Tasquet from @tuttieee
Minutes from @jorgevmendoza
Fulcrum.wiki from @rockiger
Popnotes from @gabth
EmailMeApp from @manuelescrig
Noteplan from @eduardme
Notebag from @pretzelhds
TaskClone from @troychristmas
ThoughtTrain from @marcperel
WeNote from @yccheok

  1. 3

    Thanks for the mention @gordon! Many great options 👏

    1. 1

      No worries at all @manuelescrig. Thanks for sharing your product.

  2. 2

    Thank you! That's really helpful!

    1. 1

      Glad you found it helpful!

  3. 2

    Going to plug my product for note-taking as well. If you're a developer, I made CoderNotes specifically for you. It offers an IDE-like experience (syntax highlighting, auto-brackets, even errors and message in some languages), and a really powerful search engine.

    Check it out!

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing this @Kevcon80. I am no developer but this looks like a neat little product. Keep up the great work!

  4. 2

    Notational velocity, linking works similar to Roam research.

    https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

    1. 1

      Looks great @aqui_c. Thanks for sharing!

  5. 2

    Thanks for the mention @gordon! It's been invaluable to get the community's feedback :)

    1. 1

      Pleasure @cara ! Keep up the great work!

  6. 2

    I recently launched https://nums.app. It's a workflowy like outliner with a builtin calculator twist. Please check it out.

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing this @zeeyang. This looks interesting. Looks like it could be helpful for budgeting and project planning. Have you thought about marketing it to enterprise customers?

      1. 1

        To be honest I have no idea how to position this for enterprise. Any tips is welcome.

  7. 2

    It pains me to see that Joplin is not mentioned in those kind of lists. https://joplinapp.org

    1. 1

      Haha thanks for the recommendation @rasulkireev !

  8. 2

    Nice summary! That’s what I hear from my users as well for reference apps to take ideas from 😅

    1. 1

      For sure @eduardme. It is hard to get one that fits every need!

  9. 2

    In term of free-to-use app, which is the best?

    1. 1

      I think you can't go wrong with Notion.so for free use @NinjaTeam. My MacNotes App will always get great use too.

  10. 2

    Thank you for summarizing very wide variety of note apps (including mine 😉)! It's so helpful.

    Let me point out one thing - the links to Tasquet, Minutes and Notebag look broken. They are linked to IndieHackers site.

    P.S. I'm open to answer any questions about Tasquet!

    1. 1

      Thanks for noting this @tuttieee. I'll fix these now!

  11. 2

    @gordon thanks for the mention in this great notes taking list, I agree it is hard to find a silver bullet solution but there are plenty of options

    1. 1

      You're welcome @jorgevmendoza. Absolutely. I think that is why so many of us use more that one of the above!

  12. 2

    Hi @gordon!

    Thanks for the shout out! Really helps to gain visibility in the ocean that is the note taking market. So many choices, so little time!~

    If anyone has questions about Notebag I'll be around to answer them ✨

    Also I noticed that the link in the post just goes back to IndieHackers. Would be super great if you could fix that :)

    1. 1

      You are very welcome @pretzelhds. I have fixed the link now also :)

  13. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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