NoteTakingApps is a directory with an opinion

Picking a note app is a bet on the next few years of your writing, and most of the advice out there is a list of feature names. So we built the other thing: one dataset covering every app worth considering, scored on six weighted axes and checked against 82 individual features, with the same questions asked of every app.

From that dataset come 9 shortlists, 29 guides written through one reader at a time, a review of each app, and a comparison tool that puts up to four of them side by side. The scoring method is written out in full on how we rate, including what a feature had to do before we marked it supported.

One person, who builds software and writes about the tools that go into building it. There is no staff, no agency, and no rotating cast of freelancers. That is the honest limit of the site, and it is also why every score comes from the same hands rather than from ten reviewers with ten private standards.

Apps are used before they are rated. Where the data is a published fact, such as a price or a platform list, it comes from the app maker. Where it is a judgment, such as how good the AI actually is, it is ours and we say so.

Nobody buys a place in the directory, a score, or a spot in a shortlist. There is no sponsored slot, and no ranking is for sale. Some outbound links may earn a commission if you sign up, which never changes an order that the published weights already decided.

One app in the directory, Grape, is ours. It is scored on the same six axes as everything else, it never takes a place in a ranked list that its number did not earn, and the interest is disclosed on its review, on how we rate, and in the machine-readable data.

Prices move and features ship, so every app record carries the date it was last checked. The newest check in the dataset is 19 October 2026. If you find something stale or wrong, tell us on the contact page and it gets fixed in the next pass.

The whole dataset is published as JSON, with an OpenAPI spec and an open API, so anyone can check our numbers against their own or build something else on top of them.