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Comparison

Best AI Note-Taking Apps in 2026

"AI note-taking app" covers two different products: recorders that turn meetings into transcripts and summaries, and notebooks where AI works on what you write. Decide which one you need first, then compare free tiers. The eight apps below cover both.

Updated 2026-10-27

8 apps

The shortlist

  1. 1.

    Otter.ai

    Recording and transcribing meetings and lectures
    Price
    Free Basic plan. Pro $16.99/month or $8.33/month billed annually
    Platforms
    Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Chrome extension
    Standout

    Joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, or records in person, and produces a live transcript, summary and AI Chat over the conversation.

    Caveat

    Free tier caps each conversation at 30 minutes, 300 minutes a month, 3 lifetime file imports and 20 AI Chat queries a month; it is a recorder, not a place to write.

  2. 2.

    Notion

    Teams that already keep their docs and projects in Notion
    Price
    Free and Plus include a Notion AI trial. Full AI is on Business, about $20 per member per month billed annually, check current pricing
    Platforms
    Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android
    Standout

    AI works inside databases: it drafts pages, autofills properties, and on Business answers questions across the workspace and connected tools.

    Caveat

    Full AI only arrives on the Business plan, and the workspace needs someone to design and maintain the databases.

  3. 3.

    Evernote

    Long-time users with a large archive of clipped pages and scans
    Price
    Free plan limited to 50 notes and 1 device. Starter and Advanced plans, check current pricing
    Platforms
    Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android
    Standout

    AI Assistant, AI Edit, Semantic Search and AI Transcribe sit on top of a strong web clipper and search inside PDFs and images, with an MCP connection for AI tools.

    Caveat

    The free plan is a 50-note trial, AI availability depends on plan, and export is ENEX rather than Markdown.

  4. 4.

    Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM)

    Studying or researching from a fixed set of sources
    Price
    Free Standard tier. Google AI plans raise the limits, check current pricing
    Platforms
    Web
    Standout

    Answers questions grounded in the sources you upload, with citations, and generates audio overviews of them.

    Caveat

    It is a research tool for sources you upload, not a notebook you write in every day; free tier allows 100 notebooks of 50 sources each.

  5. 5.

    Goodnotes

    Handwritten notes and PDF annotation on a tablet
    Price
    Free up to 3 files. Essential $11.99/year, Pro $35.99/year, AI Pass add-on $9.99/month (as of October 2026, check current pricing)
    Platforms
    iPad, iPhone, Mac, Android, Windows, web
    Standout

    AI works on handwriting: ask questions of your notes, generate flashcards, and transcribe and summarize audio recordings.

    Caveat

    The free tier holds only 3 files and 20 minutes of audio, and syncing one library across Apple and non-Apple devices needs Pro.

  6. 6.

    Microsoft OneNote with Copilot

    People already paying for Microsoft 365
    Price
    OneNote is free. Copilot comes with Microsoft 365 Personal ($9.99/month) on Windows, or a Copilot business license elsewhere
    Platforms
    Windows, Mac, iPad, web (Copilot); OneNote itself also on iPhone and Android
    Standout

    Copilot summarizes pages, rewrites text, drafts content and turns notes into task lists inside a free-form notebook with full ink support.

    Caveat

    Today Copilot works on the current page and your Microsoft 365 files; Microsoft lists notebook-wide context as coming soon.

  7. 7.

    Mem

    People who want an AI agent to organize notes for them
    Price
    Free plan. Plus $9/month, Pro $29/month (as of October 2026, check current pricing)
    Platforms
    Mac, Windows (check the site for mobile)
    Standout

    Mem Agent searches notes, meetings and connected sources by meaning and keeps a running picture of your tasks and projects.

    Caveat

    The free plan allows 25 new notes and 25 messages to the agent a month, which is a trial for daily use.

  8. 8.

    Scribelet

    Typed Markdown notes with an AI that answers from them, with citations
    Price
    Free plan with unlimited notes and AI with daily limits. Pro $8/month or $79/year
    Platforms
    Web, iOS (Android in development)
    Standout

    AI chat answers from your notes with citations and remembers people and projects across conversations; background checks compare factual claims in a note against the web.

    Caveat

    Voice notes, background verification and automation are Pro features, and there is no Android app yet.

5 examples

Which one fits your situation

The right answer depends on what you are moving, how you capture, and what you need back out.

1.Account manager with eight client calls a day

When it fits: Use this when most of what you need to remember is said out loud in video calls, and typing during the call costs you the conversation.

Carla manages twelve accounts at a logistics software company and spends most days on Zoom. She cannot type and listen at the same time, and her follow-up emails are written from memory at 6 pm. Her company has not bought a meeting tool.

Recommendation: Otter.ai, starting on the free plan. It joins the call, transcribes it, and gives her a summary and action items to paste into the follow-up. The free plan's 30-minute cap per conversation is the constraint to test in week one: most of her calls run 45 minutes, so she will likely need Pro at $8.33 a month billed annually. A notebook app is the wrong first purchase for her. Her problem is capture during speech, not organizing what she writes.

2.History PhD student with 60 sources for one chapter

When it fits: Use this when the material is a fixed pile of PDFs, the questions are about what those sources say, and you need to cite the page.

Tomasz is writing a dissertation chapter on 1920s labor strikes. He has 60 sources: archival scans, two monographs as PDFs, and journal articles. He needs to ask "which sources mention the Łódź strike, and what do they disagree on?" and get answers he can check.

Recommendation: Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), free. Upload the sources into one notebook (the free tier allows 50 per notebook, so split by theme), ask questions, and follow each citation back to the passage. It is free and built for exactly this. Its limit is that it answers from the sources, not from his own developing argument. He should keep his own reading notes and drafts in a notebook app alongside it.

3.Pharmacy student who writes everything by hand

When it fits: Use this when you learn by writing and drawing on slides, and you want AI to quiz you from your own handwriting.

Imani is in her second year of pharmacy school. She annotates every lecture deck with an Apple Pencil, draws mechanisms in the margins, and studies by self-testing. Typed-notes apps do not fit how she learns.

Recommendation: Goodnotes, on Essential or Pro. It is built for handwriting and PDFs, and its AI works on what she writes: questions answered from her notes, flashcards generated from her handwriting, and audio transcription. The free tier holds only three files, which is one course, so at $11.99 to $35.99 a year the paid plan is a cheap line in a student budget. If her school already gives her Microsoft 365, OneNote with ink is the free alternative, though Copilot needs its own license.

4.Engineering lead who wants notes an agent can read

When it fits: Use this when your notes are typed, technical, and you want both a chat answer with citations and a coding agent that can search them.

Rafael leads a platform team. His notes are design decisions, incident write-ups and meeting outcomes, typed in Markdown. He wants to ask "why did we drop the Redis cache in March?" and get the note, not a guess, and he wants Claude Code to read the same notes while it works.

Recommendation: Scribelet, on the free plan to start. Notes are Markdown, the AI chat answers from them with citations, and the MCP server lets Claude Code or Cursor search and read the desks he allows. The GitHub connector lets verification check notes against the actual repository. Evernote also offers an MCP connection, and is the better fit if his notes are mostly clipped pages. Scribelet's limit for him: voice notes and background verification are Pro.

5.Operations team that already runs on Notion

When it fits: Use this when the team's docs, projects and wiki already live in one Notion workspace and the question is whether to add AI or add another app.

Wen runs operations for a 25-person company. Every process doc, vendor contract summary and project board is in Notion. Staff keep asking each other where things are. She is considering a separate AI tool to answer those questions.

Recommendation: Notion AI, by moving to the Business plan. The content is already structured in Notion, and Business adds workspace-wide Q&A, AI Meeting Notes and connections to Slack and Google Drive. Adding a second app would split the knowledge base in two. The cost is real, about $20 per member per month billed annually for every seat, so she should price it against the time spent answering "where is the vendor contract?" before committing.

Two products share one name

Search for an AI note-taking app and you get two kinds of tool mixed together. Most lists never separate them, which is why so many people try one and decide AI notes do not work.

Meeting recorders listen. They join a call or record a room, transcribe what was said, and produce a summary with action items. Otter is the example on this list; Fireflies, Fathom and Granola are others. They solve one problem well: you cannot type and listen at the same time.

AI notebooks read. You write notes, clip pages or upload files, and the AI drafts, summarizes, organizes or answers questions from that material. Notion, Evernote, Mem, Goodnotes, OneNote with Copilot, Gemini Notebook and Scribelet are this kind. They solve a different problem: notes pile up and you cannot find what you wrote.

If your pain is meetings, start with a recorder. If your pain is the notes you already have, start with a notebook. Many people end up with one of each, and the recorder's summaries get pasted into the notebook.

What actually matters when you compare them

What the AI can see. This is the biggest difference and the least advertised. Gemini Notebook answers only from sources you upload. Copilot in OneNote currently works on the current page and your Microsoft 365 files. Notion's workspace Q&A arrives with the Business plan. Scribelet's chat and Mem's agent work across your notes. Ask each app about something you wrote months ago before you trust it.

Whether it cites. An answer without a link to its source is a guess you cannot check. Gemini Notebook and Scribelet cite the source or note behind each answer. Prefer that over fluent prose with no trail.

What happens to your notes in three years. AI features will change. The notes have to survive the change. Markdown exports open anywhere. ENEX, PDF and Word are a partial escape. Check before the archive is large.

What is genuinely free

"Free" means something different in each app, so here are the numbers that bite:

  • Otter: 300 minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation, 3 lifetime imports, 20 AI Chat queries a month.
  • Gemini Notebook: 100 notebooks, 50 sources each. The most generous for research.
  • Notion: unlimited pages for one person, but Notion AI is a trial until Business.
  • OneNote: the app is free with 5 GB of OneDrive storage; Copilot is not.
  • Evernote: 50 notes and one device.
  • Goodnotes: 3 files and 20 minutes of audio.
  • Mem: 25 new notes and 25 agent messages a month.
  • Scribelet: unlimited notes, AI chat with daily limits, encryption at rest.

If you will not pay, the free tier is the product. Pick the one whose limit you will not hit in the first month.

How we chose these eight

We included apps that someone searching for an AI note taking app is likely to consider, across both product types, and read each vendor's own pricing or feature page in October 2026. Where a vendor's page did not show a price, the entry says "check current pricing" rather than repeating a number from a review. Scribelet is our product; it is listed once, with its limits stated the same way as everyone else's.

Where Scribelet fits, honestly

Scribelet is a typed Markdown notebook. It is a good fit if you write your own notes, want an AI chat that answers from them with citations, and care that everything exports as plain text. It is not a meeting recorder, so Carla in the first example should start with Otter. Its strength is typed notes, so Imani should use Goodnotes. Voice notes and background verification are Pro, and the Android app is still in development. If those limits do not rule it out, the free plan is enough to find out whether the AI chat finds what you wrote.

How to decide

  • Decide whether you need a recorder or a notebook

    If the problem is capturing what people say in meetings, you want a recorder such as Otter. If the problem is finding and using what you wrote, you want a notebook with AI. Most disappointment with AI note apps comes from buying one when you needed the other.

  • Check what the AI reads

    Some apps answer only from the current page, some from uploaded sources, some from your whole account. Ask the app a question whose answer is in a note from three months ago. If it cannot find it, its AI will not help you remember.

  • Insist on citations

    An answer you cannot check is a guess. Prefer apps that link each answer back to the note or source it came from, so you can verify before you act on it.

  • Read the free tier as a number

    "Free" ranges from 3 files to unlimited notes. Write down the cap that matters to you (minutes per meeting, notes per month, sources per notebook) and compare that, not the word.

  • Test the export before the AI

    AI features change every quarter; your notes need to outlive them. Export a notebook in the first week. Markdown travels to almost any app. ENEX, PDF and proprietary formats travel less well.

In the app

How to do this in Scribelet

  1. Create a free account and write or paste a few notes in Markdown. Tag them inline with #project-name and link related notes with [[wikilinks]].

  2. Open AI chat and ask a question whose answer is in your notes. The answer cites the specific notes it used, and memory keeps track of people, projects and terminology across conversations.

  3. Coming from Evernote or Obsidian? Import your .enex export or vault, and everything stays exportable as Markdown.

  4. Attach a photo of a whiteboard or a PDF to a note. A vision model extracts the text and a caption so the AI can search and use it.

  5. On Pro, record a voice note. Scribelet transcribes it and structures it into a note with a title, headings, action items and tag suggestions.

  6. Have your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini key? Add it in settings if you want to. It is optional; the free plan includes AI with daily limits.

Start with the quick start if you are new to Scribelet.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free AI note-taking app?

Several, with very different limits. Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) is free for 100 notebooks of 50 sources each. Otter's free plan gives 300 transcription minutes a month, capped at 30 minutes per conversation. OneNote is free but Copilot is not. Scribelet's free plan has unlimited notes and AI chat with daily limits. Evernote's free plan stops at 50 notes.

What is the difference between an AI note taker and an AI notes app?

An AI note taker records audio (usually meetings) and produces a transcript and summary. An AI notes app is a notebook where AI helps you write, organize and search what you have written. Otter is the first kind. Notion, Evernote, Mem and Scribelet are the second. Goodnotes and Scribelet's voice notes sit in between.

Can AI take notes from a lecture recording?

Yes. Otter transcribes and summarizes recordings, Goodnotes transcribes and summarizes audio on paid plans, and Scribelet's voice notes (Pro) transcribe and structure a recording into a note with headings and action items. Check the length limits: Otter's free plan stops at 30 minutes per recording.

Which AI note-taking app is best for students?

For handwriting, Goodnotes. For studying from a set of readings, Gemini Notebook. For typed notes with courses and deadlines, Notion, which is free for students at accredited colleges. For recording lectures, Otter. The Notion vs OneNote comparison goes deeper on the typed versus handwritten split.

Do I need my own API key to use AI in a notes app?

Usually not. Most apps include AI in their plans. Some, including Scribelet, let you add your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini key as an option, which can make sense if you already pay for one. The BYOK AI post explains the trade-offs.

An AI that answers from your own notes

Write in plain Markdown, link notes with [[wikilinks]], and ask Scribelet's AI chat what you decided, with citations back to the note. Free plan includes AI with daily limits, and everything exports as Markdown.

Try Scribelet free
or get the app
Download on theApp Store

Free plan, no credit card. See pricing

Comparison

Notion vs OneNote: Database or Notebook?

Notion is a workspace you assemble from blocks and databases. OneNote is a free binder you write on, with the best stylus support of any mainstream note app. Pick by what your notes are: records you filter and sort, or pages you write and revisit.

Comparison

Evernote vs OneNote: Which Note App Should You Pick?

Evernote is a capture-and-search archive you pay for. OneNote is a free digital binder that shines with a stylus and inside Microsoft 365. The right pick depends on how you capture, how you find things later, and who owns the account your notes live in.

Comparison

NotebookLM vs Obsidian: Source Research or a Notes Vault?

Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) answers questions from sources you upload, with citations. Obsidian is a free app for writing and linking your own Markdown notes in a folder on your device. One reads other people's documents, the other holds your thinking, and many people use both.

Comparison

Notion vs Evernote: Workspace or Archive?

Notion is a workspace you build from pages and databases, strongest for teams, projects and wikis. Evernote is an archive you capture into and search, strongest for clipped pages, scans and PDFs. Pick by whether your notes are records you organize or documents you need to find again.

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