Best Note-Taking Apps for Windows and Android in 2026: Five, by What Happens to Your Notes

The question people ask about note apps is which has the best features. The question that decides whether you regret your choice is different: where do the notes physically live, and can you open them without the app?

That is not a philosophical point. Notes accumulate for years, apps get discontinued or change their pricing, and the moment you want to leave is the moment the storage format matters. There are three answers among these five:

Plain files on your disk. Obsidian. Your notes are markdown files in a folder. Any text editor opens them. The app is a viewer, not a container.

A local database on the device. Fossify Notes. Fast, private, entirely offline — and getting notes out means using its export function.

On someone else's server. Google Keep, Notion, OneNote. Sync across devices is effortless because the server is the source of truth. Your notes are in an account, and leaving means an export that may not preserve everything.

None of those is wrong. They suit different uses, and the mistake is picking the third when you needed the first.

The two where your notes stay yours

1. Obsidian — markdown files in a folder, with links on top

• Version: v1.13.7 · Size: 315.7 MB · Windows: 10/11 64-bit · Licence: freeware
• Needs: 2 GB RAM · 250 MB free space

Obsidian is the entry that solves the long-term problem, and it does it by being architecturally boring: a vault is a folder of plain .md files on your disk. No database, no proprietary container, no account required to open your own notes.

That has a consequence people underrate. If Obsidian shut down this evening, every note you have written would still open in Notepad tomorrow, still be searchable with Windows Search or Everything, still be greppable, still be under version control if you put the folder in Git. The lock-in risk is close to zero because there is nothing to be locked into.

On top of that it adds the features that make it more than a text editor. [[Wiki-style links]] connect notes to each other, backlinks show what points at the note you are reading, and a graph view maps the structure. Over a few hundred notes those links stop being decoration and start being how you find things — you navigate by association instead of remembering filenames. The plugin ecosystem is over 1,500 community plugins covering task management, spaced repetition, calendars, diagrams and more.

Two honest costs. 315.7 MB is very large for a text editor, because it is an Electron application — a browser shell around a web app. And official sync is a paid service. You can sync free through Dropbox, OneDrive, Syncthing or Git precisely because the vault is just files, and that takes a little setup.

Personal use is free with no note limits and no feature gates.

Use this if: you want notes that outlive the app, or you write enough that links between notes will matter.

2. Fossify Notes — 9 MB, and it cannot phone home

• Version: v1.7.0 · Size: 9.09 MB · Android: 6.0+ · Licence: open source
• Needs: 1 GB RAM · 20 MB free space

Fossify Notes is 9.09 MB — the smallest app on this page by a wide margin — and its defining property is that it declares no internet permission.

That distinction is worth being precise about. It is not a privacy policy saying data will not be collected. It is the absence of network access at the operating-system level, which means the app has no mechanism to send anything anywhere. For notes, which are frequently the most personal text on a phone, a structural guarantee beats a promise.

What you get is fast, plain note-taking with checklists, widgets, and text notes that open instantly. What you do not get is sync, collaboration, rich formatting or attachments. That is the deal, and at 9.09 MB on Android 6.0 with 1 GB of RAM, it runs on hardware nothing else here will tolerate.

It is part of the Fossify suite of open-source Android replacements, which continues the Simple Mobile Tools apps after that project was sold. If you want more privacy-focused Android apps built the same way, the suite is worth a look.

Use this if: you want private notes on your phone with no account, no sync and no network access. Also the right pick for an old or low-storage device.

The one for capturing things fast

3. Google Keep — the lowest-friction capture on Android

• Version: v5.26.322.0 · Size: 22.4 MB · Android: 8.0+ · Licence: freeware
• Needs: 1.5 GB RAM · 35 MB free space

Google Keep is not the most capable note app and it is the one that wins the moment you have a thought at a bus stop.

The design is a colour-coded card grid — every note visible at once, no folders, no hierarchy to decide about. Colour and labels do the organising, and search does the finding. For a shopping list, a phone number, a reminder or a half-formed idea, the time from unlocking your phone to a saved note is shorter than anything else here.

Voice memos are transcribed automatically, so a spoken note becomes searchable text. Checklists are proper checkboxes. Reminders are time- or location-based and fire through Android's normal notification system. Sync across devices is instant and requires no thought, because it is a Google account.

The limits are real. There is no formatting beyond bold-ish plain text, no nesting, no page structure, and it becomes unmanageable past a few hundred notes because the grid is the only view. Your notes are also in your Google account, which is the trade for the sync being effortless.

Use this if: you need fast capture and short-lived notes. Many people run Keep alongside a heavier app rather than instead of one.

The one for structure

4. Notion — a database that happens to hold pages

• Version: v0.6.2115 · Size: 64.8 MB · Android: 8.0+ · Licence: freeware
• Needs: 2 GB RAM · 90 MB free space

Notion is often compared to note apps and it is closer to a lightweight database with a document editor attached.

The unit is not a note, it is a page — and pages live in databases with typed properties. A reading list where each book has an author, a status, a rating and a link. A project tracker where each task has an owner, a due date and a stage, viewable as a table, a board, a calendar or a timeline from the same underlying data. Relations link one database to another. That is a genuinely different capability from anything else on this page, and it is why teams use it.

The free personal plan is generous: unlimited pages, unlimited databases, and collaboration with a few guests.

Two limits to plan around. It is connection-dependent — offline support exists on mobile but is limited and unreliable enough that you should not depend on it. And the flexibility is a cost as well as a feature; Notion asks you to design your system before you can use it, which is why so many Notion setups are abandoned templates. If you want to write a note in three seconds, this is the wrong tool.

Use this if: you are tracking things with properties and relationships, or working with other people. Not if you mainly want to write.

The one for handwriting

5. Microsoft OneNote — free-form canvas and real ink

• Version: v16.0.17830 · Size: 72.4 MB · Android: 9.0+ · Licence: freeware
• Needs: 2.5 GB RAM · 95 MB free space

OneNote keeps one capability the others do not attempt: an unbounded canvas you can write on by hand.

Every other app here is a list of text. OneNote is a page you can click anywhere on and start typing, drop an image beside it, draw an arrow between the two, and annotate the whole thing with a stylus. On a tablet with a pen — a Surface, or an Android tablet with an active stylus — that is the closest digital equivalent to a paper notebook, and handwriting search means the ink stays findable.

Organisation is notebooks, sections and pages, which maps onto how people already think about ring binders, and it scales to a lot of content without becoming a wall of cards. Sync runs through OneDrive across Windows, Android, iOS and the web, and the Windows desktop version is a full application rather than a cut-down one.

The costs: Android 9.0 and 2.5 GB of RAM, the highest requirements on this list, which rules out older phones. It stores notes in Microsoft's own format in your OneDrive, so export is an operation rather than a copy. And on a phone without a stylus you are using a fraction of what it is for — the flexible canvas is awkward to navigate on a small screen.

Use this if: you have a stylus and a tablet, or you want a free-form canvas rather than a list.

The five side by side

Only one is open source. Only one stores notes as files you can read without it. Those are two different entries, and both properties are worth wanting.

The overlaps and the honest gaps

Obsidian on Android exists but is not in this comparison. The desktop build listed here is the Windows one. The mobile app works and syncing a vault to a phone needs one of the sync methods set up first — it is not the zero-configuration experience Keep or Notion give you.

Nothing here is both file-based and effortlessly synced for free. That is the real gap in this category. Obsidian gives you the files and asks you to arrange sync. Keep and Notion give you sync and keep the files. Pick which half you need more.

Two apps is a normal answer. Quick capture and long-form thinking are different jobs, and Keep plus Obsidian is a common pairing precisely because neither does both well.

Search behaves differently in each. Obsidian searches file contents locally and instantly. Keep and Notion search server-side, which is fast but needs a connection. Fossify searches its local database. OneNote also searches handwriting, which nothing else attempts.

What no note app fixes

A system you do not follow. Every app on this page can hold a well-organised set of notes and none will create one. The most elaborate Notion workspace is worth less than a plain folder you actually open.

Notes you never revisit. Capture is easy and reading back is the hard part. Obsidian's links help because they surface related notes without your remembering them; nothing solves it outright.

Lock-in, once it has happened. Every app here exports. Exports lose things — formatting, structure, attachment links, ink. The decision that avoids that cost is the one you make now, which is why the storage question comes first.

The short version

If you want notes that will still open in ten years, use Obsidian. Plain markdown in a folder is the only answer here with no exit cost.

If you want private notes on a phone with nothing else attached, use Fossify Notes. 9.09 MB, no internet permission, runs on Android 6.0.

Use Google Keep for capture regardless of what else you run. It is 22.4 MB and it is the fastest way to save a thought.

Only pick Notion if you need databases, and only pick OneNote if you have a stylus. Both are excellent at those specific jobs and heavy for anything else.

Every app named here resolves to a page in the FileCobra catalogue — the build fails if one does not. Versions, package sizes and system requirements are read from that catalogue rather than written by hand. Where our ingestion worker has fetched a release itself, it records a SHA-256 of the exact file we serve and publishes it on the app’s page. We do not run an antivirus lab: where a VirusTotal report exists we link it, and where none exists we say so rather than imply one.