Free Note-Taking Apps for iPhone

Apple Notes

The notes app already on every iPhone, and for most people the one to try before downloading anything else. It handles typed notes, checklists, scanned documents, photos, audio and Apple Pencil sketches in the same note, syncs through iCloud without a separate account, and can lock individual notes behind Face ID. The catch is that it only really lives in Apple's world: there are apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro plus a web version at iCloud.com, but nothing for Windows or Android, and everything you attach counts against the free 5 GB of iCloud storage you share with photos and backups.

Google Keep

Google's sticky-note app: coloured cards you can label, search, pin and share, with reminders that can fire at a time or when you arrive somewhere. It is the fastest of these apps for a shopping list you want your partner ticking off in real time, and it reads text out of photos so a snapshot of a receipt stays findable. It is also the least ambitious: there are no folders, no long-document formatting and no real structure beyond labels, so it tends to be the app people use alongside a heavier one rather than instead of it.

Microsoft OneNote

OneNote gives you a freeform page you can type on anywhere, draw on with a pen, and organise into notebooks, sections and tabs like a real ring binder. It is free with a Microsoft account on essentially every platform, which makes it the natural pick if your phone is an iPhone but your desk has a Windows PC. The trade-offs are a busier interface than the simpler apps here and a page model that can feel loose once a notebook grows; a Microsoft 365 subscription is the only paid step up, and it is really a bundle for Office and OneDrive storage rather than a OneNote upgrade.

Notion

Notion is less a notes app than a workspace you assemble yourself out of blocks: paragraphs, to-dos, images and databases that can be filtered into tables, boards and calendars. For an individual the free plan is generous, with unlimited pages, and it is the strongest option here if you want notes, projects and a personal wiki in one place. The cost is time: a blank Notion is intimidating, the mobile app is noticeably slower to open than Apple Notes or Keep, and file attachments on the free plan are capped at 5 MB each.

Evernote

The app that defined this category, and still the best searcher of the bunch: it indexes text inside PDFs, photos and scanned documents, and its web clipper saves whole articles rather than links. What has changed is the free plan, which is now the tightest here at 50 notes, one notebook and a single synced device, so an iPhone-only user who never opens it on a laptop can still get real work done but anyone else will hit the wall quickly. Reviewers have been vocal about that squeeze, and its App Store rating is the lowest in this table.

Bear

A writer's app: Markdown underneath, a calm typographic interface on top, and tags instead of folders. It won an Apple Design Award and is the one people in this list tend to describe as a pleasure to type in, with no account needed to start. The important caveat for anyone comparing free plans is that iCloud sync is a Pro feature, so on the free tier your notes stay on one device; the free version also limits you to three themes and one app icon, and there are no Windows or Android apps at all.

Simplenote

Made by the company behind WordPress, Simplenote does one thing: plain text notes that sync everywhere, instantly, for nothing. There is no paid tier, no storage meter and no upsell, and it runs on more platforms than anything else here including Linux and the browser. It is also the most limited: no images, no attachments, no folders beyond tags, and formatting only through Markdown, so it suits people who write in text and want a note to open the instant they tap it.

Obsidian

Obsidian keeps your notes as ordinary Markdown files in a folder you own, then builds links, backlinks and a graph on top of them. The app itself is free with no account and no limits, and a large plugin community extends it into a kanban board, a daily journal or a research database. It is the most demanding app here to set up, and the free plan leaves syncing to you: Obsidian's own encrypted Sync service is a paid add-on, though you can put the folder in iCloud Drive instead at no cost.

UpNote

UpNote is the quiet middle ground: a proper rich-text editor with notebooks, links between notes, themes and a focus mode, on every platform including Linux, with free syncing built in. It is popular with people leaving Evernote who want something simpler but not bare, and it is unusual in offering a one-off lifetime purchase instead of a subscription. The free version stops at 50 notes, which arrives faster than it sounds, and the app is made by a small team so it moves less quickly than the big names here.

Goodnotes

Goodnotes is a digital paper notebook: you write by hand, mark up imported PDFs and lecture slides, and the handwriting stays searchable. It is built for an iPad and an Apple Pencil first, and on an iPhone alone it is more of a companion for reading and quick annotation than a place to take notes. The free tier now lets you keep three notebooks with a 5 MB import limit, so students who scan a term's worth of readings will need the paid plan, which is one of the cheapest here.

Notability

Notability's signature trick is recorded audio tied to your handwriting: tap a word later and it plays back what was being said as you wrote it, which is why it is a fixture in lecture halls. It mixes ink, typed text, photos and annotated PDFs on one page and runs on Windows and Android as well as Apple devices. The free Starter plan caps you at five notes, the tightest entry limit in this table, and audio recording and handwriting search sit behind the paid tiers.

Zoho Notebook

Zoho Notebook builds each note out of cards: a text card, a checklist card, an audio card, a photo card, a sketch card, or a bookmark that reformats a saved article for offline reading. It is genuinely free to use with syncing included, has no ads, and comes from a company that sells business software rather than your data. The card model is the reason to pick it and also its limitation, since long continuous documents fit it less naturally than they do a plain editor, and the free tier gives you 500 MB of cloud storage.

Standard Notes

Standard Notes encrypts every note end to end, so the company hosting your notes cannot read them, and it is the obvious choice for a journal, passwords or anything you would rather not trust to an advertising business. The free plan is unusually honest about what it includes: unlimited notes, unlimited device sync, offline access, two-factor authentication and encrypted backups. What you give up is formatting, because the free tier is plain text only and the Markdown, rich text and spreadsheet editors are part of a paid plan that costs more than most apps here.

Craft

Craft is the best-looking app in this list, and the one to choose if your notes get read by other people: documents built from blocks that you can share as a polished web page in a couple of taps, with full offline editing. It is Apple-first, with iPhone, iPad and Mac apps plus the web, and no Android app. The free plan gives you every feature but caps total content at 1,500 blocks and 1 GB of storage, which is fine for occasional use and tight for anyone writing daily.