The best note taking apps for Mac – markdown, open format, cross platform
Milanote v2.2.37. 15th April, 2021. The help chat now works in the Mac app. Fixed a bug with collapsed comments in the trash. Milanote v2.2.31. Discover your next favorite thing. Product Hunt surfaces the best new products, every day. It's a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations. Milanote is an easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards. Add notes, images, links and files, organize them visually and share them with your team. Milanote is a great tool for organizing creative projects into beautiful visual boards. It feels like the old days when we’d post all our notes, ideas, inspiration, and sketches on the studio wall. I use Milanote for everything from mood boards to outlining product requirements and a bunch of stuff in between.
Published (updated: ) in Productivity.
With the release of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 in 2016, Apple introduced a new version of Notes. It added a number of new features for formatting, drawing and sync using iCloud instead of via IMAP. It was lightweight, fast and simple. I started using it shortly afterwards and now have almost 1,000 notes ranging from book highlights to saved web pages to meeting notes to journal articles.
Unfortunately, the iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 releases have been incredibly buggy. I have found that sync is inconsistent across devices (my MacBook, iPad and iPhone each register different numbers of notes) and some notes are not syncing at all. Search also stopped working before fixing itself, and now returns inferior results.
Considering how much information I have stored in Apple Notes, this made me reconsider what I wanted from a note taking app.
Requirements for a note taking app
Simplicity
I only require basic formatting, images and tables. I’m not interested in fancy fonts or colours because the system is better at ensuring the formatting works across devices, screen sizes and rendering into the future e.g. if I ever need to increase font sizes. This means using Markdown formatting saved to a plain text file. Markdown is a well understood format that has many apps that can edit and render on any platform
Non-proprietary format
The “new” Apple Notes app moved away from IMAP to an iCloud based format. This made sync work better (until recently) but was necessarily a proprietary database format. I can’t easily see or edit the individual notes on disk to make backups or import to another app. They are contained in a SQL Lite database in ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes alongside attachments and images organised by internal note IDs. It’s usually dangerous to meddle with app files like this.
Apple Notes doesn’t have an export option except individual notes as PDFs. The only way around this is using the Apple Privacy data download service which allows you to export Apple Notes as HTML with their associated attachments. This is how I have been keeping a backup of all my Apple Notes to date.
Ideally the app will allow editing of individual files on disk. I can then choose my own sync service and run backup as part of my normal approach using Arq. Any app should at least allow export of content to multiple formats.
Regular updates / actively maintained
The problem with Apple software is that their main revenue is generated by the core OS, not any of the apps. They are there to compliment the OS but there is no competitive incentive to keep them up to date, add new features and fix bugs.
The annual update cycle is a legacy from the old days of shipping physical software. This makes sense for annual iPhone hardware refreshes but is totally outdated for shipping software. Microsoft updates Office every month and Windows every 6 months. How do you report bugs or get support for Apple Notes? You can’t.
My experience with the poor quality of these latest Apple releases has changed my approach – if I am going to rely on software then I want the developer to be properly incentivised to maintain it i.e. I need to pay them directly for it.
This is one reason why I use and pay for 1Password vs using Apple iCloud Keychain (as well as all the other features 1Password has). It’s also why I don’t mind the move to subscription business models for software.
Search
My approach to note taking is to save the full text and associated files of things I find interesting or useful so I can search them in the future.
Spotlight Search on macOS is very good (and has some advanced options). Even though I keep my files well organised, I regularly use it to find things because it is quicker and searches inside documents. For some reason, Apple Notes are not searchable from Spotlight though, so I have to search twice – in Spotlight and in Notes.app. I would prefer to have everything searchable from Spotlight, or any other search tool.
Cross-platform
This is not a requirement but rather a “nice to have” if the app I use on macOS also has an iOS equivalent. If all the above requirements are met, I can easily edit open file formats from different apps on different platforms.
My Macbook Air (13″ 2018) is only a year old so I have no plans to replace it soon, although have had to send it in for 1 keyboard replacement already. I don’t mind the feel of this keyboard but the reliability is poor.
Given the state of Apple software quality and the general problems with the Macbook keyboards, I have been following Microsoft’s Surface products with interest. The Surface Laptop 3 is very nice. I’ve been into the London Microsoft store to have a play and I’m eager to see the Surface Pro X when it is released. I’m just unsure about Windows. Over a decade ago it was Windows Vista that forced me to move to Mac due to the poor quality. I’m not quite there with macOS yet but am unhappy with it.
Evaluating note taking apps
All together I have been re-evaluating my choice of key software to ensure that I’m tied to the Apple ecosystem as little as possible. I already use Office365 for my email and calendar but have also started to move my files to OneDrive from iCloud Drive (I’m glad I didn’t try the recent macOS betas!). What’s the difference? I pay Microsoft for these services and they are regularly updated (unlike iCloud for Windows) and maintained, probably because they directly generate $billions of direct revenue.
Ultimately, my goal is to be flexible in which platform I use, selected based on the best core OS and hardware. I don’t want to be restricted by apps and file formats that only work on a single platform. macOS remains the best OS for now (including for privacy) but I don’t want to be locked to it.
My recommended note taking apps
Based on reviewing all the apps below, these are the best notes apps for Mac:
- Bear: Simple, well designed UI, actively maintained, markdown export but proprietary database. Mac / iOS only.
- iA Writer with your own cloud drive (I use OneDrive). Edits files on disk in Markdown format with simple, well designed apps for macOS, Windows, Android and iOS.
- VS Code with several markdown extensions (see below). If you are a developer and comfortable with a more technical interface, and/or already using VS Code, then this is a great third choice to avoid installing yet-another-app.
Bear
Bear was my favourite app purely for Apple devices. Good tag support, Markdown rendering, strong search (including Spotlight integration), encrypted notes, embedded images and attachments, and multiple export options. I particularly liked the helper mechanism when linking between notes, which maintains the link even if you rename a note.
It is fully supported and actively developed for the Apple ecosystem. The entire company is based around the product and has a subscription business model, suggesting they are likely to be able to keep things going. The iOS and iPad apps work well and sync across from my Mac was always reliable. It actually uses iCloud behind the scenes which makes Apple Notes failure to sync more unusual.
Bear would be my recommendation for someone who was happy with staying on Mac/iOS. If needed, you can export to various different formats. I used it for a whole month (which is the length of the free trial – sync is not available in the free version) and it worked well.
The main reason I decided not to continue using it is that Bear uses a proprietary data format so it can sync with iCloud. This makes sense because their time is better spent on the app functionality rather than making cloud sync work, but I ultimately decided that I valued having open, plain text files more than the extra functionality. If I do eventually move to Windows then I would be unable to move my notes easily. Having an open format was the key to selecting iA Writer instead.
iA Writer
Although not designed for note taking, last year iA Writer added support for #hashtags (but only on Mac, not Windows) which makes it much more suitable as a notes app.
I really like the UI on macOS because it fits in perfectly with the system design guidelines. It is very lightweight, simple to use and fits all my criteria for editing files on disk with Markdown. It is very minimalist with few settings, forcing you to focus on the task at hand. There are also apps for macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
iA Writer does not support attachments and the embedded image support is limited, but that actually forces you to store those files on disk (so files like PDFs can be searched by Spotlight and edited directly e.g. for highlighting, which doesn’t work if you open PDFs from within a Bear note). Naming becomes important for binary files like images so they can be properly searched.
If you use iA Writer on iOS with iCloud then deals with sync for you but there is a limitation with using external file sources such as OneDrive – you have to manually find and add files into the app to edit them, which is a hassle. Otherwise, files are stored on disk and so I can sync them with OneDrive and run my normal backups. Since they are plain text Markdown, I can edit them in any app.
I would like to see the ability to nest tags and add emoji to them, plus helpers for Markdown formatting e.g. linking to other notes and improved image support. However, those limitations are minor enough to overlook and pick iA Writer as my Apple Notes replacement.
VS Code + Markdown extensions
VS Code supports markdown out of the box, including with a live preview, however there are several extensions which add extra functionality.
The final plugin is the crucial one because it allows me to take advantage of organising my notes by tag. Of course, VS Code’s command bar is excellent at search so I could just navigate files by name (or text search), but it is sometimes useful to be able to see and view all associated notes in a list.
Unfortunately, the tag format supported by iA Writer – #hashtags – is not part of the Markdown format. Instead you will need to use the Markdown metadata format by including tags in a YAML block at the start of each file. The advantage of using this format is that it is generally supported by other Markdown parsers, so if I wanted to switch to something new in the future there is a greater chance of it being supported with no changes.
VS Code does use Electron behind the scenes. However, unlike many Electron apps, VS Code ties into the native UX of the OS it is running on and has acceptable performance. This is a rare example of a well-built Electron app, most of which are slow and buggy.
Other note taking apps I tried
Evernote
Years ago this was the first notes app I ever used, however it was notoriously buggy and I gave up. The company has been through some challenging times but still uses a proprietary note format and database, which rules it out. I didn’t bother to try it because of the history of poor quality software.
Notable
Notable is still very early in development, and the rough edges show e.g. when copy/pasting it would paste text 3 times. It also uses Electron and has many weird UI elements showing through the cross-platform layer, for example the popover menus for attachments don’t have the same behaviour as menus should on macOS.
The management of attachments was not as good as Typora – it would copy them to an ‘attachments’ directory but the management of those files was very basic. Removing the attachment from the note did not delete it on disk.
This app is too early to take over such an important use case and has no clear business model yet (donations and a pending application to Y Combinator).
Obsidian
Obsidian fits all the requirements – simple, works with Markdown and cross-platform.
It supports #hashtags, but they are shown in order of number of items rather than alphabetically and strangely there is no way to change the order.
It has some good functionality around linking to other notes and backlinks so you can see which notes reference each other. This makes it more like an organiser than a simple Markdown editor.
The app is nicely designed, but uses Electron so is slow to launch and doesn’t fit into the native OS design as nicely as Bear or iA Writer. When you are using an app regularly, performance and UI consistency matters.
OneNote
Included with my Office365 subscription, OneNote has been improving rapidly and now has a much simpler UI and fast sync. One of the great features is character recognition in images, allowing them to be searched as if they were in plain text.
Notes can only be in a single section or Notebook (like Apple Notes) whereas I feel that tags are more flexible approach to organising things. OneNote supports tags but they are hard coded to specific types, which suggests there’s still a lot of legacy cruft still behind the scenes.
OneNote on the web looks good with the new simplified UI and the Mac app also works nicely, particularly with dark mode. However, compared to all the other notes apps it is always slow to launch. I find this lag exists with all Microsoft apps on Mac – they are very heavyweight.
Using it with Office365 creates the Notebook file in your OneDrive but this is just a URL file that opens the web UI when you load it. There’s no actual content in the file which means that OneNote is using a proprietary database behind the scenes.
Although OneNote is a regularly updated application that works cross-platform (and has a decent app for iOS as well), the lack of open file format means I can’t back up the files and extract my data whenever I want. Like Apple Notes, there is no export functionality. I don’t want to move from Apple’s proprietary format to Microsoft’s, so this rules it out.
Typora
Typora was promising because it is a good Markdown editor with cross-platform apps that manages files on disk. I particularly liked how it managed attachments for notes, creating a .assets folder with the same name as the parent note. However, it doesn’t have very advanced file management features for the library/list of notes and there’s no support for tags.
It also uses Electron and I really hate Electron based apps. They remind me of Java apps that almost get the native OS style right, but not quite. They feel brittle, tend to have poor performance and I found that Typora was buggy (the macOS version is in beta). I understand why developers use Electron because it allows you to build cross-platform apps using web technologies, but I’ve had bad experiences with them e.g. the poor performance of Slack.
Worth a mention
- Inkdrop is an app I’ve heard about because of the blogging of its main (Japan-based) developer. It fits most of my requirements and the UI looks great, but uses a proprietary format rather than files on disk. The format is JSON and you can set up your own CouchDB server to run the sync services, but that isn’t something I’m interested in doing.
- nvALT hits all of my requirements except tag support, but is quite an old app (and looks it). The UI is why I excluded it, but I am keeping an eye on nvUltra which is the replacement in active beta now. It’s not open for public use at time of writing so I couldn’t try it yet. Since it supports Markdown, when it is released I will just be able to point it to the files I’m editing.
- Scrivener might be great for complex writing projects but it is far too sophisticated for a notes app.
- Simplenote is worth a look because they have well maintained apps and Markdown editing available for free. I excluded it because of the proprietary database format but generally like what Automattic do.
- Standard Notes looks interesting because it pledges privacy and longevity with how it manages your notes files. It has options to store attachments in Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive as well as automated backups there, but ultimately stores notes in a proprietary format (even if that format is open and you can run your own server because the code is open source). It doesn’t use simple plain text files on the filesystem which is one of my requirements (and the desktop apps are Electron) – I don’t really want to be messing around running my own server and MySQL database for notes. Potential option for power users but not what I’m looking for.
- Trilium Notes is another Electron app which is built around a hierarchical structure so you can build your own personal knowledgebase, whatever that means. It requires running a server, or has an unsupported Mac app. This makes it too complex for my requirements given the suitable alternatives above.
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See also
- A review of note taking apps for iOS/Mac from 2019.
- Another review of note taking apps but from 2017.
- A list of all text editors for iOS.
- 9to5Mac on the best note-taking apps for Mac in 2019.
Every idea starts with a thought. People mostly rely on note-taking apps to jot down thoughts and brainstorm ideas. But there is a limitation in terms of execution. Our brain works differently to connect the thoughts, and it’s often hard to replicate the same brainstorming process on paper or normal notes app. Here is where dedicated mind mapping software comes into play.
Power users opt for a mind mapping app to get a clear picture of the idea. So in this article, I have listed the 7 best mind mapping software for Mac that can help you organize your ideas.
Table of Contents
1. MindNode
Most mind mapping software offer a giant canvas to connect the dots. MindNode is no exception here. I like how the app offers a detailed tutorial upfront to get started. Even a beginner can start building the thoughtmap without prior experience.
The software takes you to the default blackboard, and you can start adding elements such as blocks, images, emojis, and more to the board. You can create an outline for an organized, hierarchical view and observe how it grows as a mind map. Opt for the mind map to visually rearrange nodes and add new thoughts.
My favorite function from the bunch is the focus mode. It removes all the distractions and lets you focus on one thought at a time. As for styling, MindNode packs beautiful themes and custom stickers. You have complete control over how you want to design the idea on the board.
Once done with the process, you can easily share it to Apple Reminders, a task management app, or any other app in various formats.
MindNode offers a free version with a basic editor. The real action happens with an upgrade to MindNode Plus.
Price: Free (Premium subscription starts at $2.49 per month)
2. Xmind
Xmind is one of the best work-from-home mind mapping tools. Xmind is basically a Swiss Army Knife for your brain. The reason being various options such as Fishbone Chart, Matrix, Brace Map, Org Chart to connect relationships among complex thoughts. The possibilities are endless here. It’s up to you on how you want to view the current thought process on the board.
Xmind allows you to handle comparative analysis and track milestones as well. As for features, you can add a topic, subtopic, set a boundary, add notes, and assign relationships among them.
I love Xmind’s theme editor. It lets you tailor the style of themes based on your preference, make changes to shapes, lines, colors, etc. Once assigned, you won’t have to repeat it every time.
Price: Free (Premium subscription starts at $39.99 per six months)
3. Milanote
This one is my personal favorite, something that I use daily. The software packs a perfect combination of modularity and customization options to stand out in the crowd.
You have a blank canvas upfront to get started. Simply drag and drop elements such as notes, links, to-do, lines, columns, comments, images, etc., from the left sidebar. Place them anywhere on the Milanote board and use arrows to connect them.
Milanote comfortably beats rivals with a rich collection of templates. Some of the useful templates include Brainstorming, Creative Writing, Moodboards, Story Boards, and more. The sharing is seamless as well. Simply share the board with others and discuss ideas in detail with others in real-time.
Price: Free (Premium plan starts at $9.99 per person per month)
4. SimpleMind
SimpleMind has the best on-board process among all the mind mapping software out there. No need to sign up. Simply open the app and get started mapping out ideas.
I appreciate the theming options out of the box. You won’t have to mess with endless color options in the software. SimpleMind does the trick for you. Go to the theme option in the Inspector menu and choose from the available themes and styles.
Other features remain standard. The list includes an unlimited number of mind maps, notes, style sheets, collapse and expand branches, and more.
SimpleMind free version is feature-rich compared to rivals. However, you can unlock more functions such as sharing, productivity booster, cross-platform synchronization, and more.
Price: Free (One-time purchase at $29.99)
5. MindMeister
Used by over 14 million users worldwide, MindMeister emphasizes design to deliver one of the aesthetically pleasing mind mapping experiences.
MindMeister is completely web-based, meaning you can use it across anywhere on Windows, Mac, or Linux. And surprisingly, it works perfectly fine, and I had no problems navigating and using the software on Google Chrome.
The standard feature list is comparable to rivals but what sets MindMeister apart from the rest of the options is the built-in presentation mode. With a single click, the software will turn your mind map into beautiful, dynamic slideshows.
As for export options, one can export the slides as PNGs, embed the whole presentation on the website, or even broadcast it live to their collaborators online.
Price: Free (Premium subscription starts at $2.49 per month)
6. MindMaster
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MindMaster is a full-featured cross-platform mind mapping and brainstorming tool. Whether you are an employee, an entrepreneur, a student, or a freelancer, you can use MindMaster to develop more ideas, boost creativity, and streamline your workflow.
The software offers different structures to view your ideas. MindMaster also supports treemap, fishbone, timeline, sector map, circle map, and bubble map.
MindMaster also support various themes to customize paddings, borders, and shades.
Brainstorming mode is an interesting add-on. The feature lets you can conduct group brainstorming sessions effectively. Enter ideas with different colors on the left pane, and later drag them to the right pane to generate a mind map.
Price: Free (Premium subscription starts at $59 per year)
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7. Mindly
If none of the above options are meeting your needs then move your attention to Mindly. The app follows the solar-system like structure to organize your inner universe.
Mindly eliminates unnecessary clutter and delivers a clean experience to work with ideas. The list of features includes an infinite hierarchy of elements, color schemes for elements, multiple sharing options, iCloud support, and more.
If you are fine with Mindly’s different approach towards mind mapping, then go ahead give it a try.
Price: $29.99 as a one-time purchase.
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Brainstorming is easier than ever with dedicated mind mapping software. It can help you get plan-out huge projects on the go. Go through the apps list above and pick the suitable option for you.
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