The best AI notes apps

Taking notes used to be a mess of notebooks, Post-its, and scribbled napkins. Tired of flipping pages, you went digital and stored everything on your devices and cloud accounts. Now, as we move forward in the AI age, you can improve the note-taking process even more to get those thoughts out of your head, shape them into powerful ideas, and maybe even start doing something with them.

Using new technologies can be tricky, especially when dealing with sensitive data like your personal notes. And you don't want to let AI run free and take the brilliance out of your lightbulb moments. Keeping this in mind, I researched and tested all the best AI notes apps that shortcut the process of creating, formatting, and searching notes in a way that feels like an extension of your brain—not a replacement.

The best AI notes apps

• Mem for AI-powered organization

• Evernote for editing with AI

• Microsoft OneNote and Copilot Pro for chatting with your notes

• Reflect for voice-to-text notes 

• Notion for creating a second brain

What makes the best AI notes app?

Taking notes is about saving thoughts for the future. Maybe they're not relevant or doable today, but they'll be a valuable resource to support your ideas further down the road. Since they can be fleeting, note-taking apps focus on gathering them fast with a quick note creation experience. And since they can be numerous, the organization and searching tools need to be exceptional.

I've just described what a great note-taking app should be, but AI can take this experience further. It can generate content (either for creating new notes or generating search answers), offer semantic linking between notes, and help you edit and clean up messy notes, among other things.

Here's what I considered when testing the best AI notes apps:

• AI feature set. AI note apps should offer tools to help you improve your note-taking, including text generation, summarization, and semantic linking suggestions. If all you get is a "make this shorter" button, it's not enough.

• Note creation experience. Just like in a standard note-taking app, It should be fast and intuitive to create a new note. The best AI notes apps will put a keyboard or other input method in front of you in less than a few clicks or taps—and they won't be any harder to use than a standard notes app.

• Organization features. As your note library grows, it gets harder to browse and find what you're looking for. Organization is key to helping retrieve knowledge easily and at the right time. This is true of regular notes apps and AI notes apps.

• Cross-device availability. Whether you're sitting at your desk every day, moving around the city, or doing a mix of both, these apps will help you record what you need, no matter where you are.

• Security and privacy. Your notes are yours. This means no one else should have access to them, be that the app owner or a hacker on a heist.

I'm using one of these apps every day and the others I tested over the course of three weeks. I started by creating accounts, added a few notes, used all the available AI features, and installed the mobile apps to see how much the experience changed. Based on all my testing, here are the five best.

The best AI notes apps at a glance

Best AI notes app for AI-powered organization

Mem (Web, iOS)

Mem pros:

• Wide range of AI features

• Great chatbot for asking questions about your notes

Mem cons:

• No free plan

We've all been there: that moment when you click to see all your notes, and they pour out like an overflowing closet. No one wants to spend too much time meticulously organizing their notes, so Mem is here to sort it out for you.

As you create new notes, you'll get suggestions on hashtags to organize your library, making it easier to find what you need later on. For example, when you open a hashtag to display your cooking notes, Mem adds a little list at the bottom suggesting other notes on the same topic to add to the collection.

This would be amazing on its own, but there's a lot more. When generating new text, you don't want to fill up your notes with general ideas pumped out by AI: you want to expand your thoughts, not replace them. The Smart Write and Edit features help you (re)generate text while staying on topic, keeping the writing style close to yours. This is a win: your notes will be much more consistent and complete.

When you're rolling with thousands of notes inside your account, drop the search and start chatting with them instead. Click the Mem chat button, ask questions, and send prompts as you would to ChatGPT. The output will be grounded on what you've added to the platform before, prioritizing that information at all times.

The app feels great to use with its keyboard shortcuts, and the mobile app is intuitive as well: I like the speed when creating new notes and the AI chat interface. It feels more natural to ask questions to my chatbot on the go instead of using traditional search tools.

If you're having a hard time connecting all your knowledge, Mem can help you network your ideas, organize your work, and be more productive. And if you want even more productivity, connect Mem to Zapier and automate your note taking. Learn more about how to automate Mem, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Mem price: From $14.99/month

Best AI notes app for editing with AI

Evernote (Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)

Evernote pros:

• Good fit for anything from short notes to full documents

• Plenty of views available for easy navigation and searching

Evernote cons:

• Going through a lot of changes—but could this be a pro to you?

When I'm excited about a new idea, my fingers don't always keep up with my brain. If I don't come back to the note and edit it, I'll be left wondering what was I actually thinking through the typos and random phrases. Evernote's note cleanup tool can help smooth these bursts—provided there's enough context for it.

On the rich-text editing bar at the top of the screen, click the AI Edit dropdown. The range of AI controls is relatively limited, but that's a plus if you don't like to be overwhelmed with hundreds of prompts and regeneration actions. Select Fix typos to shape up your writing, Summarize for long ramblings around a topic, or Change the tone if you need to paste that idea into an email.

The other solid AI feature here is search. In addition to searching through your notes, it also goes into PDF documents, photos, and pictures with your handwriting to generate the answers. And since Evernote also supports tasks and events, you can ask questions about those, too, and get a summarized view of everything together. You'll have a list of sources for the answer so you can jump straight to the original data and check that the model isn't hallucinating.

These features are promising and work well, especially considering this is Evernote, a legendary note-taking app that set the bar for the category for many years. The note creation speed and experience are still some of the best, especially on mobile. After a gradual downfall over the years, it was acquired by European-based software company Bending Spoons, and it's now going through intense restructuring, mostly at the infrastructure and user experience level.

While Evernote claws back its former glory, you don't need to fight as hard to stay on top of your work. Connect Evernote to Zapier, and start automating repetitive note-taking actions. Learn more about how to automate Evernote, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Evernote price: Free plan available; paid plans from $14.99/month

Best AI notes app for chatting with your notes

Microsoft OneNote with the Copilot Pro add-on (Web and nearly all devices)

OneNote + Copilot pros:

• Flexible note-taking experience

• Generated responses include sources

OneNote + Copilot cons:

• AI features could be easier to access

Microsoft keeps adding AI features to its 365 apps with Microsoft Copilot Pro. For OneNote, this means a handy chat sidebar for sending prompts and a set of buttons to transform text inside your notes.

To begin, you first need to subscribe to the Copilot Pro add-on. Once you activate it, the button on the top of the screen will become clickable, bringing out the sidebar to play. There, you can ask to generate ideas, draft a project plan, or get tips on how to make better presentations. Copilot seems to prefer answering questions about your notes, though: once you add something to a new note, it'll start answering questions on that topic instead of focusing on generating new content.

As you find snippets you like, copy and paste them into the note. Since OneNote's user experience is more flexible, you can drag and drop the content anywhere to make whatever layout you want—it's great for mind mapping, mood boarding, or dashboarding your favorite topics. This is one of the unique selling points of OneNote, even without the AI.

There are controls to edit the text with AI, but they're a bit hidden: highlight the text you want to change, and then right-click it. The Copilot option appears, and you can turn that snippet into a to-do list, get a summary, or have it rephrase. Once the results come back, you can keep or discard the results depending on how they look.

To do even more with your AI notes, integrate OneNote with Zapier, so you can connect it to all the other apps you use. Learn more about how to automate OneNote, or take a look at these pre-made workflows for inspiration.

Microsoft OneNote + Copilot Pro price: Free plan available; Microsoft 365 Personal subscription unlocks additional features at $6.99/month; Copilot Pro (AI features) are $20/month.

Best AI notes app for voice-to-text notes

Reflect (Web, iOS, iPad)

Reflect pros:

• Very keyboard-driven

• Easy backlinking features

Reflect cons:

• Some key features are a bit hidden

Don't like hammering away at keyboards? I can empathize. If you're tired of slamming keys, use Reflect and your voice to store your notes. You can open the app and relay your thoughts as they come, not worrying about rambling or length.

The audio will be saved and, right next to it, an accurate transcription of everything. Once the app finishes turning them into text, you can use Reflect's AI editing features to shorten, lengthen, rephrase, or simplify the writing. Since you can save time editing notes with these tools, you'll feel freer to improvise, hesitate, or work around the ideas you're expressing. AI can clean it up later for you, which feels like the perfect human and machine combo.

If you find that you have recurring types of "talks" going on, you can save custom prompts to process them. When you provide instructions on how to organize that note, you can apply structure or style changes, optimizing it if you need to publish later. This way, you can talk out a blog post, an X thread, or a bulleted list of key topics by talking and applying the custom prompt.

To keep track of what's changing in your life and work, head to the daily notes section and add the major events, links, and thoughts. This is useful to keep track of your progress while working on a project or building a huge idea. Scroll up or down to travel to the past or future, or do a time jump by clicking a date on the calendar on the right side of the screen.

Reflect is the most secure note-taking app on this list, too, demanding you create a passphrase to encrypt your entire account. It's useful but also a danger zone: if you ever lose this passphrase, no one—not even the app's team—will be able to retrieve your notes. Keep it safe in a password manager.

To get even more out of your AI notes, integrate Reflect with Zapier so you can spend less time at your computer and more time brainstorming. Here are a few automation suggestions to get you started.

Reflect price: $10/month (billed annually)

Best AI notes app for creating a second brain

Notion (Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)

Notion pros:

• Flexible organization features

• Great collaboration tools

Notion cons:

• May take too much work to maintain

Notion is more a religion than a productivity app. While it has wider applications than the other AI notes apps on this list, it still deserves a spot because you can use its databases and AI features to build a note-taking framework that can expand into gigantic proportions—and still remain searchable and organizable.

Beyond the workspace app features (you can collaborate with your team, build your dashboards, and access a range of page analytics), Notion works well as a note-taking app when you create a new database for your notes and start dumping all your thoughts in there. 

When you pen down your notes, you can add new fields to record tags and topics or assign dates. More than that, you can use relational data fields to connect notes, store them inside a notebook, or associate them with a project. Notion's flexibility here is its greatest strength and weakness, as savvy users will appreciate the freedom, but others will wonder why they have to do so much work just to start taking notes.

As far as AI goes, Notion AI can generate text for you: on any empty line, press space, and write a prompt. Once you hit enter, AI will start generating, and you can then refine the result. You'll find the usual AI editing tools too, letting you change the text's tone and structure to match your needs. And when your workspace is filled to the brim with useful information, you can start using Notion AI Q&A to ask questions about anything and get generated answers grounded on your data.

The combination of the databases, connections, notes, and the Q&A feature make Notion a good tool to build a sidekick for your brain. And as it gets bigger, it's a good idea to start automating some of its actions—connect Notion to Zapier to get that started. Learn more about how to automate Notion, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Notion price: Free plan available; paid plans from $10/month, but AI features are an add-on at $10/user/month

AI apps for research and studying

In my testing, I came across two apps that didn't fit neatly into the criteria as neither of them really focuses on saving notes. They're better fits for research and study use cases, but I really liked them, so I still wanted to shout them out, since there's some overlap with the category here.

The first one is NotebookLM from Google. It lets you add your PDF and document sources and then chat with them. You can selectively turn each on or off to get different answers. It's a great tool if you're dealing with a lot of data and need to quickly understand relationships between information.

The other one is Unriddle, which is directed at the research crowd. Start adding your sources—you can add as many as you need—and write about those topics. The app will uncover connections between sources and your writing, helping you move forward in academic work.

Which AI notes app should you use?

Moving from paper to digital is a big leap. AI is next: you can focus on having great ideas, recording them quickly, and seeing where the journey leads. From there, the machines can take care of cleaning, connecting, and helping you articulate them in the best way possible. Is it possible this is the perfect balance?

Of course, notes apps are extremely personal. I'd recommend trying a few on for size to see what feels good for you—that matters. All of the apps I wrote about here have at least a free trial, so take them for a spin, and pick the one that suits your style.

Related reading:

• How to automate your note-taking app

• The best AI productivity tools

• The best AI text generators