Best Note Taking Apps in 2026

Granola is an AI-powered notepad designed to help individuals and teams, particularly product teams, get more value from their meetings. It transcribes computer audio directly, eliminating the need for invasive meeting bots, and allows users to take their own notes during calls. After a meeting, Granola uses advanced AI models to enhance these raw notes, extracting key themes, insights, action items, and even generating follow-up emails or summaries. The tool is particularly beneficial for product teams, enabling them to turn customer conversations into actionable product insights, validate roadmap decisions, and build a searchable library of user research. It integrates with popular tools like Notion, Slack, HubSpot, and Zapier, streamlining workflows and ensuring that insights are easily shared and acted upon across different departments. Granola aims to help users stay present in meetings while ensuring no critical information is missed, ultimately boosting productivity and decision-making.

Fathom is an AI notetaker that automatically transcribes, summarizes, and extracts action items from your virtual meetings. It aims to eliminate the need for manual note-taking, allowing users to stay fully present during conversations. The tool provides shockingly accurate transcripts, instant summaries, and action items, which are delivered directly to your inbox. Fathom integrates seamlessly with popular communication and productivity tools like Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, and Asana, automatically syncing meeting notes, insights, and action items. It also features an "Ask Fathom" capability, allowing users to search meeting content and get customizable AI summaries tailored to their team's workflow. This helps teams move work forward faster by reducing time spent on searching and follow-up. Fathom is designed for various teams including sales, marketing, operations, HR, and product & engineering, helping them improve collaboration, track progress, and gain actionable insights from every meeting.

Evernote was the note-taking app that defined the category. Capture notes, clip web pages, organize with notebooks and tags-the original cross-platform note storage. The web clipper remains excellent. Search finds notes reliably. The platform has years of notes for loyal users. Long-time users keep using Evernote for the accumulated value of years of stored notes and familiar workflows.

Notion AI brings artificial intelligence directly into Notion's workspace. Summarize notes, generate first drafts, and brainstorm ideas without leaving your docs. Translate content and fix grammar automatically. Extract action items from meeting notes. Q&A answers questions about your workspace content. AI that works where you already work, making every page smarter.

Fellow is meeting management software that helps teams have more productive meetings. AI-generated meeting agendas from past discussions. Collaborative note-taking during meetings. Action items automatically tracked and followed up. Integrates with Google Calendar, Zoom, and Slack. Meeting analytics show how you spend your time. Transform meetings from time-wasters into productive sessions with clear outcomes.

Notion Calendar is a beautifully designed calendar app that unifies work and personal schedules. Integrated with Notion, it shows project deadlines alongside events, offers built-in scheduling links, and supports multi-timezone collaboration-all with a fast, keyboard-driven interface.

Microsoft OneNote is a free-form digital notebook that lets you capture notes, drawings, screenshots, and audio recordings in organized notebooks. Part of Microsoft 365, OneNote syncs across all devices and integrates deeply with other Microsoft products like Outlook, Teams, and Word. The canvas-based interface allows placing content anywhere on a page, making it great for brainstorming and visual note-taking. OneNote is particularly strong in education and enterprise environments where Microsoft ecosystem is prevalent.

Nabla is an ambient clinical AI assistant used by health systems to capture the patient-clinician conversation and generate structured notes. It also offers clinical-grade dictation inside Epic and other major EHRs, plus E/M and ICD-10 coding suggestions that stay under the clinician. Nabla cites a large number of health organizations, clinicians, and patient encounters. HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR are listed. Partners can embed via Nabla Connect or an API. A free trial is on the site; enterprise rollouts are quote-only.

Otter.ai is an AI-powered meeting assistant that automatically transcribes, summarizes, and extracts action items from your meetings. With up to 95% accuracy, it works seamlessly with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, joining your meetings as a participant to capture everything. Beyond transcription, Otter uses AI to generate summaries, identify key topics, and assign action items to team members. The AI Chat feature lets you query past conversations-ask "What did we decide about the Q4 budget?" and get instant answers. With integrations to Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and Notion, Otter fits into existing workflows. Used by major companies including Salesforce, Harvard, Amazon, and IBM, it is consistently rated as one of the most accurate transcription tools available.

XMind is a mind mapping and brainstorming application available on desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux) and mobile (iOS, Android). It supports multiple diagram types including mind maps, org charts, tree charts, fishbone diagrams, and timelines. The Premium tier adds real-time collaboration, cloud sync, and an AI copilot for brainstorming assistance. XMind is popular with students, professionals, and teams who need visual thinking tools for planning, note-taking, and idea organization.