My Note Taking Roster

I've always been searching for the perfect note taking app. An app that I can store all my ideas, lists, random quotes, draft blog posts, and everything in between. Yet I've never found a single app that perfectly suits these various type of notes. Each app I've tried has excelled at one and been poor for the others. I've since accepted that there isn't one notes app to rule them all. I've had to scatter my notes across multiple services just to get the best experience for each type. Here's what I use now.

Google Keep

Keep is great for quick notes and lists. Any random thought I'd like to write down goes in Keep first. Every list that I'd like to track goes there as well. It's easy to tag and label notes and search for the one you're looking for later.

It's not great for longer notes since there's little formatting and the web editor is not suited for longer notes at all.

Simplenote

I only added Simplenote to my roster of notes app last year but it's become a key member. It's great for long notes that you'd like to just sit and type out. I write most of my 200 WAD posts in it and blog posts as well. Before I used Evernote for long notes but it's interface and editor has always been clunky and a pain to manage for me. It has a lot of features but all I really need is a decent editor and a chronological list for these type of notes.

The searching and tagging system it has isn't nearly as intuitive as Keep's and it doesn't have any formatting options if you really need those.

OneNote

OneNote has a completely different notes paradigm than most apps. You can create notebooks with multiple pages and each page is basically a blank canvas where you can type anywhere and insert anything into it. It has a ton of formatting options as well. I mainly use it for collections of notes on related topics. For a new side project, I can collect a ton of different notes on one page that I can easily refer back to.

The interface can take a while to get used to and it's not easy to navigate through a page on mobile but for my use case, it's perfect when used on desktop.

Those are the main apps in my notes roster right now. If you're still searching for the best notes app for you I think you should give this approach a try. Find the right platforms for specific types of notes and get the best experience for each. It's not perfect but it's been a lot better for me than forcing them all into one platform.