Most "best note app" roundups go wrong in the same place. They rank these tools against each other as if they're competing, when a local Markdown vault and a cloud database are really two different products that happen to share a shelf. The question worth asking isn't which app wins. It's which architecture fits how you actually work.
Ask it that way and the free tiers sort themselves into three groups.
Group one: it lives on your machine
The open-source and offline-by-default crowd — Obsidian, Joplin, Logseq, AFFiNE, Standard Notes. Your notes are files, on your device.
Obsidian is the cleanest example. Unlimited notes as plain Markdown on your own hardware, plus the full editor, linking, graph view and the whole community plugin and theme ecosystem. Free for personal use. No card, no account. And because it's local-first, your notes are there whether or not the wifi is.
That's a bigger deal than it sounds. Files on disk mean nothing to export later, nobody to be locked into, and no dependence on a company sticking around. The cost is setup. You handle your own sync, and the flexibility that makes Obsidian great also means you have to decide how to use it.
Group two: free plans you can actually live in
Notion, OneNote, Apple Notes and Zoho Notebook all give away enough to settle into permanently.
Notion is the usual recommendation, for a concrete reason: the free plan hands one user unlimited blocks and full database features, with no trial clock ticking. If you want tables, relations and multiple views of the same information, that's a serious amount of software for zero dollars.
Its weak spot is exactly Obsidian's strong one. Notion has improved at casual offline use, but it still isn't the same as plain files sitting on a disk — and if you work on planes, trains or a connection you don't trust, that difference decides it.
Apple Notes gets less credit than it's earned. If you're already on Apple hardware and don't need linking or plugins, it's the free pick. It's also the only genuinely free AI note-taking option out there: no subscription, no token limits. The catch is that the AI needs a newer device.
Group three: free, with an asterisk
Evernote and GoodNotes still have free tiers, but they behave more like extended previews of the paid version. That's fine — just know you're starting a countdown rather than moving in.
The AI question is smaller than it looks
Notion AI is the better bet for teams and connected workspaces, with Ask Notion and AI agents in the mix, but those live on the $20 per user per month Business plan. Twenty dollars a month for note-taking AI alone is a tough sell when Apple Notes does AI for free on supported hardware.
Choose by your constraint, not the feature list
Care most about offline access and owning your files? Obsidian. Care most about structure and databases? Notion. Already carrying an iPhone and want it to just work? Apple Notes.
Everything after that is taste — and taste is a lot easier to satisfy once you've picked the right shape.
Image: fauxels, via Pexels
