Best Note-Taking App for Mac in 2026: Honest Comparison
Notion, Obsidian, Apple Notes, Bear, Craft, and Stik — we put the most popular Mac note apps head to head. Here's which one actually fits your workflow.
There are too many note apps. Here's how to pick one.
In 2026, the number of note-taking apps for Mac has exploded. There's an app for every philosophy: apps that want to be your second brain, apps that want to replace your entire productivity stack, apps that want to own your data, and apps that just want you to capture a thought before it disappears.
The problem isn't finding a note app. It's figuring out which one is right for how you actually work.
This comparison covers the most popular options honestly — what each one does well, what it doesn't, and who it's built for. No affiliate links, no sponsored rankings.
Quick comparison table
| App | Price | Storage | Markdown | Offline | AI | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notion | Free / $10+ mo | Cloud | Partial | Limited | Yes | Teams, wikis |
| Obsidian | Free / $4+ mo | Local | Full | Yes | Plugin | PKM nerds |
| Apple Notes | Free | iCloud | No | Yes | Yes | Casual, Apple ecosystem |
| Bear | Free / $2.99 mo | iCloud | Yes | Yes | No | Writers |
| Craft | Free / $5 mo | Cloud | Partial | Yes | Yes | Design-conscious |
| Stik | Free | Local | Yes | Yes | Yes | Quick capture |
| Standard Notes | Free / $9 mo | Cloud (E2E) | Yes | Yes | No | Privacy-first |
Notion
Best for: teams, project management, collaborative wikis
Notion is the Swiss army knife of productivity tools. Pages, databases, kanban boards, calendars, wikis — it can do almost anything. If you need a shared workspace where multiple people contribute, comment, and organize together, Notion is hard to beat.
The problems start when you use it solo for quick notes.
Opening Notion to jot down a fleeting thought takes 4–6 seconds minimum. You need to find the right page, the right section, and decide where the note goes before you've even started typing. By then, the thought has already started fading.
Offline access is unreliable. If you're on a plane or have a spotty connection, some features simply don't work. Your notes are on Notion's servers, not your machine.
Notion raised prices in 2025, and the free tier is now meaningfully limited. For solo users who just want to write things down, it's an expensive solution to a simple problem.
Verdict: Excellent for structured team collaboration. Overkill — and genuinely clunky — for quick personal note capture.
Obsidian
Best for: personal knowledge management, linked thinking, power users
Obsidian has one of the most dedicated user bases in the productivity space, and for good reason. It stores everything as plain markdown files on your machine. It has a powerful graph view that shows how your notes connect. The plugin ecosystem is enormous — you can make Obsidian do almost anything.
If you're building a Zettelkasten, writing a book, or maintaining a detailed personal knowledge base, Obsidian is genuinely excellent.
But the learning curve is steep. Setting up a workflow requires choosing from hundreds of plugins, configuring hotkeys, deciding on a folder structure, and learning Obsidian's own conventions. Most people spend more time organizing their Obsidian vault than actually using it.
For quick capture, Obsidian is overkill. The app is designed for thinking in public and linking ideas together — not for a 2-second thought dump before you forget something.
Obsidian Sync costs $4/month and is required for reliable multi-device access. There are workarounds using iCloud or Dropbox, but they're not officially supported and can cause sync conflicts.
Verdict: The best tool for serious knowledge management. Too heavy for daily quick capture. Rewarding once you've put in the setup time.
→ See how Stik compares to Obsidian directly
Apple Notes
Best for: casual users deep in the Apple ecosystem
Apple Notes is the easiest note app to recommend to non-technical people. It's free, pre-installed, syncs instantly across every Apple device via iCloud, and works offline without any setup.
In 2026, Apple Notes has gotten genuinely good. Tags, Smart Folders, Quick Note via the corner of your screen, handwriting support, collaboration features. It's no longer the bare-bones app it was five years ago.
The fundamental limitation is portability. Your notes live in a proprietary iCloud database. You can export individual notes, but there's no clean way to bulk export to markdown or any other open format. If you ever want to leave Apple Notes, migration is painful.
There's also no markdown support in the traditional sense — what you see is what you get, formatted in Apple's own way.
Verdict: The right default for most Mac users who don't have strong opinions about note-taking. If you're technical and care about owning your data, the format lock-in becomes a real problem.
→ See how Stik compares to Apple Notes directly
Bear
Best for: writers, markdown fans who want a polished Mac app
Bear is beautifully designed and genuinely pleasant to write in. Full markdown support, a thoughtful interface, hashtag-based organization, and a focus mode that gets out of your way. For writers who spend long sessions in a single document, Bear feels right.
The free tier stores notes locally but doesn't sync across devices — that requires Bear Pro at $2.99/month or $24.99/year. That's reasonable, but it's worth knowing sync is a paid feature.
Bear uses its own SQLite-based storage under the hood, not plain files. You can export to markdown, but the actual note data isn't stored as individual .md files you can access directly. For most users this doesn't matter; for power users who want to grep their notes or open them in VS Code, it matters a lot.
Verdict: A genuinely excellent writing app for Mac. The best choice if you want a polished experience and don't need raw file access. Less suited to quick throwaway capture.
Craft
Best for: design-conscious users who want beautiful documents
Craft is the most visually impressive note app on this list. Block-based editing, beautiful typography, share-as-webpage features, and a design that feels intentional at every level. Writing in Craft just feels good.
The free tier is generous for basic use. Paid plans start at $5/month and unlock advanced features.
The trade-off is format lock-in. Craft exports to markdown and PDF, but the rich formatting — block layouts, card views, linked documents — doesn't survive the export. If you build a detailed Craft workspace and then want to migrate, you'll lose a lot of structure.
Craft is also more oriented toward polished, shareable documents than quick, messy note capture. It's optimized for the output more than the input.
Verdict: The best-looking note app on Mac. Worth it if you create a lot of shareable documents. Not the right tool if you just need to dump thoughts quickly.
Standard Notes
Best for: privacy-first users who don't trust anyone with their data
Standard Notes is the only app on this list with true end-to-end encryption by default. Your notes are encrypted on your device before they ever touch a server. The team literally cannot read your notes — not if a government asks, not if they want to.
The free tier is functional but basic. Extended features — rich editors, themes, two-factor auth — require a subscription at roughly $9/month.
For most users, Standard Notes is more security than they need. But if you're a journalist, lawyer, activist, or anyone who writes genuinely sensitive material, the encryption model here is categorically different from everything else on this list.
Verdict: The only serious choice if privacy is non-negotiable. More friction than a casual user will want.
Stik
Best for: quick capture, developers, anyone who wants their notes as plain files
Stik was built to solve one specific problem: capturing a thought in under 3 seconds without breaking your flow.
Press a global keyboard shortcut (works in any app, including fullscreen ones). A floating post-it window appears. You type. You close it. The note is saved as a plain .md file to ~/Documents/Stik/ on your Mac. You're back to what you were doing.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Every note is a plain markdown file. Not a database entry, not a proprietary format — an actual file in a folder on your machine. You can open them in VS Code, search with grep, version them with git, back them up with rsync, or sync them by pointing the folder to iCloud Drive or Dropbox.
AI-powered search runs entirely on-device using Apple's NaturalLanguage framework. Search for "authentication" and it finds your note about "login security" even if the word never appears in the note. No API keys, no data sent anywhere, no subscription required for AI.
Stik is free and open source under the MIT license. There is no paid tier, no cloud dependency, no account to create.
The trade-off is intentional scope. Stik doesn't have databases, linked notes, graph views, or collaborative features. It doesn't try to be your second brain. It just catches the thought before it escapes, and saves it somewhere you own.
Verdict: The best quick-capture tool for Mac in 2026. Not a replacement for Notion or Obsidian — a complement to them.
How to choose
You work with a team → Notion Everything shared, everyone commenting, databases and wikis. Notion is built for this and nothing else comes close.
You want to build a knowledge base → Obsidian Linked notes, a plugin for everything, plain files under the hood. Accept the setup cost and it pays back over years.
You live in the Apple ecosystem → Apple Notes Frictionless, free, syncs everywhere. The right default for anyone who doesn't have specific requirements.
You write long-form content → Bear The best writing experience on Mac. Worth $2.99/month if you spend hours in documents.
You need real privacy → Standard Notes End-to-end encryption, no exceptions. The only serious choice for sensitive material.
You need to capture thoughts without breaking flow → Stik Instant capture, plain files, on-device AI, completely free. Built for the moment between ideas, not for organizing them.
Compare in detail: Stik vs SideNotes · Stik vs Apple Notes · Stik vs Obsidian
The honest answer
There's no single best note app for Mac. There's only the best one for how you work.
Most people benefit from two apps: a heavy app (Notion, Obsidian) for organizing and structuring information, and a lightweight app (Stik, Apple Notes) for catching quick thoughts before they disappear.
The two jobs are different enough that trying to do both with one tool almost always means compromising on one of them.
Pick the right tool for each job. Your thinking will thank you.