So it has come to one of those

fairly infrequent points in my life

where I start to reevaluate some of the tools

that I'm using to get my work done.

And this time around my critical eye has fallen

on the apps that hold my thoughts and machinations.

I like that word, it's a good word, machinations.

Anyway, yes, it is time to talk about note taking apps

because after about a full week of let's be honest here

far more research than I should have done for this topic.

I am now ready to present to you

my top 10 note-taking apps in 2019.

Now before we dive in

I do want to talk a little bit about my criteria

for this list.

First, the apps on this list

primarily use text as their input method

because I can type a lot faster than I can write

and I want to be able to type and get data out

at the speed at which I think.

So while we're gonna talk about apps

like Evernote and OneNote

which can support drawing to an extent,

we're not gonna focus on apps

that primarily use hand writing as their method of input

like Noteshelf 2 for the iPad.

Plus a lot of those apps

have integrations with Evernote anyway.

Secondly, every app I'm gonna talk about here

has some form of cross platform availability.

Not every app on the list is available on every platform

but nothing on this list is available on only one OS.

And finally criteria number three

which I find to be the most important criteria,

I don't think an app is the note-taking app

unless it combines its note-taking or editor area

with its UI for browsing files or notes.

I think this is crucial for note-taking app,

because I'm constantly referencing different notes,

searching for things,

and I want to have all that available in one window.

So that means apps like Google Docs

and Microsoft Word, Dropbox Paper

are all not going to make the cut here.

Though I do have to admit the Dropbox Paper in particular

has probably the best writing experience in writing app

that I've ever tried.

Though we do have one app on this list

that does come very close to that level of greatness.

So stay tuned for that app.

Before we get to that one though,

we do have to go to the other entries on my list.

And where better to start than with Evernote.

Yes, Evernote.

The granddaddy of syncing note-taking apps.

I've been using Evernote

for darn near nine years at this point

and I have to admit that it's a very powerful tool

that I basically can't get myself to break away from.

Its got a pretty capable rich text editor,

the ability to share notebooks with other people.

It's got tags, the ability to save searches

and a ton of different integrations with other apps.

It also features optical character recognition

which means that you can scan in images with text

and it can make that text searchable

and you can also annotate images in the app as well.

But for all its strengths, Evernote frustrates me,

and that's primarily because

you cannot create nested hierarchies of notebooks.

You can do notebooks and you can notebook stacks,

but that's it.

Now some people out there,

like the writer Michael Hyatt for example,

advocate using a tag based structure

to gain that hierarchy instead.

But that doesn't really work

because on the Evernote mobile apps

those tags are not going to show in their hierarchy,

they're all alphabetical, so it kind of breaks down.

Still, Evernote is incredibly powerful,

it's available on basically every platform.

And because of those reasons I am continuing to use it

at least for certain parts my work flow,

even though I have many other options in 2019.

Speaking of other options, let's now talk about OneNote.

Microsoft OneNote is probably

the closest competitor to Evernote in terms of features

as you're gonna find similar image support,

optical character recognition,

the ability to annotate images

and honestly the editor area

is a lot more flexible and customizable than Evernote is.

Additionally, Microsoft OneNote is free, like actually free.

The only way you'd ever pay for Microsoft OneNote

if you decided to upgrade your OneDrive storage

as that's the only way the ever charge you money,

they just use OneDrive for their storage.

That being said, I personally just can't get into OneNote.

I know a lot of people out there love it,

it's incredibly powerful which is why it's on my list,

but it doesn't work for me

because you cannot sort notes within your notebooks

by date modified, date created or alphabetically.

You can only drag them around

like they're actual note cards or pages in a notebook.

And that combined with limited tagging capabilities

and the same number of organizational levels of hierarchy

as you get in Evernote, you don't get more,

it makes OneNote kind of a no go for me personally.

That brings us over to Bear,

which is an absolutely beautiful app

that I wish that I could use

as a daily driver in my work flow.

But Bear is a Mac and iOS exclusive

and that's kind of a bummer

because I also use Windows on a daily basis

alongside my Mac and iPhone.

That being said,

if you are a Mac and iPhone only kind of person,

Bear is definitely worth your consideration.

This is primarily because unlike Evernote and OneNote,

Bear has a beautiful hybrid markdown editor.

And if you're not familiar with markdown,

it's a markup language

that allows you to format your text as you type

by putting different symbols around your text.

So for example, you can put two stars around a word

to bold that word.

Now a lot of markdown editors force you

to write in plain text

and then you can only preview your formatted text.

But Bear doesn't do that,

it actually format your text as you write

which I really really like.

Additionally, Bear also has

a pretty interesting organizational system

that does let you create

as many levels of hierarchy as you like

and they use tags to achieve this.

By typing hash tags in your document

and then using slashes to create additional tags beyond it

you can create your own organizational structure.

Now some people don't like having tags

right in the editor window like that

but some people might not mind that.

And I also have to give a shout out to their archive feature

which lets you archive notes and take them out of search

and your organizational hierarchy but not delete them.

Of course if you are an Apple exclusive kind of person

then we do have to consider Apple's own notes program.

Mainly because it's free and unlike Bear,

if you happen to not have access

to an Apple computer at some point

or you're a part-time Windows guy like me,

you can at least access your notes at icloud.com.

Now though Apple Notes doesn't have

the awesome hyper markdown capabilities of Bear

or some other apps we're gonna talk about,

it does have really nice formatting tools.

And to my eyes, the default formatting

looks better than it does on Evernote.

Additionally, yep, you guessed it,

you can indeed create your own

nested list of hierarchical folders

and I love that feature.

Moving on to the next item on our list,

we are now at Google Keep

which is a pretty nice and simple note-taking app

that's available in the browser

and also on pretty much all of your devices as well.

Now when I was testing Google Keep

the number one word

that kept coming up to my mind was simplicity,

it's a very simple note-taking app.

Very simple but effective formatting options

and you can even change the background color of your notes

to visually distinguish them.

The problem for me though

is there's only one level of tags that you can create,

you cannot create a hierarchical level

of basically anything,

so there's no hierarchical organization.

So I guess if you're gonna use Google Keep

as a note-taking app,

you're gonna want to rely mostly on their search function.

And I guess with it being Google,

that search function is probably pretty good.

But that being said,

since it lacks true organizational hierarchy,

I don't see this as a viable alternative

to Evernote or OneNote or anything more complex.

But if you want a scratch pad for taking notes

and setting reminders for later,

Google Keep could be a good bet.

That brings us over to Notion.

And I know a lot of you guys were waiting for me

to talk about Notion.

It's definitely the app

that I get the most questions about these days

and for good reason, because notion is stupidly powerful.

It's definitely the most flexible tool on this list,

allowing you to layout pages however you want,

create an infinite hierarchy organization on the sidebar

and even interlink between pages easily.

It's also got a great hybrid markdown editor

that's very similar to the one you're gonna find in Bear,

though it does have some quirks

that keep me from really loving it,

such as the fact that you cannot precisely select text

if it goes outside a single block of information.

But my gripes about the editor aside,

Notion can do things that no other app can do,

that's mainly because the combination

of a couple of different features.

First, their table feature is actually a database feature,

so every row in a table actually links to its own page

And secondly, they've got a templating feature

that allows you to make basically anything into a template.

And I have combined these two features to build Notion out

into an incredibly powerful video management platform

that has made our editing process so much smoother.

So in one area of the app

I've got a database with all of our videos

who's sponsoring them, their publish dates,

all kinds of good information like that.

But if you click into any video

you'll see there's a very well laid out template

that allows for us to create

a B-Roll database, a script

and also has some checklists

that are automatically populated

every single time you do a video.

So for very complicated processes

like going through the publishing process,

we can just go to that automatically generate a checklist

and make sure nothing gets left behind.

Now like I said, I get a lot of questions

about Notion over on Twitter and on Instagram.

So if you guys want to see a more detailed

Notion video on this channel,

definitely let me know in the comments down below.

Right now the verdict is out on

if it's a great note-taking app,

but it's definitely a great organizational app in general

and it's, again, very flexible.

All right, let's talk about Standard Notes.

Now Standard Notes as far as I can tell, I could be wrong,