Best Note-Taking Apps in 2026: Obsidian vs Notion

The Short Answer: Which App to Pick

Obsidian is the best note-taking software in 2026 for one person, and Notion is the best one for a team. Obsidian is free, needs no account, keeps plain Markdown on your own disk, and adds optional sync for $4 a month billed annually. Notion is $10 per member per month billed yearly and is the only tool here built to run a group. If you want speed and nothing else, Apple Notes and Google Keep are free with the device you already own.

Below is the reasoning, the verified September 2026 prices, and the four apps that are easy to get wrong this year. Here is what everything actually costs.

Every figure came from the vendor's own pricing page on September 12, 2026. Two of these companies replaced their plans outright in the last year, Evernote and Mem, which is exactly why the hedged "approximate" pricing in most roundups is worse than useless.

---

What Actually Changed in 2026

If you read a note-app comparison written a year and a half ago, four of its claims are now wrong. These are the specific changes, with dates.

Notion learned to work offline. This was the standard knock on Notion for years, and it stopped being true with Notion 2.53 in August 2025. Offline pages now work for every member on every plan, including Free, in the desktop and mobile apps. Browsers are still excluded, Free users have to mark pages available offline by hand, databases only carry the first 50 rows of the first view, and embeds, forms and sharing stay unavailable. The blanket claim that Notion dies without a connection is finished.

Obsidian stopped requiring a commercial license. Until February 2025, anyone using Obsidian at a company with two or more employees was supposed to buy a commercial license. That requirement was dropped. The $50 per user per year license still exists, but it's now a voluntary way to support the project, not a condition of using it at work.

Mem started charging by the note. Mem rebuilt itself as "your AI chief of staff," and its pricing now meters note creation. The free plan allows 25 new notes a month. Mem Pro at $29 a month allows 100. There is no unlimited plan at any price, and annual billing isn't offered.

Evernote retired its plan names. Personal, Professional and Teams are gone, replaced by Starter and Advanced for individuals with Flexible and Enterprise for teams, and Evernote says plainly that you can't revert to an old plan or get a legacy discount. If you're comparing against a guide that quotes Evernote Personal pricing, that plan no longer exists.

Two more worth knowing: Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook in July 2026, so any 2026 article still calling it NotebookLM is dated on arrival. And Reflect published an open-source, local-first rewrite called Reflect Open in July 2026 that stores plain Markdown files, which is a very different product from the encrypted cloud app it sells today.

---

The Four Things That Still Differ

Block editing, bidirectional links, AI summarization and mobile capture exist in nearly every serious app now. When features converge, the comparison has to move somewhere harder to copy. Four things are left, and each one gets better or worse over years of daily use rather than on launch day.

Data ownership. Where do your notes physically live, and what happens when you stop paying? Local-first apps keep plain files on your disk that survive the company. Cloud-first apps keep your notes in their database, reachable by export but not truly yours. Call it a planning horizon. A second brain you're building for ten years should outlive any one vendor, and Evernote's users just learned what a change of ownership feels like.

Capture friction. The distance between "I want to save this" and "it's saved." Friction is where note systems quietly die. If saving a paragraph from an article takes six taps, you stop doing it, and an empty system is worthless no matter how elegant. Web and mobile capture are the friction-heavy paths, and most apps still treat them as afterthoughts.

Search at scale. Everything searches fine at 50 notes. The test is 5,000-plus, when you half-remember a quote and need it in two seconds. Good search blends full-text, fuzzy matching and increasingly semantic retrieval, so you find a note by meaning even when you've forgotten the exact words. Weak search turns a large vault into a write-only archive.

Total cost, including the AI tier. Solo pricing is a rounding error. Team pricing compounds, and in 2026 the AI line is no longer a small add-on. Notion folded its AI into the Business plan, so the floor for "Notion with AI" is $20 per member per month billed yearly rather than $10, and its Custom Agents meter on top of that. Capacities sells AI as a $10 monthly extra. Google's Keep AI features require a paid Google AI plan. Read the AI row before you read the base price.

---

The Head-to-Head Matrix, With Real Prices

Where a vendor publishes both monthly and annual rates, both are shown, because the gap is often 20% or more.

The cheapest serious tool, Obsidian, also has the strongest ownership story, which is unusual in software. Mem is the only app here that limits how many notes you're allowed to write. And against the two apps this comparison is really about, Evernote is the one you stay in rather than the one you start in: Advanced costs more per person than Notion Business while giving a single user less than free Obsidian.

---

Obsidian vs Notion in 2026, Head to Head

These two get compared more than any other pair here, so a table row won't do. Notion and Obsidian aren't really competing. They're built for two different fears: Notion for the fear of a disorganized team, Obsidian for the fear of losing control of your data. Once you know which fear is yours, the decision is already made.

Pick Notion if more than one person reads the same page, you want databases with relations and views without building them, or you'd rather never think about file storage. Its AI now searches the whole workspace by meaning, which matters a lot once a team wiki gets big.

Pick Obsidian if you're mostly working alone, you expect to keep these notes for a decade, or you want to shape the tool rather than accept its opinions. The gap that used to decide this in Notion's favor, web and mobile capture, has largely closed: Obsidian's own clipper handles highlights, templates and per-site rules, and Bases gave Obsidian the database views it was missing.

The honest version of the answer: if you're choosing for a team, this isn't close, take Notion. If you're choosing for yourself and you care about ownership, it also isn't close, take Obsidian. The people who agonize over it are usually the ones who haven't decided whether they're building for a group or for themselves.

---

App-by-App: Best At and Worst At

Notion

Best at: being a team's operating system. Databases, relations and views let a group run a wiki, a project tracker and a docs library in one place, and Notion AI is strong inside that collaborative workspace, summarizing pages, drafting in context and searching across the workspace by meaning. Notion says it passed 100 million users in August 2024, which is the most recent figure the company has published.

Worst at: raw speed, true ownership, and the shape of its AI pricing. Opening Notion to jot one line still feels heavy next to a native notes app, and your content lives in Notion's database. AI is no longer a cheap add-on you can bolt onto a $10 plan: it comes with Business at $20 per member per month, and the newer Custom Agents are metered separately at $10 per 1,000 monthly credits. Budget accordingly.

Obsidian

Best at: local-first ownership and depth, at a price that's hard to argue with. Your notes are plain Markdown on your own disk, there's no sign-up, and the vault outlives any company. Desktop search is excellent, the plugin ecosystem extends it almost without limit, and Bases (generally available since August 2025) turned notes into table and card views without leaving the file format. Sync is $4 per user per month billed annually, or $5 monthly, for one vault and 1 GB; Sync Plus is $8 billed annually, or $10 monthly, for ten vaults and 10 GB.

Worst at: the on-ramp, and collaboration. The flexibility power users love reads as overwhelming complexity to newcomers, and there's no real-time co-editing at all. The old complaint about web capture no longer holds: Obsidian's first-party Web Clipper launched in November 2024, is free and open source, runs on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Brave, Arc and Orion, and has roughly a million Chrome users. You do have to install it, and its templating rewards setup, but no community plugins are involved.

Evernote

Best at: capture maturity and archival. The web clipper has been refined for well over a decade, still sits at about two million Chrome users with a 4.7 rating, and remains one of the most reliable ways to pull a full article into a note. Full-text search reaches into text inside images. Version 11, released in January 2026, added an AI Assistant, semantic search and AI meeting notes, so this is not abandonware.

Worst at: price position and the free tier. Free is now 50 notes, one notebook and one device, which is a demo rather than a trial. Starter is $99 a year, or $14.99 if you pay monthly, and Advanced is $249.99 a year, and Advanced therefore costs more per person than Notion Business while doing less for a team. Old plans were retired with no grandfathering, and there's no way back to them. Evernote is a reasonable place to stay if you already have years of notes there. It's hard to justify as a starting point.

Mem

Best at: being an AI assistant that happens to keep notes. Mem repositioned itself as "your AI chief of staff," splitting into a Workspace that holds context and an Agent that acts on it. If what you want is a model that already knows your material, that framing is coherent.

Worst at: being a note-taking app, which is what this list is about. Mem meters note creation: 25 new notes a month on Free, 50 on the $9 Plus plan, 100 on the $29 Pro plan, and you have to reach $199 a month to get 2,000. There is no unlimited tier at any price, no annual billing, no published team pricing (a Mem Teams plan exists, but only through contact-sales), and no Android app at all. One hundred notes a month is about three a day. For most people that number decides it, and not in Mem's favor. Note that "Mem 2.0" shipped in October 2025, not this year, and its 1.0 to 2.0 transition removed features some users relied on.

Apple Notes and Google Keep

Best at: zero-friction default capture, and both quietly got better. Apple Notes supports note-to-note links (type >> or use Add Link), exports to Markdown as of iOS 26, and transcribes audio on iPhone 12 and later without needing Apple Intelligence at all. Google Keep gained Keep Live in September 2026, which turns spoken stream-of-consciousness into structured lists, plus Keep notes shared inside Google Messages.

Worst at: scaling into a knowledge system, and the fine print on their AI. Apple Notes has forward links but no documented backlink index, so you can point at a note and not see what points back. Every Keep AI feature requires a paid Google AI plan or a Pixel device, and the list-generation feature is Android-only today. Google documents per-note size limits in its Keep API reference, 20,000 characters of body text and 1,000 list items, but neither vendor publishes a note-count cap, so treat any such number you read elsewhere as invented. They make a great inbox and a poor library.

Reflect and Capacities

Best at: opinionated takes on thinking, at a knowable price. Reflect centers the daily note with end-to-end encryption using XChaCha20-Poly1305, independently audited by Doyensec, for $10 a month billed annually. Capacities models notes as typed objects (people, books, meetings) rather than flat pages, and its free tier is the most generous here: unlimited spaces, objects and blocks, sync across devices, offline support and full export, for nothing. Media uploads are the one thing it caps, at 5 GB and then 100 MB a month. Pro is $9.99 a month billed yearly, $11.99 monthly.

Worst at: platform coverage and scale, and one encryption caveat. Reflect has no free tier, no Windows app and no Android app, and using its AI features sends text to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, outside the encrypted model, so "encrypted and AI-powered" isn't simultaneously true. Its July 2026 open-source rewrite, Reflect Open, is a Mac download and an iPhone TestFlight build, still pre-1.0. Both companies are genuinely small: their iOS listings carry roughly 87 and 113 ratings respectively. That's a real risk to weigh, not a dealbreaker.

Worth knowing: Granola and Gemini Notebook

Two tools keep appearing in "best notes app" searches without being note apps in the traditional sense. Granola records and writes up meetings, raised a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation in March 2026, and runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android, with a free Basic tier that keeps a rolling 30 days of history and Business at $14 per user per month. Gemini Notebook, which Google renamed from NotebookLM in July 2026, turns a pile of sources into a grounded research workspace and reports more than 30 million users. Both are worth a look, but neither replaces a general note system, and our NotebookLM alternatives guide covers where that category fits.

---

Offline and Cross-Device Sync

Two questions decide this for most people: does it work on a plane, and does it stay in step across a phone, a laptop and a tablet? The answers differ more than the marketing suggests.

Obsidian is the only one where offline is the default state rather than a feature, because the files were never anywhere else. Notion's offline mode is real but partial: databases show the first 50 rows of the first view, and embeds, AI blocks, forms and buttons don't work without a connection. If you're on Android, Mem and Reflect are simply out, no matter how good the rest of the pitch sounds.

If your requirement is offline-first capture with AI on top, surviving a phone, a laptop and a tablet, there are two honest answers. Notion covers all three device classes including iPad, works offline in the desktop and mobile apps on every plan, and needs Business at $20 a member for real AI. Obsidian makes offline-first the storage model itself, runs everywhere including Android tablets, and reaches AI through plugins or its Clipper's Interpreter. Both merge changes when you reconnect rather than overwriting the older copy.

---

The Capture Problem Nobody Lists

Almost every "best note-taking app" guide stops at the destination. It compares editors, link graphs and AI features, then sends you off to fill your shiny new vault. Then nothing fills it.

Those guides skip the input side. Notes don't originate in the note app. They come from reading articles, scanning PDFs, working through books and watching videos. The note app is where ideas land. They're born somewhere else. If capture from those sources is painful, the best editor in the world stays empty. This is also why the pricing table above matters less than it looks. A $0 app you actually feed beats a $29 app you don't.

This is the gap Glasp's web highlighter is built to fill. You highlight directly on the page as you read, and those highlights become structured notes you can send straight into Notion, Obsidian, or anywhere else. Glasp is the capture front-end for whatever app you picked above.

The coverage is deliberately broad because reading is. Use YouTube Summary to pull key points and transcripts out of video instead of scrubbing back through it. Save Kindle highlights so the passages you marked in a book flow into your system instead of dying in a proprietary reader. And because Glasp is social, you can discover what others highlight in the same articles and books through the community, which surfaces signal you'd otherwise miss.

Notion, Obsidian or Capacities decide where ideas live. Glasp decides how they get there. The two layers solve different problems, and the capture layer is the one most comparisons forget. If you're weighing where reading fits in your stack, our guide to the best online highlighters goes deeper on that layer specifically, and the Kindle highlights workflow covers books end to end.

---

How to Choose: A Decision Table

Match your biggest pain point to the tool that solves it. One row the price table left out: if your constraint is spending nothing and still writing as much as you like, it's Obsidian or Capacities, the only two here that allow unlimited notes at $0.

Pick one home for your notes, then add Glasp as the intake pipe. The combination beats trying to make one app do both jobs, because no app yet does both jobs equally well. For the bigger picture on building a durable system, see our guides to personal knowledge management and building a second brain.

---

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Notion or Obsidian better in 2026?

Neither in the abstract, because they optimize for opposite fears. Notion is better if your problem is coordinating a team, and at $10 per member per month billed yearly it's the only tool here designed for shared editing. Obsidian is better if you want plain Markdown files you own forever, and it's free with no account. The two old tiebreakers have both moved this year: Notion now works offline, and Obsidian now ships its own web clipper, so pick on collaboration versus ownership instead.

How much does Obsidian actually cost?

The app is free for everyone, including at work, with no sign-up. Obsidian Sync is $4 per user per month billed annually or $5 billed monthly, covering one vault and 1 GB; Sync Plus is $8 annually or $10 monthly for ten vaults and 10 GB. Obsidian Publish is $8 per site per month billed annually. The $50 per user per year commercial license became optional in February 2025 and is now a way to support the project rather than a requirement.

Is Mem worth $29 a month?

Only if you want an AI assistant rather than a note-taking app. Mem's plans cap how many new notes you can create each month: 25 on Free, 50 on the $9 plan, 100 on the $29 Pro plan. There is no unlimited tier at any price, no annual billing, and no Android app. If you write more than about three notes a day, which most serious note-takers do, Mem's pricing model works against you.

How does Mem compare to Obsidian?

They aren't the same kind of product any more. Obsidian is free, stores plain Markdown on your disk and puts no ceiling on how much you write. Mem is $29 a month for 100 new notes a month, about three a day, with no unlimited tier at any price and no Android app. Pick Mem if you want an AI assistant that already knows your material and you write in small volumes. Pick Obsidian if you want to write as much as you like and still have the files in ten years.

Obsidian vs Reflect: which should I pick?

Obsidian if you want to own the files, Reflect if you want the daily note and end-to-end encryption. Obsidian is free and runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. Reflect is $10 a month billed annually with no free tier, no Windows app and no Android app. Reflect's encryption is XChaCha20-Poly1305, audited by Doyensec, but its AI features send text to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, outside that envelope. If you're not on Apple hardware, the decision is already made for you.

What are the best Apple Notes alternatives?

It depends on why you're leaving. If you want cross-platform and real linking, Obsidian is the closest upgrade and is free. If you want a shared workspace, Notion. If you like Apple Notes' simplicity but need structure, Capacities has a free tier with unlimited notes and a typed-object model. Bear in mind Apple Notes itself gained note-to-note links and Markdown export, so the gap is narrower than it was.

Which note-taking apps work offline?

Obsidian works offline by default because your notes are local files, and sync is the optional layer. Notion has worked offline in its desktop and mobile apps on every plan since August 2025, though not in a browser and with databases limited to the first 50 rows. Capacities states offline support on every tier including free. Evernote lists offline mode on every plan, including Free, though Free syncs to only one device at a time. Check this before you commit, because it's the dimension most roundups skip.

Is Evernote still worth using in 2026?

If you already have years of notes in it, yes, and version 11 added AI search and meeting notes in January 2026, so it's still being developed. As a new choice it's hard to justify: the free tier is 50 notes, one notebook and one device, and Advanced costs $249.99 a year, more per person than Notion Business. Old plan names were retired with no option to revert.

Does Glasp replace Notion or Obsidian?

No, and it isn't meant to. Glasp is a capture and highlighting layer for the web, PDFs, Kindle and YouTube. It feeds what you read into the app you already use. Think of it as the front door for everything you read, with Notion or Obsidian as the room where ideas live. They're complementary by design.

---

Conclusion

The 2026 verdict has no single winner, because these apps compete on different axes. Obsidian is the best local-first tool for people who want to own their data, and it's free. Notion is the best team operating system at $10 per member per month billed yearly. Capacities has the most generous free tier, Reflect the strongest encryption story, Evernote the most mature clipper and the least attractive pricing, and Mem has priced itself out of general note-taking by metering the notes themselves. Match your biggest constraint to the tool that solves it and ignore the feature checklists.

Then close the gap every other comparison leaves open: where your notes come from. Most knowledge work starts with reading, and that's the layer to get right first. Highlight as you read with Glasp and send what you keep into whichever app you chose above.

Want to go deeper on building the system itself? Read our guides on personal knowledge management and building a second brain. Pick the home, wire up the capture, and your notes app finally fills itself.