The Best Notes Apps for iPad

The best notes apps can do more than just take your doodles and to-do lists. They can remind you to email a friend or help you outline a new book, and they should be accessible on multiple platforms. They should also sync between them and work offline when needed.

This minimalist note-taking app has a beautiful, clean UI that gets out of your way and lets you focus on what matters most. It supports different font styles and sizes, and it can create widgets to show you recent notes at a glance. It can even let you scribble on photos or scan documents.

It's no surprise that Notion tops our list of the best note-taking apps for iPad. Like OneNote, it's a digital notebook with rich note-taking functionality, including built-in to-do lists, code snippets, and the ability to publish notes as web pages. It syncs across its iPhone and iPad apps as well as its in-browser client, and it's free for personal use. A premium subscription unlocks collaborative features for multiple users.

Notion is the only app on our list to push the boundaries of what a notes app can do and almost pulls it off. Each note is called a "page" in Notion, and every page can contain anything that could be placed on a page in a word processor—including text, checklists, files, tables, code, LaTeX equations, and diagrams. You can add as many of these blocks to a page as you want and organize them in whatever manner you choose.