Zoho Notebook

What's the pitch? A full notes app that costs next to nothing.

The free plan has no ads and syncs across your phone, your laptop and the web. Zoho says outright that it doesn't sell your data or run adverts.

Notes are cards. A text card for writing, a checklist card for the shopping, an audio card for a voice memo, a photo card for the whiteboard you snapped after a meeting. They live in notebooks with covers, so it looks more like a shelf than a file list.

It's on everything, too. iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, the web and even Linux.

And Zoho keeps adding to it. This year's updates brought a Markdown editor and a way for AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to read and write your notes.

It's a bit rough round the edges. That's the fair summary of the complaints.

Sync comes up most. One App Store reviewer found notes made on a laptop turning up twice on the phone, or not at all. A student lost half of what they'd written, more than once. Those reviews are from 2022 and 2024, so some of it may be fixed.

The card look isn't for everyone, either. An Evernote user who tried to switch in 2019 gave up because everything was big tiles, with no compact list. A Hacker News commenter called it "on the ugly side", while still liking the price.

Handwriting is hit and miss. You can write with an Apple Pencil, but one long-time user said the feature that turns it into text kept jumping in before they'd finished a word.

And the free plan's 500 MB sounds fine until you add photos and recordings. Oddly, Zoho's App Store listing says 2 GB. Its pricing page says 500 MB, and that's the one we'd go by.

Start free. The plan is called Essential, and there's no time limit on it.

Pro is $19.99 a year, or $1.99 month to month. You get 100 GB, files up to 1 GB each and search inside images and documents.

Pro Plus is $39.99 a year, or $3.99 monthly. That's the AI one: up to 30 hours of transcription a month, mind maps and writing help. For a team, Business is $4.16 a person a month on yearly billing.

Feeling sure? You can pay for three years up front: $49.99 for Pro or $99.99 for Pro Plus. It's a good price, but three years is a long time to bet on any notes app, so we'd do one year first.

Two things to watch. Buy on Zoho's website, not inside the iPhone app, because the US App Store lists Pro at $24.99 a year. And there's no instant trial of Pro. You have to ask support for one.

Zoho Notebook has 4.7 on the App Store from about 23,900 ratings.

The fans tend to be people who wanted something nicer than the notes app their phone came with. They like the covers, the colours and the tags, and they use it for everything from grocery lists to recipes and scanned receipts.

The critics split in two. Some hit bugs: slow syncing, crashes, notes that doubled up. Others wanted more control over their writing, like highlighting, or changing the font for part of a note. Some of those wishes are from older reviews, and the editor has had updates since.

It barely comes up on Hacker News. When it does, it's as the cheap one with apps everywhere. One person there says they had issues with it, and with Evernote and OneNote too, before settling on Obsidian.