Built by a two-person team, UpNote feels every bit as polished as note-taking apps from huge corporations. It offers user-friendly apps for every major platform and seamlessly converts Markdown code into rich text formatting. Best of all, you can buy the full version for a one-time fee and never worry about the (still reasonable) subscription costs. You have to deal with some downsides, most notably the limited file size for uploads and the omission of drawing tools; however, UpNote is otherwise a worthy note-taking app that keeps your expenses down. Still, our Editors' Choice winners for the category remain Joplin, which offers a better free version, and OneNote, which is far more capable.

Pricing: Cost-Effective, With One Main Limitation

UpNote offers a free version that allows you to sync notes across all your devices. But instead of imposing a limit on total storage, UpNote restricts you to just 50 notes and doesn't allow attachments, importing (aside from plain text files), or exporting. Far more generous free applications are available, namely OneNote, Joplin, and Obsidian.

A Premium UpNote subscription costs $1.99 per month. Alternatively, you can buy a lifetime license for $39.99. Lifetime subscribers get access to all the current features in perpetuity—the company can't guarantee that Premium Lifetime members will get all future features, however, citing the unknowable nature of related costs.

As of this writing, the Premium tier removes all restrictions of the free version, while also adding support for notebook covers and interface themes. It's possible to lock your notebooks at this level as well. UpNote recommends storing fewer than 20,000 notes to ensure optimal performance when syncing across devices. Each file upload can be up to 20MB.

The only way to pay for a premium subscription is via UpNote's Android, iOS, or macOS app; you can't upgrade via the service's Linux or Windows apps. The UpNote team suggests paying through one of the supported platforms and then syncing with the other apps to access paid features across all your devices.

UpNote's paid plan is much more affordable than those for other note-taking apps. Evernote subscriptions, for example, start at $14.99 per month. Compare this with a Microsoft 365 Personal plan ($99.99 per year), which provides 1TB of storage with no syncing limits for OneNote (and all other files you want to store in OneDrive), along with email hosting and access to other Office suite apps. Apple Notes syncs using iCloud storage, which starts at $11.88 per year for 50GB of storage or $35.88 per year for 200GB of storage.

The biggest hiccup with these comparisons is UpNote's file size limitation. If you want to store files larger than 20MB in your notes, consider alternative options. If not, UpNote is an especially good value.

Interface and Ease of Use: Clear and Consistent

As mentioned, UpNote offers desktop apps for Linux, macOS, and Windows, as well as mobile apps for Android and iOS. You can't access it via a web browser.

(Credit: UpNote/PCMag)

After you download UpNote, you can start using it immediately. You don't need to create an account until you intend to start syncing notes to your other devices. I appreciate that you can get a feel for the app quickly without needing to provide an email address.

The interface should be quite familiar if you've used Apple Notes, Joplin, or older versions of Evernote. The leftmost panel allows you to choose a notebook or tag to browse, the middle panel lists your notes, and the rightmost panel (the largest one) displays the currently open note. I enjoy the minimalist and spacious look.

Formatting Options: Unobtrusive Markdown Support

Creating a new note is as simple as clicking the New Note button in the upper right. The first line you type becomes the name of the note, after which you can type whatever you want. UpNote relies on rich tech for formatting, and it will automatically turn any Markdown code into that format. It's a nice compromise, even if some formatting elements, such as images and links, don't translate from Markdown. If you reflexively use Markdown, UpNote can step in and fix it, but everyone else doesn't even need to know that this feature exists.

Notebook Organization and Tagging: A Useful Set of Tools

You can create as many notebooks as you like and even nest notebooks if that helps you organize your files. It's possible to choose a cover image for each notebook from either a stock image or a custom image, making it easy to distinguish notebooks at a glance. Notion does that, too. You can store notes in multiple notebooks, something I haven't encountered in other note-taking apps. Effectively, this means that your notebooks work more like tags, which is odd because UpNote also supports tags. You can tag any note by including a #hashtag in its text, as you can in OneNote. This provides you with yet another way to organize your notes.

(Credit: UpNote/PCMag)

A recent update introduces Spaces, a higher-level way to organize your notes. You can add as many Spaces as you like, each containing a distinct collection of notebooks. This is useful, for example, if you want to separate work-related notes from personal ones or keep a separate collection of notebooks for different projects.

(Credit: UpNote/PCMag)

You can add tasks to any note by clicking the checklist button, which creates a clickable checkbox beside the current line. It also adds the note to the Todo section in the sidebar, where it stays until you complete it. Effectively, you can use UpNote as a sort of to-do list app for keeping track of items you intend to follow up on.

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UpNote offers a version history feature, allowing you to browse past versions of your notes. By default, it backs up 50 versions of every note, but you can optionally increase the versions up to unlimited if you like.

Embedding Files: Simple, With PDF Support

Images you drag into UpNote appear directly within your note. You can preview PDFs and fill out forms directly within the application. Any other type of attachment appears as a clickable link. I would like the option to preview more types of files, similar to the way you can in Evernote, but supporting PDF is the most important one to me.

(Credit: UpNote/PCMag)

UpNote allows you to embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and, to the best of my knowledge, any other service that offers embedding. I even managed to get it to work with Spotify, which is not listed as an option in the documentation. Embedding files is useful if you're trying to save a collection of media or resources to check out later.

Importing and Exporting: Versatile Enough

UpNote can import your existing notes from Evernote, Simplenote, and others. It's also possible to import an entire folder full of Markdown notes, which you can easily grab from Obsidian, Joplin, and any other apps that store notes in that format. Additional supported formats include HTML, RTF, TXT, and Word. Note that importing any file type other than text documents requires a Premium subscription.

For exporting, you can obtain all your notes in HTML, Markdown, PDF, and TXT file formats. These are all fairly universal formats, so you can easily export your notes from UpNote and import them into another app.

Keyboard Shortcuts: Easily Accessible

Double-clicking on any note opens it in a new window without the sidebar. This is a great way to keep notes open all the time or to work on multiple notes at once. UpNote also offers a focus mode, which hides everything but the text of the note you're working on—a boon if you're trying to focus on writing.

UpNote has extensive keyboard shortcuts, but you don't need to memorize them thanks to a backslash menu. Type a backslash, and the app pops up a menu with all of the available formatting shortcuts, which you can browse using the arrow keys.

(Credit: UpNote/PCMag)

Web Clipper: Simple, But Effective

UpNote offers a decent web clipper for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that grabs the content of a web page and turns it into a note. The extension confusingly pulls in the text of the article you're reading without any prompts, but it works well enough once you get used to it. Still, I wish it would let you customize the clipping like the clippers for Evernote and OneNote.

What's Missing in UpNote?

As mentioned, UpNote lacks a web app. It also can't search attachments. Bear Evernote, and OneNote can all search attachments using optical character recognition (OCR), for comparison.

Otherwise, UpNote doesn't support sketching, meaning iPad note-takers should consider alternatives, such as Notability or OneNote. You also don't get a custom email address for forwarding emails into your note-taking app, unlike with Evernote and OneNote.

Finally, UpNote lacks support for collaboration aside from sharing notes. You can create a URL to share any note from UpNote, but the URL leads to a read-only web page. If you want to collaborate on editing notes with others, Evernote and OneNote are your best bets.

Of course, you might not need any of these features. If you're just looking for the basics, then it's absolutely worth spending less for UpNote.

Is UpNote Safe to Use?

The UpNote team is based in Vietnam and says that all data is stored on a Firebase server in the US. Google provides the Firebase service, which encrypts data in transit using HTTPS and encrypts data at rest. You can set up multi-factor authentication for your account.

If you don't sign up for an account and therefore don't have syncing enabled, there's no need to worry, as UpNote stores all your information locally on your device.