We took each of these with a fresh account and no payment method, wrote notes for two weeks across two devices, and then tried to get everything out again.
The question is the one this desk always asks: can you use it indefinitely without a card?
The three that pass
Obsidian is the unusual one, and it passes for a reason none of the others do: your notes are Markdown files in a folder on your own disk. The app is free for personal use and requires no account at all.
That means the free tier is not a commercial decision that can be revised. There is no service holding your notes, so there is nothing for a future pricing change to hold hostage.
What costs money is Sync — moving notes between devices through Obsidian’s servers. You can do that for nothing with iCloud, Dropbox or Syncthing, each of which works and each of which has sharp edges. We paid for Sync as a convenience and want to be clear it was a convenience.
Apple Notes and Google Keep are both genuinely free with no caps that ordinary use reaches. They are free because they are retention features for platform businesses rather than products that must monetise, which makes them more structurally stable than most subscription apps — and ties your notes to one ecosystem.
Keep is a capture tool rather than a document editor. Excellent for fragments, wrong for anything long.
The freemium one
Notion’s free tier is a real plan and its friction is on the way out.
Your notes live in Notion’s block model. Export produces files that lose a good deal of the structure you built, and that structure was the reason you chose it. So the switching cost grows every month you use it — which is a more durable form of lock-in than a paywall, and less visible.
We are not grading that as a trap, because nothing is misrepresented at signup. It is a real cost and it belongs in the decision.
The one that no longer passes
Evernote’s free tier now carries note-count and device limits low enough that ordinary use reaches them within weeks.
We are grading the current tier, not the reputation. Anyone on legacy terms is in a different position from anyone signing up today, and for a new user the free version functions as a demonstration rather than a plan.
The test we would run before committing
Export on day one.
Note-taking is a twenty-year activity. The question is not whether the app is good now — it is what happens when the company is acquired, changes its pricing, or shuts down.
Obsidian answers that question by not being in the loop at all. Everything else asks you to trust an answer.