In 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) is quietly transforming our daily lives—from how we search, shop, and communicate, to how we work and learn. One of the most natural and impactful applications of AI is in note-taking.
AI note takers are smart apps that automatically capture, organize, and summarize your notes—whether from meetings, lectures, or spontaneous ideas. Instead of scrambling to jot things down or combing through disorganized notes, these tools transcribe spoken words into clear text, highlight key insights, and even suggest follow-up actions. The result? You save time, retain more, and stay organized with minimal effort. With AI doing the heavy lifting, note-taking becomes smarter, faster, and more useful than ever.
But with so many options out there, how do you choose the right one? Below, we’ll explain what features to look for in an AI-powered note app, then dive into detailed reviews of the top five general-purpose AI note-taking tools of 2025.
What makes a great AI note-taking app?
Not all “smart” note apps are worth the price (or time). When evaluating AI note-taker apps, keep an eye on the following features and qualities:
Intelligent Organization & Search: The app should do more than capture notes – it should help organize them. Look for AI that can auto-tag or link related notes and a powerful search that finds information even if you don’t remember exact keywords. The best tools use AI to surface what you need (e.g. by context or topic) rather than just a raw text search.
Multi-Device Sync: Your notes should follow you everywhere. Great note-taking apps sync seamlessly across phone, laptop, tablet, and more, so you can jot something down on one device and read it on another instantly.
Voice-to-Text and Transcription: A good AI note-taker can handle speech, not just typing. This means you can dictate notes or have meetings and lectures transcribed automatically into text. The app’s speech recognition should be accurate and ideally punctuate and paragraph the text for you.
Summaries and Action Items: One superpower of AI notes apps is automatic summarization. They can condense a long meeting or document into a concise summary and even extract action items or to-do tasks mentioned. This is incredibly useful for busy people who need the gist quickly without reading every word.
Ease of Use: Fancy AI features are great, but the app still needs a friendly, intuitive interface. If it takes longer to learn the tool than to just write your notes, it’s not worth it. The best apps have a shallow learning curve – clean layouts, easy commands – so you can start being productive right away.
Integrations and Ecosystem: Consider how the note app fits into your workflow. Does it integrate with your calendar or task manager? Can you easily share notes to other apps? Some AI note-takers integrate with tools like work apps to automatically sync meetings or send summaries. Others, like all-in-one suites, have built-in docs, tasks, and calendars (as you’ll see with Lark).
Now that you know what to look for, let’s explore the top five AI note-taking apps of 2025 and see how they stack up in terms of features, pros, cons, and ideal use cases.
If you’re looking for AI assistants for meetings instead, see Top 7 Best Minutes AI Apps in 2025.
Top AI note-taking apps at a glance
Notion AI - Unified Workspace with a Powerful Writing Assistant
Mem - Your AI-Organized Second Brain
Reflect - The Mindful Note-Taker for Personal Journaling with AI
Supernotes - Card-Based Notes with Collaboration and “Superpowers”
Evernote - The Veteran Note App with Integrated AI
Each of these apps takes a unique approach to AI note-taking, offering different features and workflows, making them suitable for a variety of needs and personal styles.
Top 5 AI note-taking apps in 2025
1. Notion AI – Unified Workspace with a Powerful Writing Assistant
Notion’s AI can be summoned inline to generate content, brainstorm ideas, or summarize existing notes. It turns your prompts into text – for example, drafting a blog post outline on the fly.
Image source: Notion.com
Overview: Notion has been a crowd-favorite workspace app for a while, combining notes, docs, databases, and project boards in one. In late 2022, Notion introduced Notion AI, an integrated AI assistant that supercharges your Notion pages. Notion AI can write for you (from blog posts to poetry), summarize long notes, translate content, fix grammar, and even generate task lists or brainstorm ideas, all within your notes. It’s like having a built-in content writer and editor inside an already powerful note-taking tool. To use it, you just hit space or a slash command and ask Notion to do something (e.g. “summarize these meeting notes” or “draft a blog intro about X”). The AI reads the context of your page and produces results in seconds.
Key AI Features: Notion AI shines at writing and editing assistance. It can generate new text based on prompts, continue writing from where you left off, or rewrite selected text in different tones (professional, friendly, etc.). It also excels at summarizing – you can have it summarize a long document or a series of notes into a brief bullet list. Other handy tricks include extracting action items from meeting notes and translating between languages. All of this is accessible without leaving the Notion app, which means your notes and the AI are in one place. Notion’s AI feels like a natural extension of your workspace rather than a separate bot.
Limitations:
AI Costs Extra: Notion itself can be used free or with a paid plan, but unlimited AI usage is a paid add-on. Free users get a limited number of AI responses to try it out, then it requires a subscription (roughly $10/month on top of a Notion plan). This can make it pricier than some standalone AI note apps.
Learning Curve for New Users: Notion is powerful, which means it can feel complex at first. New users might need a bit of time to learn how Notion pages, databases, and commands work. The AI features are fairly straightforward, but the app’s overall complexity means it’s not the simplest note-taker on this list.
Ideal For: If you want one single app to handle all your text files – notes, knowledge base, tasks, and documents – with AI sprinkled throughout, Notion AI is a top choice. It’s ideal for professionals and students who were already drawn to Notion for its flexibility, and now want built-in AI to speed up writing and organization. Teams that collaborate in Notion will also appreciate AI for summarizing meeting notes or drafting project updates. However, if you only need basic note-taking or you dislike Notion’s interface, a lighter-weight app might serve you better.
2. Mem – Your AI-Organized Second Brain
Mem’s interface is minimal and text-focused. The right-hand panel automatically shows “Similar mems” – related notes that Mem’s AI thinks are relevant – making your notes feel like a connected web.
Image source: get.mem.ai
Overview: Mem has been described as an “AI-powered second brain.” It’s a notes app built with AI at its core – the founders set out to create a tool that automatically organizes your information and resurfaces it when needed, almost like a personal Google for all your notes. Unlike traditional note apps with folders and notebooks, Mem has a timeline of notes called “mems” and relies on AI to link related ideas. In practice, Mem lets you capture notes quickly, even via SMS or email, and then its AI will tag, link, and group notes behind the scenes. When you return, you can ask the AI assistant (Mem Chat) questions or simply start typing in search to have Mem pull up exactly what you need.
Key AI Features: Mem’s standout feature is automatic note organization. You don’t have to file things away meticulously – just create notes, and Mem will infer connections. It has AI-generated collections and tags that group notes by topic or entity without manual tagging. The app also offers Mem Chat, an AI chatbot can answer questions or generate content using your notes as its knowledge base. For example, you can ask “What did I note about project XYZ last week?” and Mem Chat will find and summarize those notes. Other features include Smart Search (natural language search queries), Related Notes suggestions that pop up contextually (as shown in the image), and Smart Write which helps you draft or edit notes using AI.
Limitations:
Still Missing Some Features: In striving for simplicity, Mem omitted some traditional note-taking functions. For instance, some reviewers note it lacks text formatting richness and other organizational tools power users expect. If you need things like tables in your notes or deep folder hierarchies, Mem might feel limiting.
Learning to Let AI Organize: Mem’s approach can be jarring if you’re coming from a structured note-taking style. It works best if you trust the AI and don’t mind a bit of chaos. Users who prefer strict manual organization might feel Mem is too freeform. The flip side of “no folders” is that you might initially feel disoriented until you get used to searching and using the AI to retrieve notes.
Ideal For: Mem is perfect for individuals who want a “forget-and-find” note system – you throw information in and rely on AI to resurface it when needed. If you’re an entrepreneur, researcher, or executive juggling lots of info, Mem acts like an external memory that’s always at your fingertips. It’s also great for writers or thinkers who want to discover connections between ideas; Mem will literally show you related thoughts as you work. However, if you need heavy formatting options or extremely structured note archives, Mem’s unconventional style might not fit your workflow.
3. Reflect – The Mindful Note-Taker for Personal Journaling with AI
Image source: reflect.app
Overview: Reflect is a newer player in the note-taking space, branded as a minimalist note-taking app with networked notes and integrated AI. Reflect is designed for personal notes, journals, and knowledge management, rather than large team collaboration. One of its hallmark features is a built-in daily notes section linked to your calendar – each day you can log notes or a journal entry, and it pulls in your meetings or events automatically, so you can jot meeting notes in one click. The AI comes into play as an “AI palette” of commands that can do things like summarize your text, generate ideas, or even let you chat with your notes. Reflect emphasizes security as well, offering end-to-end encryption so your notes and your AI queries on them are private.
Key AI Features: Reflect has a variety of AI-powered abilities built in, with pre-defined prompts you can choose from. Some standout capabilities: summarizing notes, rephrasing text, listing key takeaways or action items, and even generating counterarguments to an idea you’ve written down. This is useful for digesting meeting notes or improving your own writing clarity. Reflect also lets you “chat” with your notes – essentially an AI assistant that you can ask questions to, and it will answer based on your saved notes (similar to Mem’s approach). Another cool feature: voice dictation. You can record voice memos in Reflect and have them transcribed with high accuracy, then summarized by the AI. And because Reflect is focused on personal use, it’s all fast and accessible in one place – even on mobile, you can use AI on your notes.
Limitations:
Limited Formatting & Features: In its quest for minimalism, Reflect doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. Users have noted that formatting options are limited – for example, you can’t create tables in notes and some advanced formatting or embeds aren’t available. If you need a robust editor for your notes, Reflect might feel too barebones.
No Free Tier (Premium Price): Reflect does not offer a free forever tier; it usually has a trial, then requires a subscription (~$15/month). Also, its AI features use OpenAI’s GPT-4 which is reflected in the price. This means to continue using it long-term, you have to pay – which is a downside compared to some competitors that at least offer free basic plans.
Not Team-Oriented: Reflect is really for a single user. There’s no real-time collaboration on notes or shared workspaces (beyond exporting or publishing a note). If you need to collaborate with others on notes or documents regularly, Reflect isn’t the tool for that. You’d be better off with Notion or Lark in that case.
Ideal For: Reflect is an excellent choice for individuals looking for a secure, streamlined note-taking experience with a dose of AI smarts. If you’re someone who journals daily, takes a lot of personal notes, or is building a “second brain” for your own knowledge, Reflect provides a nurturing environment. Writers have found it great for developing ideas, thanks to the AI prompts for outlines and counterarguments. It’s also well-suited for professionals who want to integrate note-taking with their calendar and tasks (solo workers, consultants, etc.). However, if you require heavy-duty collaboration or rich media in your notes, you might hit some limits with Reflect’s current feature set.
4. Supernotes – Card-Based Notes with Collaboration and “Superpowers”
Supernotes uses a unique notecard format for notes. Each note is a card that can have parents (for hierarchy) and tags, and you can easily link to other cards inline. This format keeps notes concise and organized.
Image source: supernotes.app
Overview: Supernotes takes a different approach to note-taking: everything is a notecard. Think of it like digital index cards – each note is meant to be brief (though it can actually hold a lot of content) and you can nest and link cards in a hierarchical way. This structure is great for breaking down information into bite-sized pieces. Supernotes is also built with real-time collaboration in mind – you can invite others to your note collections and work together, making it a bit like Google Docs meets flashcards. It works on web, desktop, and mobile – and even has a VR app, interestingly – and offers a free plan, which comes with 100 cards, for new users to try out.
Key AI Features: In 2024, Supernotes introduced AI “superpowers” to help users with their notes. These superpowers include features like automatic error checking, tag suggestion, improvement suggestions. They are designed to help users write better and complete tedious tasks with ease.
Limitations:
Can Feel Complex or “Different”: Supernotes’ approach is not the norm, and some users find it overly complicated at first. If you try to use it like a regular long-form notebook (ignoring the card paradigm), it might frustrate you. It shines when you embrace short notes and breaking things into pieces – a shift in note-taking style that not everyone wants.
Limited AI Scope: The AI features in Supernotes are currently more about improving notes (proofreading, organizing) than the full chatty assistant experience. There’s no built-in “ask questions to my notes” yet. If you’re specifically looking for heavy generative AI features, Supernotes might seem a bit light in that department compared to others on this list.
Ideal For: Supernotes is fantastic for students and knowledge workers who favor structured, bite-sized notes. If you love index cards, flashcards, or breaking ideas into chunks, this app will fit like a glove. It’s also great for small collaborative groups or study buddies – for example, a study group can share a Supernotes workspace to compile class notes, and the format keeps things neat. The AI superpowers make it easier to maintain an organized set of notes without extra effort, ideal for folks who accumulate lots of information. On the other hand, if you prefer long narrative notes or need advanced multimedia in notes, you might not find Supernotes as accommodating.
5. Evernote – The Veteran Note App with Integrated AI
Image source: evernote.com
Overview: Evernote is a name that’s practically synonymous with digital note-taking. It’s been around for over a decade, and while it lost some spark in recent years, 2024 brought a major update: Evernote integrated AI into its feature set. Under new ownership, Evernote launched “Evernote AI” features like AI-Powered Search and AI Edit, aiming to keep up with modern rivals. This means the classic Evernote experience – rich text notes, web clippings, images, to-do lists, across devices – now has a smart assistant element. Evernote’s AI features are focused on making your existing notes more useful rather than writing whole essays for you. The app itself still offers robust organization (notebooks, tags), powerful search, and it excels at things like saving articles from the web (Web Clipper) and scanning documents. The addition of AI is like an upgrade to the engine under the hood of an already feature-packed car.
Key AI Features: The two headline AI features in Evernote are AI-Powered Search and AI Edit (previously called AI Cleanup). AI-Powered Search means you can ask Evernote questions in natural language and it will find answers from your notes, rather than just matching keywords. For example, you could search “annual sales from 2021?” and Evernote might pull up the note with that info or even answer within the search results if possible. It’s aiming to save you time digging through many notes. AI Edit is like having an editor/proofreader for your notes. With one click, Evernote can summarize a long note, fix spelling and grammar, translate text, or even generate content based on your note. Let’s say you have a messy set of bullet points – Evernote AI can summarize them into a neat paragraph, or take a rough draft and polish it up. There’s also AI Transcribe that can convert images or audio and video recordings to text.
Limitations:
Aging Interface and Complexity: Evernote has a lot of features, which can make it feel bloated or complex compared to newer minimalist apps. The interface hasn’t dramatically changed in years, so some find it a bit old-school or cluttered. There’s notebooks, stacks, tags, etc., which is powerful but can overwhelm casual users. It’s “the old reliable” but perhaps not the trendiest experience in 2025.
Sync and Speed Woes: Long-time Evernote users have often complained about sync issues or slowness, especially with large accounts. While the new Evernote improved this with a revamped sync engine, there are still occasional hiccups if you have thousands of notes or big attachments. It’s not as lightweight as some competitors, and you might find the app heavy on slower devices.
Ideal For: Evernote remains a solid choice for power users and researchers who want an everything-in-one-place notes database. If you have a ton of notes, web clippings, PDF archives, etc., Evernote with AI will help you manage and retrieve that knowledge effectively. It’s also good if you appreciate a more traditional notebook-like structure with notebooks and tags. Many longtime users in business and academia stick with Evernote because it’s tried-and-true. Now that it has AI, they get the best of both worlds: familiarity and modern functionality. If you’re brand new to note-taking apps, you may find Evernote a bit much, but if your use case demands robust features (and you don’t mind paying for them), it’s worth a look.
Lark – Beyond note-taking: The all-in-one collaboration suite with AI
While the apps above are focused mainly on note-taking, it’s worth highlighting Lark as a powerful alternative, especially if you need a unified platform for notes, scheduling, documents, messaging, and more. Lark isn’t just a note app – it’s an all-in-one collaboration suite (think Slack + Notion + Google Docs + Zoom in one). All the apps within Lark work seamlessly together, which means you can change doc permissions in a chat, schedule a meeting from a chat, or link a task inside a doc.
Within Lark’s connected workspace, you’ll find a variety of document types, including Docs, Sheets, Slides, MindNotes, and Base, giving users the flexibility to create virtually anything, from quick notes and collaborative reports to structured databases and visual mind maps. Additionally, AI is infused throughout its ecosystem, helping users make sense of meetings, data analysis, chats, and more. It’s a bit different from a standalone note app, but for someone looking to consolidate tools, Lark offers a compelling package.
Key Features:
Multilingual AI Assistant & Translation: Lark’s chat has a built-in AI assistant that can answer questions and help draft messages in multiple languages. Uniquely, Lark also offers automatic message translation – in any chat, you can instantly translate messages to your preferred language. This is fantastic for global teams. Lark Minutes can translate meeting transcripts into different languages. In short, Lark breaks language barriers with AI – a huge plus if you work with international colleagues.
Smart Meeting Notes with Lark Minutes: Lark can record meetings (video or audio calls) and generate an AI summary of the meeting. It identifies speakers and creates an interactive transcript where you can click on text to play that part of the recording. After a meeting, you’ll get a concise summary and even action items extracted, which you can share to those who missed the call. This feature alone rivals dedicated meeting note apps, and here it’s part of your overall workspace.
Document Collaboration: Lark Docs allows multiple people to edit simultaneously, just like Google Docs. You can insert whiteboards for visual collaboration or add documents to wikis to build a knowledge base. Since it’s part of Lark, you can share documents to a chat and change access rights as needed, get notified of comments, and even edit docs right within Messenger – no need to open another app.
Free Tier Value: Perhaps one of Lark’s biggest selling points is its generous free plan. Lark’s free Starter plan includes 11 powerful apps, 100 GB of cloud storage, 1000 automation runs, for up to 20 users – all for free. This is far beyond what Slack or others offer on free plans. For small teams or personal use, you might never need to pay a cent while enjoying an integrated suite that normally could replace several paid tools.
Unique Advantages of Lark for Note-Taking: If your “notes” often live in meeting notes, project docs, or scattered across chat, Lark brings them into one flow. For instance, you can use Lark as a personal notebook – create a private Lark Doc for meeting notes or ideas – and still benefit from the AI assistance and search. The AI assistant in Lark chat can be prompted to summarize a long document or generate a list of ideas right where you’re discussing them with colleagues. The cross-app integration means your notes can easily turn into tasks or calendar events. This can be transformative for productivity: no more hopping between a note app, a chat app, and a calendar – Lark ties it all together.
Limitations:
Not Focused Solely on Notes: If you truly just want a simple note-taking app, Lark might feel like overkill, since it’s a whole suite.
Learning Curve for Full Features: Teams coming from separate tools (Slack, Google Docs, etc.) might need some time to adjust to Lark’s way of doing things. The interface is clean but fitting so many functions in one app means there are many features to discover. Lark does a good job keeping it tidy (with a sidebar for navigation), but expect a onboarding period to get everyone comfortable.
Ideal For: If you find yourself collaborating a lot and juggling multiple tools, Lark can simplify your work or personal life. It’s ideal for individuals, small businesses, startups, or project teams who need a combined solution for communication and content. Also, if you’re freelancing or in a role where you do scheduling, meeting notes, and chat with clients – using one app could streamline everything. Even for individual use, if you like the idea of having your notes, tasks, and calendar in one app, Lark is worth trying. And for anyone who deals with multilingual environments or hates taking meeting notes manually, Lark’s AI capabilities will be a highlight. Essentially, Lark is best for those who want their note-taking to be woven into a broader workflow. If that’s you, it can replace a whole suite of apps and tie everything together with a nice AI ribbon on top.
Frequently asked questions
Can AI note-taking apps replace taking notes manually?
They can greatly augment your note-taking, but you’ll likely still do some manual note-taking. AI apps excel at things like transcribing speech to text, summarizing long text, and organizing notes. For instance, in a meeting you might still jot down a few points (or record it and let the AI transcribe), and then the AI can generate a summary and action list for you. The AI might miss some nuances a human would catch, or occasionally mis-transcribe a word, so having a human eye is wise for important info. Think of AI note takers as an assistant: they handle the heavy lifting (writing the bulk, sorting, finding info), and you provide guidance and corrections as needed. Over time, as these tools get better, you might find you trust them with more of the work.
What is the best free AI note-taking app?
“Best” can be subjective, but a few free options stand out. Lark offers an extremely generous free tier – you get AI meeting summaries, translation, and full note-taking capabilities at no cost for up to 20 users. Mem has a free version with unlimited notes and some AI features (with limits), great for trying out its AI search and organization. Supernotes has a free tier (with a note count limit) if you want to experience its AI-assisted notecards. Evernote’s free plan is quite limited and may not include AI, so it’s less ideal now.
Can these AI note apps integrate with other tools I use?
Yes, many of them do. Notion, for example, has an API and many integrations (and you can embed content from Google Drive, etc., in it). Evernote can integrate with Google Calendar and has plenty of third-party plugins. If you don’t want to deal with integrations, Lark is the obvious choice. You have all the essential tools, like calendar, documents, messenger, and more, on one seamless platform. But if you do need to integrate Lark with other tools, it’s easy to do as well with Lark AnyCross.
Will AI note-taking apps work offline?
Some functionality, yes, but the AI features usually require an internet connection. Apps like Lark, Reflect and Notion allow you to access and edit notes offline; changes sync when you go online. If offline is a common scenario for you (say you’re often on a plane with no Wi-Fi), you can still use the apps, just plan to trigger AI actions when you reconnect.
