Best Note-Taking Apps to Organise Your Student Life

Most people associate student life with stressful all-night exam studying sessions, notes with too many highlighted paragraphs and a sprinkle of exciting social events that somehow make up for all the troubles. Some students manage to balance all of these aspects that come with student life, but most find this task particularly challenging. Technology has improved the university experience for educators and students alike, making teaching, learning and assessments more flexible and efficient. 

While note-taking and task management seem to have moved online for students, it is clear that these apps and platforms are not a one-size-fits-all all matter, therefore this article has selected the best note-taking apps for your personality type.

The personality types we have identified are the following:

The Artistic Visionnaire

This type loves personalising their notes and puts as much effort (or more) into making their notes aesthetically pleasing rather than just functional and simple. love complex note-taking apps with a lot of customization options. They are not scared of platforms or apps with a learning curve, finding the presence of options exciting rather than daunting.

The Scribbler

On the other side of the spectrum, we find the scribbler. The scribbler while also being creative, chooses to focus on the ideas rather than aesthetics and personalization. They just need an app where they can write short, quick notes and reminders, the online version of it sticking to do-it notes on a fridge. They have plenty of tasks and ideas and just need a place to see all of them at once, so nothing escapes their focus.

The Workflow Wizard

Somewhere in the middle, there is the workflow wizard. These people value efficiency above all things, but also need personalization to create their own perfectly strategized system. Too many options intimidate them, as they are not willing to spend a lot of their perfectly scheduled free time learning how to use an app that should simply make their lives easier. 

Every student’s needs are different, and these are the best tools to help them on their journey to organise a balanced student life. 

Best Note-Taking Apps for The Artistic Visionnaire

Notion

No other note-taking app has as many customization options as Notion. Depending on your personal preference, Notion offers you the option to make your notes minimalist and sleek and the option to have the aesthetic, colourful and highly-personalised notes that you see on Pinterest. There are also plenty of automation options, such as the option to create pages with a saved template simply with a click of a created button. This is especially good for daily to-do lists, or for creating notebooks with cohesive structures across all pages. The in-app calendar is also perfect for keeping track of recurring tasks, and academic deadlines. 

Other tools offered by this app that are especially helpful with managing student life are the AI options to summarize your notes, and also formulate quizzes based on their contents. It is also great for any team-working project, as you can share any page or workspace with any Notion user and choose the read-only or edit options, and you can also share a read-only version with non-users. The AI options are one of the best you can find in note-taking apps currently. 

Lastly, the app is very good at importing and exporting, making it very easy to switch to other apps if this isn’t the right fit. 

Milanote

Some Artistic Visionaries prefer scrapbook-style notes and mind maps since they tend to be more visually inclined. Milanote is perfect for such notes, especially since it makes it easy to freehand sketches, hold images, colour swatches, arrows and emojis besides the traditional text notes options. Even if not visually inclined, this app is an especially good tool for students who have design-related projects, such as mood boards used in marketing plans. 

The export options are also excellent, as these boards can be exported in their original layouts as PDFs and PNG images, but they can also be converted to a simplified linear version and exported as Word Documents and Plain text. 

The visual tools can be especially useful for managing group projects which are a very significant part of student life, as the platform is perfect for the brain-storming, and planning sessions that happen before the actual start of any project.

Best Note-Taking Apps for The Scribbler

Simplenote

The scribblers would benefit greatly from this app, as its simple design offers a distraction-free platform to jot down ideas. Scribblers prefer simple, straightforward notes to organize their busy student life, and platforms with a lot of buttons and suggestions simply bring them more chaos and distractions. Simplenote, just like its name only provides the option to write down simple text notes, without any images or drawings.

Google Keep

Scribblers love simplicity, but students pursuing more creative degrees would benefit greatly from being able to use images as well as simple texts. Furthermore, Google Keep has the option to be used as a sidebar on the right side of Gmail and Google Docs, perfect for writing down quick notes and reminders. 

Best Note-Taking Apps for The Workflow Wizard

Evernote

One of the most popular note-taking apps is the classic Evernote, simpler than the complex Notion, but more customizable than Google Keep or SimpleNote. Evernote has the options to organize notes in notebooks and enables its users to make simple sketches around the notes as well as paste images, but its focus is on efficiency. This is offered by their highly performing geotagging, web-clipping and OCR options. Geotagging helps students organize notes based on the places they have taken them, and web clipping gives them the option to crop article pages without the sidebars, ads, and other clutter. Lastly, the accurate OCR makes student life much easier, as it is impressively good at searching text in images and being able to read handwritten notes. This is especially helpful for students who use both traditional paper-based note taking, alongside virtual notes. 

Importing and exporting are easy processes as well, which in addition to the OCR tools makes it a very flexible app for managing student life.

OneNote

Another app that is highly efficient and also offers a lot of personalization tools is OneNote. While the OCR is not as efficient as Evernote, making pictures and handwritten notes harder to incorporate into the app, OneNote enables people to freely sketch over the text notes, making it a particularly inventive way of mixing the memory-related benefits of manually writing notes with the organizational benefit of typing them instead. This can be taken even a step further, as this app has the option to highlight and sketch over any article the student wishes to web-clip. While apps such as Milanote are perfect for design and marketing students, OneNote is especially useful for math students as OneNote also has a Math Assistant that can interpret a handwritten math equation and solve it for you. This app is also a good initiation to more complex note-taking for the Scribbler type as well since it can also sync with, which could come in handy for quick notes. 

There will never be an app that is the perfect tool which fits the needs of every student and minimises the chaos of student life with no effort. However, it is important to seek note-taking apps compatible with our unique needs, and be open-minded about how technology can be a powerful tool for organising one’s life.