12 Free and Open-source Note Apps for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon)
1- Trilium Notes
Build your personal knowledge base with Trilium Notes
Trilium Notes is a hierarchical note taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases.
Read about Trilium Notes 's features, license, platforms, and more.
2- AppFlowy
an Open source Collaborative Note-taking for Creative Teams (Notion.ai alternative)
AppFlowy.IO is a free open-source note-taking software for teams. It allows you to create almost anything you want in a writing canvas, such as tasks, kanban boards, and more.
AppFlowy is written in Flutter/ Dart, and it uses Rust for the backend.
Compared to Notion, AppFlowy allows you to organize your text and paragraphs better, and use Markdown with a straightforward WYSIWYG editor.
Read about AppFlowy 's features, license, platforms, and more.
3- FSNotes
FSNotes is modern notes manager for macOS and iOS.
Read about FSNotes 's features, license, platforms, and more.
4- Nebo
Take smarter, more beautiful notes
Nebo is a free open-source software for note-taking that offers a dozen of productivity-oriented features. It supports handwritten notes, sketches, diagrams and exports your notes in many formats.
Nebo is designed for touch screens, but it also designed to work with stylus and to write or sketch notes.
One of its other stunning features is it also works as a PDF viewer, and you can easily add PDF files to your notebook, create and export your note and annotations easily.
You can also change the background colors, and enjoy the infinite drawing canvas in a free-form page document.
It is important to note that the app is not free, but it is affordable for Windows, Android, and Apple devices.
However, if you prefer using the keyboard, Nebo got you covered easily with dozens of shortcuts, and keyboard specific tools.
The primary reason why we listed it here, is that it does not have an open-source counterpart (alternative) and it was recommended by some medical students.
The app is built for project managers, students, teachers, engineers, designers, writers, and software engineers. However, if you have a stream of ideas, we highly recommend it.
Read about Nebo 's features, license, platforms, and more.
5- Simplenote
A Simplenote client for macOS
A Simplenote client for macOS. Learn more about Simplenote at Simplenote.com.
Read about Simplenote 's features, license, platforms, and more.
6- Notes
Fast and beautiful note-taking app written in C++.
Notes is an open source and cross-platform note-taking app that is both beautiful and powerful.
Read about Notes 's features, license, platforms, and more.
7- Notesnook
fully open source & end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to Evernote
Notesnook is a free (as in speech) & open source note-taking app focused on user privacy & ease of use. To ensure zero knowledge principles, Notesnook encrypts everything on your device using XChaCha20-Poly1305 & Argon2.
The project is written in JavaScript, TyepScript, React, and React Native for mobile apps.
Read about Notesnook 's features, license, platforms, and more.
8- Joplin
an open source note taking and to-do application with synchronisation capabilities
Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks. The notes are searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified either from the applications directly or from your own text editor. The notes are in Markdown format.
Notes exported from Evernote can be imported into Joplin, including the formatted content (which is converted to Markdown), resources (images, attachments, etc.) and complete metadata (geolocation, updated time, created time, etc.). Plain Markdown files can also be imported.
The notes can be securely synchronised using end-to-end encryption with various cloud services including Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive and Joplin Cloud.
Read about Joplin 's features, license, platforms, and more.
9- Skim
skimPDF reader and note-taking solution
Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for macOS (10.7 and later). It's feature-rich program and very useful for researchers as it include notes, highlighting, bookmarks, editing tools and LaTeX support.
Read about Skim 's features, license, platforms, and more.
10- TreeSheets
Free Form Data Organizer
TreeSheets is a free open-source data organizer.
A "hierarchical spreadsheet" that is a great replacement for spreadsheets, mind mappers, outliners, PIMs, text editors and small databases.
Suitable for any kind of data organization, such as todo lists, calendars, project management, brainstorming, organizing ideas, planning, requirements gathering, presentation of information, etc.
It's like a spreadsheet, immediately familiar, but much more suitable for complex data because it's hierarchical.
It's like a mind mapper, but more organized and compact.
It's like an outliner, but in more than one dimension.
It's like a text editor, but with structure.
Read about TreeSheets 's features, license, platforms, and more.
11- Yarle
Converts Evernote notes to Markdown
Yarle is the ultimate converter of Evernote notes to Markdown.
Read about Yarle 's features, license, platforms, and more.
12- Zim
Desktop Wiki and Personal Knowledge-base
Zim is an open source free lightweight note-taking application in a form of desktop wiki. It allows you to organize your notes, articles, resources, and ideas all in one place, connect them together using page links, attach media and documents and more.
Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.
By default, Zim supports wiki syntax and a long set of shortcuts keybindings that makes writing a pleasing experience.
It comes with a spell checker plugin, that you can enable or disable.
Read about Zim 's features, license, platforms, and more.