“Milanote” has been available on macOS for quite some time and has found a solid fanbase over the years. Now, the developers are finally launching a counterpart iOS app. The mobile experience is meant to offer a streamlined method to creating and editing notes, while syncing up with the desktop app to make sure you can keep tabs on what’s going on in your head or any projects you’re working on. Milanote's maximum file upload size is 10MB, which is a lot smaller than Zoho Notebook's. The addition of a Mac app signifies a big step forward for Zoho Notebook as a service, but the lack of.

Productivity

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• Pros

  Great implementation of locked notes feature. Can stack notes. Free.

• Cons

  No Web or Windows apps. Can't upload documents. Limited sorting and organization features.

• Bottom Line

  Zoho Notebook is a free Mac app that makes note-taking simple, but to be really useful, it needs a web version and better organizational features.

Zoho Notebook is a free and lightweight note-taking and syncing app that debuted in mid 2016. It might be more accurate to say it re-debuted at that time, as that's when the company scrapped a previous product of the same name and started over again. When the app relaunched, the company only released an iPhone app. At the time, I could see where the app was headed, but the iPhone app was too version 1.0 (and devoid of any other sister apps to sync with) to be a serious contender against the likes of Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, or any other. The addition of an android app and the Mac version reviewed here are steps forward, but the lack of a Windows app and a web client count against it, for now.

Price and Platforms

Zoho Notebook is completely free to use, and that's an asset in the note-taking and syncing space, as I'll explain in a moment. There are no in-app purchases, no tiers of service to agonize over, and no storage limits. The only limit is a max file size of 50MB for uploads.

As of this writing, the service offers only three apps: Zoho Notebook for iPhone, one for Android, and one for Mac. A web app is in the works next, according to a representative. But as of now, you can only use Zoho Notebook on those three platforms. Granted, this is a review of the Mac software, but even if you're a die-hard Mac and iOS user, changes are good that you have to interact occasionally with Windows systems at work, school, and so on. It's even more likely you'll need or want to access their data from the web.

As I mentioned, the fact that Zoho Notebook is entirely free is a major selling point. The reason, in part, is because the leading app in the space, Evernote, angered a lot of users when it hiked its prices and eliminated many key features for members who used the free version of the product. Accounts now cost $69.99 per year for a Premium account and $34.99 per year for a Plus account. There is a free tier of service, too, but it limits you to syncing across only two devices, and you can upload just 60MB of data each month. There are other features that users of the free version of Evernote don't get, but those are the two most significant limitations.

Microsoft OneNote is the other major name in the note-taking and syncing space. OneNote has a much more generous free version, as well, without any feature restrictions. Faststone photo editing. It uses OneDrive for storage, which gives anyone who signs up 5GB of space for free. If you pay for an Office 365 account, you get 1TB of space all told, although that space is shared among other Office Online apps.

A brand-new app in the note-taking and syncing space called Milanote (available as a web app only, as of this writing) limits free users to saving only 100 notes, images, or links. The app offers two paid subscription options that remove the upload limit: Milanote Professional, which costs $15 per month or $144 annually, and Milanote Professional Team, which costs $12.50 per person per month or $120 per person per year. Milanote's maximum file upload size is 10MB, which is a lot smaller than Zoho Notebook's.

Google Keep is another contender in the space that, like Zoho Notebook, is totally free. I find Google Keep doesn't offer enough to make it a very compelling app, however.

Note-Taking Features

The Zoho Notebook Mac app, found in the Mac App Store, takes very little time to install. All you need to create an account is an email address and a password.

The app represents your notes as collections of notebooks. These are depicted on-screen as actual paper notebooks that you fill with your notes. Each notebook can have a unique cover design.

The notes that you create and save into the notebooks can be text-based, including text with checklists, images, links, and audio recordings. A companion web clipper lets you save content you find online into a new note, as if you were clipping a newspaper or magazine article into a scrapbook without having to copy and paste it. For example, I clipped some recipes that I saw online and saved them into a Recipe notebook in just a few clicks of the mouse.

The web clipper can snip a simplified version of what you see online, stripping out ads and other unnecessary material, or you can choose to instead clip any part of a webpage by drawing a box around it and saving it as a flattened image. Evernote and Microsoft OneNote have similar web clippers.

Within a notebook, if you have notes that you want to group together, you can drag them on top of one another to create stacks. Touch gestures, like pinching and zooming, work when you have a Magic Trackpad. You can scatter apart notes that are in a stack by zooming (that is, reverse-pinching) on them.

I like that Zoho Notebook keeps your note version history and lets you revert back to any previous copy whenever you want. I also really appreciate that you can lock individual notes, password-protecting them at the note level. Being able to lock notes gives you a little extra security with sensitive information you might put in your notes. When you lock notes, there's only one password across all your locked notes, rather than a unique password for each one. I like that all previews of locked notes are blurry, so that someone looking over your shoulder can't even get a glimpse of them unless they are unlocked.

Sharing and Collaboration

Zoho Notebook supports sharing notes, but not full collaboration. With a standard Mac share button, you can share a note through whatever channels you have enabled in macOS, such as Mail, Twitter, Messages, and so forth. When you share a note, your recipient receives the contents of the note, rather than a link to it. In other words, if you email a note, the image or text goes right into the body of the email.

There is no ability to collaboratively edit notes, however, which you can do in Evernote, OneNote, and Milanote. Cloud-based collaboration has become a driver of knowledge work, and Zoho Notebook is definitely missing out by offering neither that nor differing permissions levels in sharing (such as read only versus read and write).

What's Missing and Room for Improvement

While I was testing the app, I felt limited by the fact that I couldn't upload documents other than images. I reached out to the team at Zoho to make sure I didn't overlook some option to upload files, and they said it's the next feature due to be added. Sadly, it's not here yet.

On the subject of ways to upload your documents, Zoho Notebook doesn't include optical character recognition (OCR), either. OCR is a powerful productivity feature that turns images of text and PDF content into searchable text. With OCR, if you snap a photo of a whiteboard or a business card, everything written or typed in that picture gets analyzed as if it were typed text. Both Evernote and OneNote have it, though in Evernote it's a paid feature. It's a seriously important function that adds a lot of value.

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Some people might like the display of stylized notebooks that you see when you fire up Zoho Notebook, but I found that view quite limiting. There are only two view options in the app: Notebook and All Notes. To work effectively with hundreds or thousands of notes, I'd need a tree structure or other similar view options that do away with the imagery to use the screen real estate more effectively.

Aside from those already mentioned, other missing features include the ability to add tags, the option to export entire notebooks or your whole Zoho Notebook account, and reminders. Tags are essential for anyone who keeps thousands of notes and has a need to sort them more finely than the default notebook level, or to sort across notebooks. Exporting is important in case you ever want to leave the app or support for it disappears, and you need to transfer your notes into a new app. Reminders, meaning the ability to add alerts to notes, are reportedly in the works.

Don't Rush to Sign Up

The addition of a Mac app signifies a big step forward for Zoho Notebook as a service, but the lack of a web app is still a big problem. Sure, you can sync among Android and iOS devices, but you can't get to your notes from a Windows computer or any machine for which you don't have permission to install software. The web app is a note-taking fail-safe option, and Zoho Notebook needs one.

Even though it isn't as fully featured as Evernote or OneNote, Zoho Notebook still offers more than most lightweight competitors, such as Simplenote, and it doesn't cost a cent to use. It's not quite a must-have app yet, but when the improvements that are said to be in the works show up, it will definitely be worth considering.

Productivity

We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use.

• Pros

  Great implementation of locked notes feature. Can stack notes. Free.

• Cons

  No Web or Windows apps. Can't upload documents. Limited sorting and organization features.

• Bottom Line

  Zoho Notebook is a free Mac app that makes note-taking simple, but to be really useful, it needs a web version and better organizational features.

Zoho Notebook is a free and lightweight note-taking and syncing app that debuted in mid 2016. It might be more accurate to say it re-debuted at that time, as that's when the company scrapped a previous product of the same name and started over again. When the app relaunched, the company only released an iPhone app. At the time, I could see where the app was headed, but the iPhone app was too version 1.0 (and devoid of any other sister apps to sync with) to be a serious contender against the likes of Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, or any other. The addition of an android app and the Mac version reviewed here are steps forward, but the lack of a Windows app and a web client count against it, for now.

Price and Platforms

Zoho Notebook is completely free to use, and that's an asset in the note-taking and syncing space, as I'll explain in a moment. There are no in-app purchases, no tiers of service to agonize over, and no storage limits. The only limit is a max file size of 50MB for uploads.

As of this writing, the service offers only three apps: Zoho Notebook for iPhone, one for Android, and one for Mac. A web app is in the works next, according to a representative. But as of now, you can only use Zoho Notebook on those three platforms. Granted, this is a review of the Mac software, but even if you're a die-hard Mac and iOS user, changes are good that you have to interact occasionally with Windows systems at work, school, and so on. It's even more likely you'll need or want to access their data from the web.

As I mentioned, the fact that Zoho Notebook is entirely free is a major selling point. The reason, in part, is because the leading app in the space, Evernote, angered a lot of users when it hiked its prices and eliminated many key features for members who used the free version of the product. Accounts now cost $69.99 per year for a Premium account and $34.99 per year for a Plus account. There is a free tier of service, too, but it limits you to syncing across only two devices, and you can upload just 60MB of data each month. There are other features that users of the free version of Evernote don't get, but those are the two most significant limitations.

Microsoft OneNote is the other major name in the note-taking and syncing space. OneNote has a much more generous free version, as well, without any feature restrictions. It uses OneDrive for storage, which gives anyone who signs up 5GB of space for free. If you pay for an Office 365 account, you get 1TB of space all told, although that space is shared among other Office Online apps.

A brand-new app in the note-taking and syncing space called Milanote (available as a web app only, as of this writing) limits free users to saving only 100 notes, images, or links. The app offers two paid subscription options that remove the upload limit: Milanote Professional, which costs $15 per month or $144 annually, and Milanote Professional Team, which costs $12.50 per person per month or $120 per person per year. Milanote's maximum file upload size is 10MB, which is a lot smaller than Zoho Notebook's.

Google Keep is another contender in the space that, like Zoho Notebook, is totally free. I find Google Keep doesn't offer enough to make it a very compelling app, however.

Note-Taking Features

The Zoho Notebook Mac app, found in the Mac App Store, takes very little time to install. All you need to create an account is an email address and a password.

The app represents your notes as collections of notebooks. These are depicted on-screen as actual paper notebooks that you fill with your notes. Each notebook can have a unique cover design.

The notes that you create and save into the notebooks can be text-based, including text with checklists, images, links, and audio recordings. A companion web clipper lets you save content you find online into a new note, as if you were clipping a newspaper or magazine article into a scrapbook without having to copy and paste it. For example, I clipped some recipes that I saw online and saved them into a Recipe notebook in just a few clicks of the mouse.

The web clipper can snip a simplified version of what you see online, stripping out ads and other unnecessary material, or you can choose to instead clip any part of a webpage by drawing a box around it and saving it as a flattened image. Evernote and Microsoft OneNote have similar web clippers.

Within a notebook, if you have notes that you want to group together, you can drag them on top of one another to create stacks. Touch gestures, like pinching and zooming, work when you have a Magic Trackpad. You can scatter apart notes that are in a stack by zooming (that is, reverse-pinching) on them.

I like that Zoho Notebook keeps your note version history and lets you revert back to any previous copy whenever you want. I also really appreciate that you can lock individual notes, password-protecting them at the note level. Being able to lock notes gives you a little extra security with sensitive information you might put in your notes. When you lock notes, there's only one password across all your locked notes, rather than a unique password for each one. I like that all previews of locked notes are blurry, so that someone looking over your shoulder can't even get a glimpse of them unless they are unlocked.

Sharing and Collaboration

Zoho Notebook supports sharing notes, but not full collaboration. With a standard Mac share button, you can share a note through whatever channels you have enabled in macOS, such as Mail, Twitter, Messages, and so forth. When you share a note, your recipient receives the contents of the note, rather than a link to it. In other words, if you email a note, the image or text goes right into the body of the email.

There is no ability to collaboratively edit notes, however, which you can do in Evernote, OneNote, and Milanote. Cloud-based collaboration has become a driver of knowledge work, and Zoho Notebook is definitely missing out by offering neither that nor differing permissions levels in sharing (such as read only versus read and write).

What's Missing and Room for Improvement

While I was testing the app, I felt limited by the fact that I couldn't upload documents other than images. I reached out to the team at Zoho to make sure I didn't overlook some option to upload files, and they said it's the next feature due to be added. Sadly, it's not here yet.

On the subject of ways to upload your documents, Zoho Notebook doesn't include optical character recognition (OCR), either. OCR is a powerful productivity feature that turns images of text and PDF content into searchable text. With OCR, if you snap a photo of a whiteboard or a business card, everything written or typed in that picture gets analyzed as if it were typed text. Both Evernote and OneNote have it, though in Evernote it's a paid feature. It's a seriously important function that adds a lot of value.

Some people might like the display of stylized notebooks that you see when you fire up Zoho Notebook, but I found that view quite limiting. There are only two view options in the app: Notebook and All Notes. To work effectively with hundreds or thousands of notes, I'd need a tree structure or other similar view options that do away with the imagery to use the screen real estate more effectively.

Aside from those already mentioned, other missing features include the ability to add tags, the option to export entire notebooks or your whole Zoho Notebook account, and reminders. Tags are essential for anyone who keeps thousands of notes and has a need to sort them more finely than the default notebook level, or to sort across notebooks. Exporting is important in case you ever want to leave the app or support for it disappears, and you need to transfer your notes into a new app. Reminders, meaning the ability to add alerts to notes, are reportedly in the works.

Don't Rush to Sign Up

The addition of a Mac app signifies a big step forward for Zoho Notebook as a service, but the lack of a web app is still a big problem. Sure, you can sync among Android and iOS devices, but you can't get to your notes from a Windows computer or any machine for which you don't have permission to install software. The web app is a note-taking fail-safe option, and Zoho Notebook needs one.

Even though it isn't as fully featured as Evernote or OneNote, Zoho Notebook still offers more than most lightweight competitors, such as Simplenote, and it doesn't cost a cent to use. It's not quite a must-have app yet, but when the improvements that are said to be in the works show up, it will definitely be worth considering.