
There's no information about who originally made the note and who else has been invited to edit it. Collaborative notes aren't marked in any way. When a collaborator logs into their account, however, there's no way for them to tell which notes are their own and which belong to someone else. They receive an email announcing that they've been added as a collaborator. You can invite people by email to have complete editing and viewing access to any note. Simplenote now offers fully collaborative editing, and while that's a big step forward from where the app was a few years ago, it needs some improvement. When you add tags to a note, Simplenote uses type-ahead suggestions so you can be consistent with them. Your tags show up in the order you made them, and you can rearrange them at will. All the tags you create appear in a far left menu bar that's collapsed until you open it. You make your own tags, the same way you do in Evernote. There are really only three more significant features in Simplenote: tags, collaboration, and version history. When you paste in formatted text, all the formatting is erased. If you paste in a hyperlink, however, it does stylize and link out. When you create a note in Simplenote, the top line becomes the title, and everything that follows is the note text. Those tools are keystone features in Evernote, OneNote, and Joplin. In addition to being text-only, Simplenote doesn't offer folders or subfolders, notebooks, sections, stacks, or other organizational tools.

Simplenote has a little Markdown cheat sheet that you can pull up at any time if you need a reminder on how to add a particular style. Markdown doesn't give you much beyond bold, italic, headings, and a few kinds of stylized lists. You may have seen people text messaging app put asterisks around a word like * this* to make it bold: That's Markdown. Markdown is a simplified language for typing symbols around text to stylize it. You can use Markdown (Opens in a new window) if you like, but it's optional. If you're okay with having a text-only app, you might not mind that Simplenote keeps things simple all around. While many users have grown frustrated with Evernote over the years, and rightfully so, it has been an innovator in the note-taking apps category for years. Evernote is our third Editors' Choice pick. OneNote offers many more features and Joplin gives you more tools for organizing your notes. They are Microsoft OneNote and Joplin, which is also open source. Two of them are free, just like Simplenote. There are better choices, however PCMag has three Editors' Choice winners. For those firmly in the less-is-more camp, Simplenote is worth a look. This app is made for those who focus best when they aren't distracted by extra frills. You can use Markdown language (more on this below), but otherwise you don't get formatting or styling options for the text.

Only text notes are supported, however, meaning there's no uploading images or recording voice memos. It's a straightforward synced note-taking app that's cross-platform and free, and it also includes collaboration options. Simplenote, owned by Automattic (which also runs and Tumblr), is a good option for anyone who doesn't need all that. The giants of the space, Evernote and OneNote, aim to do it all, offering rich features and support for multimedia. Not all note-taking apps are created equal.
