Dec 28, 2019 đŸ’°Price tag: Free software Features: Easily navigable dashboard, drag-and-drop chapters, collaborative editing, multiple layout preview options, publication setup FastPencil is essentially Google Docs for the professional (or aspiring) author. This online platform cannot be downloaded and is therefore only usable if you have WiFi. However, its nonexistent price tag more-or-less makes up for. Jarnal is an open-source application for notetaking, sketching, keeping a journal, making a presentation, annotating a document - including pdf - or collaborating using a stylus, mouse or keyboard. It is similar to Microsoft Windows Journal and to the earlier Mimeo whiteboarding and Palm notepad applications.
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. 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 (Free at Apple.com) 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($123.00 at Amazon) . 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.
Best Productivity Picks
Further Reading
Milanote Cost
Productivity
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Pros
- A note-taking app for the visually inclined.
- Works very well on Chrome.
- Real-time collaboration supported.
Cons
- Missing many features.
- Expensive paid accounts.
Bottom Line
Milanote is a new Web-based note-taking app that thinks of notebooks more like canvases than legal pads. It's designed for visual people but leaves out too many features to truly satisfy them, for now.
Milanote is a new cloud-based note-taking app designed for people with a visual mindset. In many ways, it mimics note-taking apps that are specific to the iPad, such as Penultimate, adopting the model of an unlined canvas rather than A legal pad. But Milanote is not available on the iPad or any other touch-specific format at the moment. The only place to find it is in a web browser. It doesn't support drawing, sketching, or handwriting, and for that reason, is very limited—apart from its excellent real-time collaboration.
Price and Plans
Milanote is free to use for as long as you want with one large limitation: You can only store up to 100 notes, images, or links. The app offers two paid subscription options that remove the upload limit. Milanote Professional (the version I tested) is the first paid tier, which costs $15 per month or $144 annually. The other tier is called Milanote Professional Team, and it's designed to give multiuser signups a discount. When two or more people sign up together, the price is $12.50 per person per month, or $120 per person per year. Other than that, the plans are the same. You get the same support channels, the same set of features, and the same maximum file upload size of 10MB.
Milanote prices are on the high side, compared with other similar services, especially given that it doesn't have nearly the same range of features as the top players in the space.
Evernote, for example, is one of the most note-taking popular apps, and users complained loudly when the company upped its prices to $69.99 per year for a Business account and $34.99 per year for a Plus account. That's still much less than Milanote charges. Evernote also still has a free tier of service, but it limits you to syncing across only two devices, and you can only upload 60MB of data each month. There are a few other great features that free Evernote users don't get. See PCMag's review of Evernote for more details on what's included in the different plans.
Microsoft OneNote is the other major name in the note-taking and syncing space. OneNote has a free version as well, with no feature restrictions. It uses OneDrive for storage, which gives anyone who signs up 25GB of space absolutely for free. Should you pay for an Office 365 ($99.00 at Amazon) account, you'll get 1TB of space all told, although that space is shared among other Office Online apps. Google Keep and Zoho Notebook also have generous free plans.
Note-Taking Features
Milanote lets you create, edit, and save notes and notebooks. Think of notebooks as pasteboards, along the lines of those in Pinterest , but beefier. To each pasteboard, you can add images, arrows and lines, free-form text notes, and column notes, which are essentially notes with a header. You can also add notebooks within notebooks.
I tested the app for a few days in Chrome and Firefox. It ran much better in Chrome, with the Firefox version sometimes becoming unresponsive or sluggish.
According to a representative, Milanote backs up everything you create instantly and forever. When my power cut out unexpectedly and my computer crashed, I was impressed to see that the letters I had typed into one of my notes were all there when I rebooted. The app doesn't keep histories of notes, however, so you can't restore an older version of a note. According to the same representative, the feature may be added later. He added that the team handles restore requests manually on a case-by-case basis for now. Evernote Premium and Microsoft OneNote (Free at Microsoft Store) already offer the ability to restore older versions of notes.
A neat feature I have not seen in other note-taking apps before is a drawer off to the right of your pasteboard in which you can put notes that you have not yet sorted into an appropriate notebook. Other note-taking apps have their own solutions or workarounds for unsorted notes, such as creating an Inbox notebook to serve as the default for all notes until you sort and categorize them, but I like the concept of the drawer because you can see it no matter which notebook you're viewing.
Real-Time Collaboration
Milanote's real-time collaboration impresses me. You can share any board by entering your intended collaborator's email address or copying a link and deciding whether the person should have read-only or editing privileges.
When another person with editing privileges joins your board and begins making changes while you're still viewing and editing the board, you see the objects they select highlighted and marked with their initials. It's similar to the way real-time collaboration looks in Google Suite apps.
There aren't any extra tools for collaborating, though, so you won't see dedicated spaces for having an asynchronous chat conversation, for example. You could always create a text box on the board and simply use it to write notes back and forth to one another—a less elegant but viable solution.
If you want to share boards in other ways, you can export them to a variety of formats, such as PDF, PDF canvas, Markdown text, plain text, and as Word documents.
What's Missing
I've mentioned in passing that Milanotes main drawback is its lack of features, such as apps for other platforms and a change history of notes. I would like to note, however, that while it doesn't offer dedicated mobile apps, you can access your account via mobile browser. The experience was not great when I tested it on an iPhone, however. A bunch of images wouldn't load, for example.
Plus, without a dedicated app, you don't have the ability to save notebooks offline, and you don't get interactive features aimed at touch screens, like drawing and handwriting. Milanote doesn't even have a set of tools for drawing, beyond the ability to make arrows and lines.
Milanote doesn't support handwritten notes, nor does it offer optical character recognition (OCR). OCR translates handwriting and pictures of text into searchable, editable, copy-able text.
Milanotes does not have the ability to record audio notes, nor does it have a web clipper. Evernote, OneNote, and Zoho Notebook all have both of those features. Web clippers are browser extensions that let you quickly save content from the web, as if you were clipping an old-school magazine or newspaper article, into a notebook. I use this feature for saving recipes, and it's excellent for academic research and many other uses.
Milanote also lacks tags. Tags are another feature I use on recipe notes so I can quickly look through all my recipes that are 'chocolate' based for example, or all 'appetizers.' If you're a serious note-taker, tags are of key importance as they help you sort and resort your notes in all sorts of useful ways.
At this time, there aren't any integrations with other services offered nor an API, although those are next on the roadmap for Milanote.
Revisit In Six Months
Given the visual, pasteboard nature of Milanote, it invites comparison with some of the best note-taking apps for iPad, namely Penultimate and Notability. To compare favorably, however, Milanote will have to add the ability to draw and write by hand to take full advantage of the touch screen and stylus that many people use when making visual notes.
Given that it lacks these features, I'm currently more inclined to compare it with Evernote and OneNote, the two top productivity products in the more general note-taking and syncing apps category. Either way, Milanote has a long way to go to catch up to the competition. What it offers isn't terrible, but it's missing such a long list of features compared with other apps in its class that there's just no reason to choose it right now. By all means tinker with the free version if you find sampling note-taking apps appealing, and then revisit it in six months or so when it's further along.
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