Best OneNote Alternatives for Mac in 2026

Best OneNote alternatives for Mac at a glance

The best OneNote alternatives for Mac in 2026 are Apple Notes, Notion, Obsidian, Joplin, Leo, Bear, and UpNote. OneNote has no real Mac version — just a port of the Windows app — so every pick below is a Mac-native replacement, compared on price, portability, collaboration, and how you'd migrate.

• Notion (free, Plus €9.50/mo) — Best all-in-one workspace for teams
• Obsidian (free for all use as of Feb 2026) — Best for local Markdown and long-term portability
• Joplin (free, open source) — Best for privacy with free encrypted sync
• Leo (free, Pro $14.99/mo) — Best for capturing notes alongside YouTube, articles, and podcasts
• Apple Notes (free, built in) — Best built-in option already on your Mac
• Bear (free, Pro $2.99/mo) — Best native Mac writing experience
• UpNote (free, $40 lifetime) — Best lightweight markdown app with a one-time purchase

Full disclosure: we make Leo, one of the apps on this list. We evaluated it on the same criteria as every other app.

Why Mac users switch from OneNote

If you're reading this, you've probably already felt at least one of these:

• It never felt Mac-native. The app works, but it has always been a port. Speed, battery efficiency, Shortcuts support, Services menu, keyboard shortcut conventions — none of it feels like an app designed for macOS.
• Proprietary format you can't easily leave. Notes live in a `.one` container on OneDrive with no clean export path. Even if you never want to think about file formats, your notes should be yours — and after watching Microsoft deprecate OneNote for Windows 10 in 2025, the "what if the app goes away" question is suddenly live.
• The freeform canvas is also a fragility problem. Text boxes and images move when you didn't mean them to. Large notebooks lag. Housekeeping — deleting old pages, reorganizing sections — is harder than it should be.
• Collaboration is shared-notebook, not real-time-document. Fine for a SharePoint era, not for how modern teams work. If you need multi-cursor editing and live presence, you're reaching for Notion or Google Docs anyway.
• The 2025 Windows 10 deprecation shook trust. Even if you're on Mac, watching Microsoft deliberately slow sync on a product people were still using was a signal. The center of gravity is the Microsoft 365 upsell, not you.

None of these are bugs. They're consequences of OneNote being a twenty-three-year-old Windows-first product built for a different era of work. Every app on the list below solves at least one of them more cleanly on Mac.

The best OneNote alternatives for Mac

There are more apps like OneNote on Mac than there used to be — and more of them are now worth taking seriously than at any point in the last decade. We'll start with the closest functional replacement for OneNote's team-wiki job and work outward.

Notion — Best all-in-one workspace for teams

If you and your team used OneNote as a shared notebook on SharePoint, Notion is the modern version of that workflow — built from the ground up for teams instead of retrofitted onto a document-sharing model. It combines notes, wikis, databases, and project management into a single workspace with real-time multi-cursor editing, comments, permissions, and relational databases that OneNote has never offered. Your data lives on Notion's servers in a proprietary format, but 100 million people use it, and the native Mac app is polished and fast.

Choose Notion over OneNote if your notes are really team docs and you need real-time collaboration, databases, and permissions. You want one workspace for notes, projects, and wikis instead of a notebook-per-team on SharePoint.

Stick with OneNote if you need a freeform canvas with stylus input, offline-first work, or data you own in files on disk. Notion has no canvas, no handwriting, and everything lives on their servers.

	OneNote	Notion
Real-time collaboration	Shared notebooks	✓ Multi-cursor
Relational databases	—	✓
Freeform canvas	✓	—
Handwriting / stylus	✓ Best-in-class	—
Markdown	—	Shortcuts only
AI features	Copilot (M365)	✓ Add-on
Offline	✓	Limited (cache)
Native Mac app	Port	✓

Free (individuals). Plus: €9.50/member/mo. AI add-on: €10/mo.

Obsidian — Best for local files and long-term portability

Obsidian is the opposite philosophy from OneNote. Where OneNote stores your content in a proprietary container on OneDrive, Obsidian stores each note as a plain Markdown file in a folder on your disk. If the app disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have a directory of `.md` files any text editor could open. That matters particularly for Mac users thinking long term: after watching Microsoft deprecate OneNote for Windows 10 in 2025, the argument for owning your files in plain text is stronger than it has been in a decade. Obsidian is now free for every use including commercial as of February 2026, has a community of 2,754 plugins, and the Obsidian Importer plugin can pull your existing OneNote notebooks in via your Microsoft account and convert them to Markdown.

Choose Obsidian over OneNote if you want your notes to outlive the app. You care about local files, plain text, and data portability. You want a deep plugin ecosystem and a graph view. You're technical enough to set up your own sync (iCloud, Git, or the paid Obsidian Sync add-on).

Stick with OneNote if you need a freeform canvas or stylus input (Obsidian's Canvas is a different thing — a whiteboard, not OneNote's text-box-anywhere model). You don't want to think about file management. Or you need built-in real-time collaboration (Obsidian is a single-player tool).

	OneNote	Obsidian
Local files	— .one container	✓ Plain .md
Markdown native	— Zero support	✓
Plugin ecosystem	—	2,754
Graph view	—	✓
Freeform canvas	✓	Canvas (whiteboard)
Handwriting / stylus	✓	—
Real-time collaboration	Shared notebooks	—
Sync	✓ OneDrive	$5/mo add-on

App 100% free. Optional Sync $5/mo. Free for all use including commercial as of February 2026.

If Obsidian turns out to be the right category but the wrong app for you, we wrote a longer comparison of the best Obsidian alternatives in 2026 — same format as this piece, but focused on apps that match Obsidian's local-first philosophy.

Joplin — Best for privacy with free encrypted sync

Joplin exists because its creator couldn't find a note-taking app that let him actually own and export his content. The answer: open source everything under AGPL-3.0 (54K GitHub stars), encrypt everything on-device before it touches the cloud, and let users sync via whatever backend they already pay for. In practice that means you pick your cloud — Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, S3, or WebDAV — Joplin handles end-to-end encryption, and you pay nothing extra for sync. The Mac app is native, the UI is utilitarian rather than beautiful, and it includes a web clipper that mirrors the OneNote Web Clipper workflow almost exactly.

Choose Joplin over OneNote if free encrypted sync is the feature you care about most. You want open source you can audit. You're already paying for a cloud provider and would rather reuse it than subscribe to another service. Or you're coming from OneNote specifically for the privacy reasons — Microsoft Copilot training on your notes is a concern you don't want.

Stick with OneNote if you want a visually polished app or a freeform canvas. Joplin's UI is functional, not beautiful. It has no handwriting, no canvas, and no first-class real-time collaboration.

	OneNote	Joplin
Open source	—	✓ AGPL-3.0
E2E encrypted sync	—	✓ Free via your own cloud
Markdown native	—	✓
Web clipper	✓	✓
Freeform canvas	✓	—
Handwriting	✓	—
Plugins	—	~266
Terminal CLI	—	✓

Free (open source + free sync). Joplin Cloud: from €2.99/mo if you don't want to BYO cloud.

Leo — Best for notes alongside YouTube, articles, and podcasts

Leo was built around the idea that the best notes are the ones you actually capture. On OneNote, quick capture meant Win+Shift+N on Windows — three keys, a floating window, and a notebook to file it in. Mac users never got the equivalent. Leo is what that should feel like on Mac: a single key press — Fn or Option, whichever you prefer — opens Leo as a popover anywhere on your Mac, over whatever you're reading, writing, or watching. It automatically files each note alongside its source, so a thought you had while watching a YouTube essay stays linked to the video, and a quote you grabbed from an article stays linked to the URL.

Then when you need them, Leo's AI surfaces what you've captured, finds connections across notes, and pulls material into whatever you're working on next. No markdown, no manual linking, no notebook hierarchy — the app's whole thesis is that capture should be frictionless and organization should be the app's job, not yours. Think of it as a digital commonplace book built for how people consume media in 2026.

Choose Leo over OneNote if capturing thoughts is the hard part for you, not organizing them. You want a single hotkey to jot anything down from anywhere on your Mac without context-switching. You take a lot of notes alongside videos, articles, and podcasts and you want the source captured automatically. Or you just want quick capture that doesn't demand a notebook structure up front.

Stick with OneNote if you need a freeform canvas with stylus input — Leo is a text-first popover, not a canvas. You need cross-platform access beyond Mac — Leo is Mac-only by design. You want local Markdown files — Leo is cloud-based (end-to-end encrypted and exportable) and deliberately formatting-free. Or you need plugins and a general-purpose PKM system.

	OneNote	Leo
Single-key quick capture	— Win+Shift+N (Win only)	✓ Fn or Option
Opens anywhere as popover	—	✓
Automatic source capture	Manual	✓ Built-in
AI-powered search & synthesis	Copilot (M365)	✓ Built-in
E2E encryption	—	✓ Included
Freeform canvas	✓	— (text-first)
Cross-platform	✓	— Mac only
Native Mac app	Port	✓

Free (5 notepads + AI). Pro: $14.99/mo. Max: $59.99/mo.

Apple Notes — Best built-in option already on your Mac

Does Apple have a OneNote equivalent? Effectively, yes — and you already own it. Apple Notes is the Apple equivalent to OneNote most people never try before reaching for a third-party app, and in a side-by-side OneNote vs Apple Notes comparison it holds up better than its reputation suggests: shared folders with live collaboration, handwriting with Smart Script on iPad with Apple Pencil, Math Notes that solve equations inline, end-to-end encrypted locked notes, OCR search across handwritten notes and images, and a freeform drawing mode. It's free, it's native, it uses no battery relative to Electron apps, and it integrates with Shortcuts, Spotlight, Siri, Services, and every share sheet on macOS. It doesn't have an infinite-canvas-with-text-boxes-anywhere mode the way OneNote does, but for the vast majority of OneNote use cases, Apple Notes is enough — and the learning curve is zero.

Choose Apple Notes over OneNote if you only use Apple devices, you want something free and already installed, and you value native performance and system integration over cross-platform reach. You do handwriting on an iPad with an Apple Pencil and the rest of your editing on Mac.

Stick with OneNote if you need any non-Apple device, you rely on the freeform text-box canvas specifically, or you need plugin-style extensibility. Apple Notes is deliberately simple and has no plugin model or API.

	OneNote	Apple Notes
Native Mac app	Port	✓ System app
Already installed	—	✓
Handwriting	✓	✓ Smart Script on iPad
Real-time collaboration	Shared notebooks	✓ Shared folders + cursors
E2E encryption	—	✓ Locked notes
OCR search	✓	✓ Handwriting + images
Freeform canvas	✓ Best-in-class	Drawing mode only
Cross-platform	✓	— Apple only
Price	Free + M365 upsell	✓ Free

Free, bundled with every Apple device. Only cost is optional iCloud+ storage if you exceed the free 5 GB tier.

Bear — Best native Mac writing experience

If the reason you're leaving OneNote is that it never felt like a Mac app, Bear is the answer to what Mac-native should feel like. It's a focused writing app built natively with AppKit and UIKit — fast, beautiful, and deliberately simple. Bear 2 added wiki-links, backlinks, and CommonMark-compatible markdown. It's not trying to be a PKM tool or a team workspace. It's trying to be the best place to open and write on an Apple device. Where OneNote's appeal is flexibility and power, Bear's appeal is that you never have to think about the tool at all — it launches instantly, looks beautiful, and stays out of your way.

Choose Bear over OneNote if you only use Apple devices and you want to write, not configure. You value a beautiful, distraction-free editor that feels like part of macOS and syncs seamlessly via iCloud to iPhone and iPad.

Stick with OneNote if you use any non-Apple device — Bear is Apple-only. You need a freeform canvas or stylus input. You need real-time collaboration or shared notebooks. Or you want plain `.md` files on disk (Bear stores notes in SQLite; CommonMark is the editor format, not the storage format).

	OneNote	Bear
Native Mac app	Port	✓ AppKit
Markdown native	—	✓ CommonMark
Backlinks	—	✓ Bear 2
Beautiful editor	Functional	✓
Freeform canvas	✓	—
Handwriting	✓	—
Real-time collaboration	Shared notebooks	—
Cross-platform	✓	— Apple only

Free (no sync, limited export). Pro: $2.99/mo or $29.99/yr — required for iCloud sync across devices.

UpNote — Best lightweight markdown app with a one-time purchase

UpNote is the quiet indie option in this list. Built by a two-person team in Hanoi, unfunded, shipped across every major platform including Linux, with a clean markdown-aware editor and a pricing model that stands out in 2026: $40 for a lifetime license. No subscription, no Microsoft 365 upsell, no proprietary cloud dependency you can't walk away from. The editor takes markdown shortcuts on input (`##` becomes a heading, `**` becomes bold) and renders as rich text — it's not true plain-markdown-on-disk like Obsidian, but it's markdown-literate in a way OneNote has never been. The Mac app is native and fast.

Choose UpNote over OneNote if you want a clean, simple writing app on Mac that also works everywhere else — including Linux if you live between machines. You're tired of subscriptions and want to pay once. You want markdown shortcuts without committing to a full PKM system.

Stick with OneNote if you need a freeform canvas, handwriting, real-time collaboration, or deep AI features (UpNote has none of these as of 2026). You have more than 50 notes and don't want to pay at all — the free tier is essentially a trial.

	OneNote	UpNote
Native Mac app	Port	✓
Markdown shortcuts	—	✓
One-time purchase	—	✓ $40 lifetime
Cross-platform incl. Linux	— No Linux	✓
Backlinks / note links	—	✓
Freeform canvas	✓	—
Handwriting	✓	—
Real-time collaboration	Shared notebooks	—
AI features	Copilot (M365)	—

Free (50-note trial). Premium: $2/mo or $19.99/yr. Lifetime: $40 one-time.

How to migrate from OneNote on Mac

Unlike Obsidian's vault of `.md` files, OneNote stores everything in a proprietary `.one` container synced to OneDrive. There is no clean export path built into OneNote itself. But there are two reliable approaches.

The official path: Obsidian Importer. Even if you're not planning to use Obsidian, the Obsidian Importer plugin is the cleanest OneNote extraction tool available. It connects to your Microsoft account via the Graph API, lets you pick which notebooks and sections to pull, converts each page to Markdown, and saves images as linked files. From that Markdown output, you can then move into any other app that imports Markdown: Joplin, Bear, UpNote, Apple Notes (partial), or Notion. For large notebooks, import one section at a time — the plugin can timeout or miss pages on bulk imports of thousands of pages.

The community path: OneNote MD Exporter. A command-line tool that takes a different approach — it reads from the desktop OneNote app rather than the Graph API, so it can work on notebooks that won't authenticate through the API. It's brittle and unmaintained at times, but for complex notebooks it's sometimes the only option.

App-by-app notes:

• Notion — Imports Markdown files individually or as ZIP. Pass the Obsidian Importer output through. Headings, lists, and code blocks come through cleanly. Images need to be re-uploaded.
• Obsidian — Direct via the Importer plugin. Links between pages carry over as wiki-links. Canvas content (text boxes at arbitrary positions) flattens into paragraphs; expect to lose the spatial layout of OneNote pages.
• Joplin — Imports entire directories of Markdown files via File > Import > MD (directory). Folder structure maps to Joplin's notebook hierarchy.
• Leo — Leo is designed for capturing fresh notes as they come to you, not migrating an existing knowledge base. There's no OneNote importer. If you want your old OneNote content searchable in Leo, copy the specific notes you still reference; leave the archive where it is.
• Apple Notes — No direct OneNote importer. The cleanest path is Obsidian Importer → Markdown files → copy/paste into Apple Notes folders. Handwriting and canvas positioning don't transfer.
• Bear — Imports plain Markdown files via File > Import Notes. Wiki-links and tags transfer. Images from the Obsidian Importer step come through.
• UpNote — Imports individual Markdown files. No bulk vault import.

What rarely transfers from OneNote: the infinite canvas text-box positioning, handwriting layers, audio recordings embedded in pages, and any Copilot Notebook context you built after November 2025. These are OneNote-specific and have no equivalent in other apps.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free OneNote alternative for Mac?

Apple Notes is already installed on your Mac, is completely free, and handles most of what OneNote does — including handwriting on iPad via Apple Pencil and shared folders for collaboration. If you want an open-source option with free end-to-end encrypted sync via your own cloud, Joplin is the strongest pick. If you want long-term portability with plain Markdown files, Obsidian is free for every use as of February 2026.

Can I import my OneNote notebooks into another Mac app?

Yes, via Obsidian's official Importer plugin. It connects to your Microsoft account, lets you pick which notebooks and sections to import, and converts pages to Markdown with images as linked files. From there you can move the Markdown output into any other app. See our migration section for app-by-app details.

Is OneNote still worth using on Mac in 2026?

OneNote on Mac works, it is free, and Copilot in OneNote adds useful AI features. But OneNote has always been a Windows-first product, and the Mac app is a port. If any of the Mac-native alternatives on this list fit your workflow, switching gives you speed, battery life, system integration, and a sense that the app was designed for your platform.

Which Mac OneNote alternatives work offline?

Apple Notes, Bear, Obsidian, and Joplin all work fully offline with local storage. Notion and UpNote offer limited offline access through caching. Leo caches notes locally but needs a connection for AI features.

Can I export OneNote notes to Markdown?

Not directly. OneNote has zero markdown support in any version — no detection, no rendering, no import, no export. Your best path is Obsidian's Importer plugin, which uses the Microsoft Graph API to pull your notebooks and convert them to Markdown.

Which Mac OneNote alternative has the best freeform canvas?

None of them fully match OneNote's text-box-anywhere infinite canvas — that remains OneNote's one uncontested advantage. Obsidian's Canvas is the closest in spirit: an infinite zoomable whiteboard with text cards, images, and embedded notes. Apple Notes has a freeform drawing mode that works well with Apple Pencil on iPad. If the canvas is your only reason for staying with OneNote, you may want to stay.

Why did Microsoft deprecate OneNote for Windows 10?

Microsoft retired OneNote for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, to consolidate development around the Microsoft 365 version. Starting in June 2025, Microsoft deliberately degraded sync performance on the Windows 10 app to encourage migration. Mac users were not directly affected, but the pattern — Microsoft optimizing for the Microsoft 365 upsell rather than for existing users — is the reason many long-time OneNote users are now looking at alternatives.

The verdict

Seven OneNote competitors, seven different answers to the same question: where should your notes live now that OneNote has stopped feeling like the right place?

Your situation	Best pick
Your team outgrew shared SharePoint notebooks	Notion
You want your notes in plain files you still own in 10 years	Obsidian
You want open-source privacy with free encrypted sync	Joplin
You capture a lot alongside YouTube, articles, and podcasts	Leo
You want the free one that's already on your Mac	Apple Notes
You want the beautiful, fast, truly Mac-native writing app	Bear
You want markdown-friendly writing with a one-time purchase	UpNote

OneNote is still the only app with a freeform canvas that does what it does, and that alone keeps it alive for some people. But for almost every other job OneNote was doing — team collaboration, long-term archive, quick capture, privacy, markdown writing — there is now a Mac-native app that's better than OneNote at that specific job. The best OneNote alternative is the one that fits the job you're actually trying to do.