The best note-taking app for students

Short answer first. Before you buy anything, find out what your university already pays for, because a Microsoft 365 licence you already hold will transcribe 300 minutes of audio a month. Then find out whether you are allowed to record in the room you are sitting in, because that decides which half of this list is usable at all. Only then does the price matter, and by that point most students discover they need one tool rather than three.

Every price below is the vendor's own published figure. Where a vendor localises its pricing, the number you see will differ from the one here, and your own country's page is the one to read.

Otter

Otter's free Basic plan gives 300 minutes of transcription a month, with three file imports for the life of the account. Not three a month. If your plan is to record on your phone and upload afterwards, the free plan closes on you in the first week.

Pro is 16.99 US dollars a month billed monthly, or 8.33 a month billed annually, for 1,200 minutes and ten imports a month. There is a 20 per cent education discount, 13.59 dollars monthly or 6.67 on the annual plan, but the pricing page words the eligibility as a ".edu" email address. Plenty of universities outside the United States do not use one. Whether Otter accepts another domain we could not verify, so ask support before you pay.

Language is the limit. Otter's pricing page lists transcription in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese, and its announcement of French and Spanish says the language is chosen once in Account Settings rather than per recording. No page names a regional English variant. Otter does claim to handle challenging accents, which is a marketing sentence, not a test result. Record one lecture with your most difficult lecturer on the free plan before you decide.

Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM

Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook in July 2026 and the tool is the same. On a computer it records nothing, and a recorder for the phone app has been rolling out since September 2026. You bring it a file, it transcribes at import and keeps the text as a source you can question and turn into study material. Each source can be 500,000 words or 200 MB, which swallows a full lecture recording without complaint.

The paid tiers are AI Plus, AI Pro and Ultra, each with more Gemini Notebook capacity than the free one, and each priced in your own currency on Google's local subscriptions page. The offer worth knowing about is the student one: Google gives eligible university students aged 18 or over a free year of AI Plus, with eligibility re-verified yearly and a country list worth checking against your own.

On a computer the missing half is the recording. You still need something to capture the lecture and a way to get the file out. If your university publishes lecture capture, look for a download button before you plan on it.

Notion and Notion AI

Notion's pricing page localises, so the figure you see depends on where you are. Read it off the page rather than off this one.

For students the price barely matters, because Notion's education plan gives the Plus plan free to students and educators at accredited universities with an institution email, limited to one member. The education page says nothing about whether Notion AI is included, and the pricing page marks AI as a trial on Free and Plus, with AI Meeting Notes, the feature that records and transcribes, sitting on Business. That makes Notion the most expensive route on this page to a lecture transcript, and the cheapest place to keep notes you made somewhere else.

Use the free education plan for organising. Do not buy Business for the recorder.

OneNote, Word and Copilot

OneNote is where a great many students already keep typed notes, and it arrives with the Microsoft licence rather than on top of it. The part of that licence most students never open is Transcribe, in Word.

Microsoft's own page puts it at 300 minutes of uploaded audio a month on a standard Microsoft 365 subscription, rising to 30,000 minutes with a Copilot licence, across 80 or more locales including regional English variants. Copilot also adds summarising inside Word itself.

Two honest limits. The page does not say whether an education tenant includes the transcription minutes, so test it on a ten-minute recording in week one rather than discovering the answer in week ten. And the output stops at words with timestamps and speaker labels. It does not turn them into anything you can revise from. If you want flashcards out of your notes, that is a second step and a second tool.

Apple Notes and Voice Memos

If you have an iPhone 12 or later, you already own a transcriber. Apple's iPhone guide says Voice Memos transcribes speech in English, all variants, plus Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Korean and two forms of Chinese, and that the feature is not available in every country. You can watch the transcript appear while recording, copy all or part of it out afterwards, and search recordings by their transcribed text. Recordings made on older versions of iOS are transcribed when you open them. The same guide has a "Record and transcribe audio" topic for Notes, so the transcript can live inside the note itself.

Free, already on the phone, and it covers every English variant. It stops at a transcript, and Apple's page does not say where the processing happens, so do not assume.

Notability and GoodNotes

Both are handwriting apps first and recorders second, which suits anyone who writes on an iPad in lectures.

Notability's pricing page is in dollars. Starter is free with five notes. At the regular price Lite is 14.99 dollars a year, Plus 19.99 and Pro 99.99. A back-to-school sale of up to 20 per cent brings them to 11.99, 15.99 and 79.99 as of September 2026, and there is no standing student price. Plus is the tier that records and transcribes audio, and it adds up to 400 AI quizzes and flashcards a month.

GoodNotes is also in dollars. The free plan is limited to 20 minutes of recording, Essential is 11.99 dollars a year and Pro 35.99, and audio recording with transcription is included on the paid tiers. There is a one-time Special Edition on Apple devices and an education plan, but the education plan is set up through an admin console, which means your university does it, not you.

Neither page names English variants, and neither says where the audio goes.

The phone you already own

• iPhone. Voice Memos, above. iPhone 12 or later.
• Pixel. Google's Recorder help page lists live transcription on Pixel 6 and later across several regional English variants, including United Kingdom, Irish, Australian, Indian, Singaporean and US English. Live transcription runs on the phone. The same page says re-transcribing may process audio files on Google servers, so not everything stays on the device. Recorder is Pixel only.

Both are free and both are good. Both stop at words. Record your next lecture on the phone you own before paying anyone for the same output.

Where does the audio go?

When you choose the app, you are the one sending the recording somewhere, not your university. Ask every vendor two separate questions: where the file is stored, and where the speech is turned into text.

• Otter names Amazon Web Services in the United States. Otter's privacy policy lists AWS, based in the United States, among the providers it relies on for compute and data storage.
• Microsoft's transcription service does not keep the audio. Its Transcribe page says audio is sent to Microsoft only to provide the service and is not stored by the service once the transcription is done. The file itself is saved to the Transcribed Files folder in your OneDrive.
• A Pixel does some of the work in the cloud. Google's Recorder help says summaries run in an isolated environment in the cloud, and that transcribing a recording again may process the audio on Google servers.
• Goodnotes and Notability say nothing about it on the pages we read.

Which data protection law covers your university, and what to weigh before uploading a recording with other people's voices in it, depends on where you study. The country pages further down are the place for that.

How do they compare?

Prices verified on 17 September 2026 in the vendor's own currency, and Notibo's row on 29 September 2026. "Not stated" means the pricing or help page we read does not say, not that the answer is bad.

The decision rule

1. Open your university's IT page. If Microsoft 365 is there, test Word's Transcribe on a short recording this week. If it works, you have 300 minutes a month before spending anything.
2. Read the recording policy and email one lecturer. If the answer is no, you are shopping for something that processes lecture-capture files and PDFs rather than a recorder, and Gemini Notebook on the free student year is the obvious candidate.
3. If the answer is yes, decide whether you need words or notes. For words, your phone is free and already lists your English variant. For notes and flashcards you can revise from, you are choosing between Notability Plus and a tool built for the job.
4. If where the audio goes is the constraint, ask each vendor in writing. Treat a vague answer as a no. Only Otter, Microsoft and Google answered the question at all on the pages we read.

Pick on the constraint that binds hardest. It is usually not the price, and it is never the feature list.

Where your country changes the answer

Three things on this page are decided locally rather than by the vendor: which licence your university has already bought, whether you may record in the room, and what these prices come to on your own statement.

• United Kingdom. What a UK university licence covers, and what the recording rules are
• Canada. The campus licence, provincial differences and prices in Canadian dollars
• Ireland. What your college provides, and what changes if a module is taught through Irish
• Australia. The campus licence, the Privacy Act question and prices in Australian dollars

Where Notibo fits

Notibo records a lecture, or takes an audio file you upload, and returns a transcript, structured notes and flashcards with spaced repetition. It also turns PDF, PPTX and DOCX files into notes and flashcards, which covers the slides and the reading. It transcribes 89 languages and the transcript comes back in the language spoken.

Files are stored in the EU, on Supabase in Frankfurt, and transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses.

Pro is free for 14 days with no card, and those days include 240 minutes of recording. After that the free plan is 30 minutes of recording a month, so a full term of lectures means Pro, at 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year. There is more on the recording side at lecture recording, and on the cards at flashcards from lectures and slides.

Recording a lecture needs your lecturer's permission. Ask first.