The best note-taking app for students in Australia

Short answer first: start with the Microsoft 365 licence that comes with your enrolment. Melbourne, Monash, UNSW, Sydney and UQ all give students Microsoft 365, and on a Microsoft 365 subscription Word's Transcribe takes 300 minutes of uploaded audio a month, with English (Australia) on its list. Then check whether you may record at all. UniSC strictly prohibits unauthorised recording, while ACU says a reasonable request should not be refused. Only then pay. Google AI Plus is 7.99 Australian dollars a month, and eligible students get a year at no cost if they redeem it by 31 December 2026.

Every price here is a list price as of September 2026, taken from the vendor's Australian page or the Australian App Store. Where no Australian price exists, you get the currency the vendor's own page shows, labelled, with nothing converted. Recording rules and privacy law each have their own article in this series, so each gets one short section here.

Each tool is assessed on its own in the best note-taking app for students. What follows is the Australian part: the campus licence, the permission, the Privacy Act question and the prices you will actually be charged.

What does your university already give you?

Look at what you already have before you spend a dollar. Your university may already record your lectures, which is the subject of lecture capture at Australian universities. And every university we checked gives its students Microsoft 365, Word included. What differs is the small print, such as who qualifies and when access stops.

• Melbourne gives you Copilot Chat, not a Copilot licence. The University of Melbourne's Student IT page lets you install Microsoft 365 apps on up to five PCs or Macs, plus tablets and phones, and says the Copilot Chat every student gets does not include a licence to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Access ends 3 to 6 months after you complete your studies.
• Monash covers students based in Australia. Monash eSolutions makes Microsoft 365 available to all current staff and students based in Australia, and you can install Office on up to five personal devices at any one time.
• Sydney keeps it running while you are enrolled. Sydney's student apps page gives you Office 365 on up to five devices, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote, for as long as you are enrolled and connect to the internet at least once every 30 days. The same page calls Microsoft Copilot a University endorsed GenAI tool, free for all students.
• UQ says it is free of charge. UQ's getting started page describes Microsoft 365 as available to students free of charge on UQ and personal computers, with OneNote listed for notetaking.
• UNSW covers every current student. UNSW's MyIT page says all current staff and students have access to Office 365, and you sign in with your zID at an ad.unsw.edu.au address.

If your university is not here, its IT page will read much the same. Look for when access ends, so your notes do not disappear with your student account. Then look for whether you hold a Copilot licence or only Copilot Chat, because Microsoft ties the higher transcription limit to the licence.

Word's Transcribe

Transcribe lives in Word. You record, or upload a file, and it returns a transcript you can work with alongside the audio. Microsoft's Transcribe page for Australia sets the terms.

• 300 minutes of uploaded audio a month. That is the limit for users with a Microsoft 365 subscription. With a Microsoft Copilot licence it rises to 30,000.
• Start in Word for the web. Transcribe on the web runs in the new Microsoft Edge and in Chrome. The Windows desktop version is limited to what Microsoft calls commercial tenants, and OneNote gets the feature on Windows only.
• English (Australia) is listed. It is one of more than 80 locales on the page.
• University accounts are not mentioned. The page does not say whether an education licence includes the minutes. Transcribe a ten-minute recording in week one and you will know.

Three hundred minutes is five one-hour lectures a month. That will not cover a full timetable, but if your account includes it, it costs nothing on top of the licence, and the transcript lands in a program you already use.

Copilot and the Premium offer

Microsoft's Australian education page gives students with an eligible education email Office 365 A1 for free, which is the web versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The same page advertises, for a limited time, 12 months of Microsoft 365 Premium with a college email, subject to terms it does not list. If your university's licence is thin, check whether A1 covers you.

Bought outright, Premium is 33 Australian dollars a month or 329 a year, Family 18 or 179, and Personal 16 or 159. Microsoft and Google both publish Australian dollar prices on their own sites. For Otter, Goodnotes and Notability, the Australian prices are on the App Store.

Are you allowed to record in that room?

Each university sets its own rule, and the rules do not agree.

• UniSC prohibits unauthorised recording. UniSC's answer to "Can I record my class?" says teaching sessions are likely to contain copyright material and personal information, and that unauthorised recording is strictly prohibited. Recording is approved when your Learning Access Plan documents it.
• ANU wants the presenter's written permission. ANU's procedure on recording teaching activities does not permit personal recordings by those present without the express written permission of the presenter.
• ACU expects a reasonable request to be granted. ACU's Lecture Capture Policy lets you ask the lecturer, before you start, to record a lecture that lecture capture does not cover, for study and revision only. No reasonable request should be refused, and you undertake not to share the file without the lecturer's consent and to destroy it when you finish the unit.

That matters when you choose an app. A tool that starts recording on its own, or sends a bot into an online class, sits badly with every one of those rules. A recorder you start yourself, after asking, fits. More universities' policies, and the state and territory laws underneath them, are in recording lectures in Australia.

Where does the audio go?

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

• A privacy policy should say whether data goes overseas. Under clause 1.4 of Australian Privacy Principle 1, which sits in Schedule 1 of the Privacy Act 1988, an organisation bound by the principles must state in its privacy policy whether it is likely to disclose personal information to overseas recipients and, where practicable, in which countries. That is the paragraph to find.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 privacy law covers your university, and what to think about before you upload a recording with other people's voices in it, is in student data privacy in Australia.

What does it cost in Australia?

Prices verified in September 2026, App Store figures where the vendor sells through it. "Not stated" means the vendor's own page does not say, not that the answer is bad.

Microsoft, Google, Otter, Goodnotes and Notability all publish an Australian dollar price, which is more than any other country on this site gets. Notion and Notibo bill in euro. Notability's App Store listing shows five Plus entries between A$12.99 and A$49.99 without a billing period, so read the period off the listing before you subscribe.

Which app should you pick?

Australia is the one country on this site where the price column is nearly complete. Microsoft, Google, Otter, Goodnotes and Notability all publish an Australian dollar figure, so you can compare like with like before you commit. Notion and Notibo are the exceptions, and both bill in euro.

That makes the licence the first question rather than the price. If Microsoft 365 is on your university's IT page, Transcribe is already yours at 300 minutes a month, and the cheapest thing on the table is the thing you have. If it is not, the free year of Google AI Plus is the next stop, provided you redeem it before 31 December 2026.

The permission question is separate and it is not optional. If you may not record, the tools that read a file are the only ones left on the list.

The verdict on each tool is in the best note-taking app for students.

Where Notibo fits

Notibo records a lecture on a computer, 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, so slides and readings end up in the same place as the lecture. It transcribes 89 languages, and the transcript comes back in the language that was spoken.

The first 14 days of Pro are free, with 240 minutes of recording and no card. When the trial ends, the free plan gives 30 minutes of recording a month. Pro is 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year. That is euro, not Australian dollars, and the local amount is shown at checkout. Uploads are capped at 50 MB, a quarter of what Gemini Notebook accepts, and one recording can run for up to two hours. Long recordings are saved in smaller parts as they run and joined into one transcript. The transcript and notes export as PDF or Word.

On a computer, in Chrome or Edge, Notibo can take the sound of a browser tab, for an online class you have permission to record, and on Windows the whole system sound. Safari and Firefox give it the microphone only, and no bot joins the call.

Files are stored in the EU, on Supabase in Frankfurt. Transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses, and the audio file is deleted from storage once the transcript and notes are generated. So the recording does leave Australia, and if you need Australian storage and processing, this is not your tool. The plans are on the pricing page.