The best note-taking app for students in Canada

Short answer first. Start with the Microsoft licence your university already pays for. Then find out whether you are allowed to record in the room you are sitting in, because that decides which tools are usable at all. Then decide whether French matters to you, because it rules out more of this list than price does. Only then compare the apps with a price on them, and compare them in Canadian dollars, because most of this market does not bill in Canadian dollars.

Of the tools below, only Microsoft and Google publish a price in Canadian dollars. Otter, GoodNotes and Notability bill in US dollars. Notion shows whatever currency it thinks you are in. Notibo bills in euro. Every price here was verified on 8 September 2026 on the vendor's own page, and where the page showed US dollars we have given the dollar figure rather than a guess at the conversion.

What does your university already give you?

Most Canadian universities license Microsoft 365 for their students. UBC IT says the service is "currently offered to UBC Students at no cost", covers Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote, and works on up to five PCs or Macs, five tablets and five phones per user. You need an active student status and a cwl@student.ubc.ca mailbox. U of T's student FAQ says the Office suite "is available for free to University of Toronto students" with a UTORid and @utoronto.ca address, in the browser or installed. Your own university's IT page will say something similar. Read it before you read any pricing page.

Word's Transcribe feature

The part of that licence most students never open is Transcribe, in Word. You upload a recording and Word returns timestamped text. Microsoft's documentation sets the limits.

• 300 minutes of uploaded audio a month on a Microsoft 365 subscription, and 30,000 minutes with a Copilot licence.
• Word for the web, Word on Windows and OneNote on Windows.
• English (Canada) and French (Canada) are both on the language list. Not many pages on this list can say that.
• Education licences are not mentioned. The page does not say whether a university tenant includes the transcription minutes. Test it on a ten-minute recording in week one rather than discovering the answer in week ten.

Three hundred minutes is six fifty-minute lectures a month. That is not the whole term, but it is more than most students pay Otter for.

Copilot and the Premium offer

If your university does not license Copilot, Microsoft's Canadian education page currently says "use your college email and get 12 months of Microsoft 365 Premium on us", for a limited time. Premium is otherwise 27 Canadian dollars a month or 270 a year, with Personal at 11.50 a month or 115 a year and Family at 14.50 or 145. Those are Canadian dollars on a Canadian page, which is rarer on this list than it should be. The same education page gives anyone with an eligible education email Office 365 A1 for free, which is the web versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. If your university's licence is thinner than UBC's, A1 still gets you Word for the web, which is where Transcribe lives.

Are you allowed to record in that room?

Canadian universities set their own rules, faculties often add their own, and most of them come down to the same thing: the instructor's permission, unless you have an accommodation that says otherwise. The lecture is the room where the answer is most often yes. Tutorials, labs and anything on a clinical or practicum placement are the rooms where the answer is no, because the people you would be recording are classmates who did not agree to it, or patients and pupils who cannot. We went through the wording institution by institution in recording lectures in Canada.

For the tools below it means one thing. An app that records in the background or sends a bot into a class is a poor fit. A recorder you start deliberately, in a lecture, after asking, is the fit. If your university publishes lecture capture, the download button matters more than any recorder, and lecture capture at Canadian universities covers where to look.

What decides it for a Canadian student?

• Price in Canadian dollars. A US dollar subscription moves with the exchange rate every month, and many Canadian cards add a foreign transaction fee on top. Not large, but it is the sort of small that adds up over four years.
• French. If you study in Quebec, or at Ottawa where a course can run in both languages, the question is not whether the tool handles English. It is whether it names French, whether it names Canadian French, and what happens when a lecturer switches language mid-sentence. Where a vendor's page names a Canadian variant we have said so. Where it just says English, we have said that too.
• Where the audio goes. Ask where the file is stored, then ask separately which country the speech-to-text runs in. Under PIPEDA, the Privacy Commissioner's guidance on processing across borders says an organisation "is responsible for personal information in its possession or custody, including information that has been transferred to a third party for processing", that the protection abroad should be "generally equivalent", and that it must make it plain to you, ideally at collection, that your information may be processed in another country and be accessible to that country's authorities. It also says that if the purpose is unchanged, "additional consent for the transfer is not required", and that once told, you do not get a separate right to refuse the transfer. So what PIPEDA gives you is the right to be told, not the right to keep the audio in Canada. In Quebec, the Commission d'accès à l'information says that under Law 25 a company must complete a privacy impact assessment before communicating personal information outside the province, that the communication must always be covered by a written agreement, and that the company "demeure toujours responsable" for the information. Most pricing pages say nothing about any of this. There is more in student data privacy in Canada.
• Notes or transcript. A fifty-minute lecture is roughly seven thousand words of transcript. If the tool stops there, you have moved the work rather than done it. The gap is the subject of transcription is not the same as notes.

Decide which of those binds hardest for you before opening a pricing page. It is usually not price.

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 it as "an email address ending with .edu". Canadian universities use .ca. Whether Otter accepts a utoronto.ca or ubc.ca address we could not verify, so ask support before you pay.

Language is the harder limit. Otter's own announcement puts its transcription at English, French and Spanish, chosen once under Account Settings, after which "all your future recordings will automatically be transcribed and summarized in that language". No Canadian variant is named for either language, and a lecture that moves between English and French has to be one or the other. For a Quebec student that is a real cost, and for an Ottawa student in a bilingual course it is close to disqualifying.

Otter processes speech on its own servers. Where those are, and under which transfer mechanism, is not on the pricing page.

Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM

Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook in July 2026 and the tool is the same. It records nothing. You bring it a file, it reads it 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.

This is one of two tools on the list with a clean Canadian price. Google's Canadian subscriptions page lists AI Plus at 6.99 Canadian dollars a month, AI Pro at 26.99, and Ultra from 139.99, each with more Gemini Notebook capacity than the free tier. The student offer is gone. Google's student page, opened with the Canadian language setting, says "our previous student offer ended on December 9, 2025 and is no longer available in your region", and points at the free tier instead. If you find a live Canadian student offer on that page, read it off the page rather than off this one.

The missing half is the recording. You still need something to capture the lecture and a way to get the file out. The page we read does not name a transcription language, so test it on a French recording before you plan a term around it.

Notion and Notion AI

Notion's pricing page localises. From where we checked it showed euro, Plus at 9.50 and Business at 19.50 per member per month. A Canadian visitor should see Canadian dollars. We could not verify that figure, so read it off the page yourself.

For students the price barely matters, because Notion's education plan is "a free Plus plan for a one-member workspace" for anyone at an accredited college or university with a school email. The education page does not say 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

Covered above under the university licence, so briefly. OneNote is where many Canadian students already keep typed notes, Word's Transcribe gives you 300 minutes of uploaded audio a month if your tenant includes it, in English (Canada) or French (Canada), and Copilot, whether through the university or the 12-month Premium offer, lifts that to 30,000 minutes and adds summarising inside Word. Nothing on Microsoft's pages we read names a Canadian data location for the transcription itself. Your university's privacy office will know what its tenant contract says, and a student can ask.

The honest limitation is the output. Transcribe returns words with timestamps and speaker labels. It does not turn them into anything you can revise from. If you want flashcards from 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 Canadian iPhone guide says Voice Memos transcription "is available on iPhone 12 or later in English (all variants), Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese", and that "it's not available in all countries or regions". 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 iOS 17 or earlier 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, English in every variant and French named outright. It stops at a transcript, and the 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 US dollars. Starter is free. Lite is 11.99 dollars a year, Plus 15.99 a year, Pro 79.99 a year, each with a one-time purchase option beside it. Plus is the tier that records and transcribes audio, and it adds up to 400 AI quizzes and flashcards a month. There is a back-to-school sale of up to 20 per cent on the page rather than a standing student price.

GoodNotes is also in US 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 free education plan, but it is set up "by setting up an Admin console", which means your university does it, not you.

Neither page names a language variant, and neither says where the audio goes.

The phone you already own

• iPhone. Voice Memos, above. iPhone 12 or later, English in all variants, French named.
• Pixel. Google's Recorder help page lists French (Canada) as a live transcription language on Pixel 6 and later, alongside French. It does not list English (Canada). The English variants are Australia, India, Ireland, Singapore, United Kingdom and United States. Live transcription runs on the phone, and the same page says "re-transcribe 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.

Comparison table

Prices verified on 8 September 2026. "Not stated" means the vendor's 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, in the language your lectures are in. If it works, you have 300 minutes a month before spending anything.
2. Read the recording policy and email one instructor. If the answer is no, you are shopping for something that processes lecture-capture files and PDFs, not a recorder, and Gemini Notebook on the free tier is the obvious candidate.
3. If French is in the room, cross off anything that does not name it. That removes Otter for a bilingual course and leaves Word, Voice Memos, Pixel and Notibo. Then record one lecture with your most difficult lecturer on the free tier before you decide, because a language on a list is not the same as a transcript you can read.
4. If the answer to recording is yes, decide whether you need words or notes. For words, your phone is free. For notes and flashcards you can revise from, you are choosing between Notability Plus in US dollars and Notibo in euro, and neither is in Canadian dollars.
5. If where the audio goes is the constraint, ask each vendor in writing. Treat a vague answer as a no. Only Pixel's help page and Notibo's own documentation answered the question 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 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 lecture-capture download and the slide deck. It transcribes 89 languages including Canadian English and Canadian French. We have not tested a lecture that switches language mid-sentence on Notibo or on any other tool on this page, so run one on the free plan before you rely on it. The free plan is 30 minutes of recording a month. Pro is 9.99 euro a month with a seven-day trial on the monthly plan, or 99.99 euro a year. That is euro, not Canadian dollars, and the local amount is shown at checkout. Uploads are capped at 50 MB, a quarter of what Gemini Notebook accepts, and long recordings are split into 30-minute files on the phone and joined back into one transcript.

On the data question the answer is split. Files are stored in the EU, on Supabase in Frankfurt. The transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses. It is not end-to-end encrypted and the audio does leave Canada and the EU for processing. If your requirement is that a recording never leaves Canada, that rules Notibo out, and it rules out most of this page too. Ask the question of every tool you consider, get the instructor's permission before you press record, and see the pricing page for what the plans include.