The best note-taking app for students in the UK

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. Only then compare the apps with a price on them, and compare them in pounds, because most of this market does not bill in pounds.

That last point is the one UK lists skip. Of the tools below, only Microsoft and Google publish a sterling price. 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 dollars we have given the dollar figure rather than a guess at the conversion.

What does your university already give you?

Almost every UK university licenses Microsoft 365 for its students. Sussex tells students they can install the Windows or Mac versions of Office on up to five devices, with 1 TB of OneDrive storage, at no cost for the duration of the course. Manchester's IT services page lists Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and OneNote, and has a guide for Copilot Chat alongside them. Your own university's 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 in Edge or Chrome, Word on Windows, and OneNote on Windows.
• 80 or more locales, with English listed in several regional variants.
• 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 free year of Premium

If your university does not license Copilot, Microsoft's UK education page currently offers 12 months of Microsoft 365 Premium with a college email, terms apply. Premium is otherwise 18.99 pounds a month or 189.99 pounds a year, with Personal at 8.49 pounds a month or 84.99 a year. Those are sterling figures on a UK 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 Sussex's, A1 still gets you Word for the web, which is where Transcribe lives.

Are you allowed to record in that room?

UK universities set their own rules, and they differ more than students expect.

• Dundee. The policy says all students may audio record any lecture given by any member of staff. Small-group teaching with student participation is different: routine recording is not permitted without the knowledge and express permission of the group. Recordings are personal, must not be passed on, and should normally be deleted by the end of the semester.
• St Mary's. Disabled students do not need permission to record lectures. Other students should ask, and the expectation is that permission will be granted unless there are data protection issues. In a seminar you tell the lecturer first, and if someone in the group objects the group has to consider other adjustments. Unauthorised sharing is misconduct.
• Reading. The university permits students to make an audio recording of a lecture, and leaves other teaching sessions to the discretion of the member of staff leading them. Recording is inappropriate where client confidentiality arises or where children are involved, and recordings are for private study only.

The pattern is that the lecture is usually recordable, with or without asking depending on where you are, and everything smaller is not. We went through the wording university by university in recording lectures in the UK. 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 checking the policy, is the fit.

What decides it for a UK student?

• Price in pounds. A dollar subscription moves with the exchange rate every month, and some cards add a foreign transaction fee. Not large, but it is the sort of small that adds up over three years.
• British English. Every tool here handles English. The question is whether it lists a UK variant, and whether it copes with a Glaswegian lecturer or a Welsh one. Where a vendor's page names English (United Kingdom) 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 the UK's adequacy regulations for the United States, in force since 12 October 2023, a transfer to a US company counts as adequate only when that company is on the Data Privacy Framework list and participates in the UK Extension. Otherwise the vendor needs another safeguard, such as standard contractual clauses. Most pricing pages say nothing about any of this. There is more in what happens to your data as a UK student.
• 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 the eligibility as a ".edu" email address. UK universities use .ac.uk. Whether Otter accepts one we could not verify, so ask support before you pay.

Language is the limit. Otter's own announcement puts its transcription at English, French and Spanish, chosen once in Account Settings rather than per recording. The page does not name a British 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.

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 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.

This is the one tool on the list with a clean sterling price. Google's UK subscriptions page lists AI Plus at 4.49 pounds a month, AI Pro at 18.99 pounds, and Ultra from 79.99 pounds, each with more Gemini Notebook capacity than the free tier. Better, Google's student offer gives eligible university students aged 18 or over a free year of AI Plus, then 4.49 pounds a month, with the UK on the list and a redemption deadline of 31 December 2026. Eligibility is re-verified yearly.

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. There is more on that in lecture capture at UK universities.

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 UK visitor should see pounds. We could not verify the sterling figure, so read it off the page yourself 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

Covered above under the university licence, so briefly: OneNote is where most UK students already keep typed notes, Word's Transcribe gives you 300 minutes of uploaded audio a month if your tenant includes it, 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 UK data location for the transcription itself. Your university's data protection 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 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 lists 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. Lite is 11.99 dollars a year, Plus 15.99 a year, Pro 79.99 a year. 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 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 English (United Kingdom) as a live transcription language on Pixel 6 and later, alongside 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.

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. 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, not 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 British English. For notes and flashcards you can revise from, you are choosing between Notability Plus in dollars and Notibo in euro, and neither is in pounds.
4. 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 British English. 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, and that is euro, not pounds, so your card converts it. 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 the UK and the EU for processing. If your requirement is that a recording never leaves the UK, that rules Notibo out, and it rules out most of this page too. Ask the question of every tool you consider, get the lecturer's permission before you press record, and see the pricing page for what the plans include.