Own your notes — forever. No subscription, no lock-in.
Notebooks stores your documents as standard files you can access, export, and move anytime.
Pay once. Use for life.
Own your notes — forever. Notebooks is a writing and organization app with no subscription, no lock-in, and no worries. Your documents are stored as standard files you can always access, export, or move freely. Pay once. Use for life.
Use Notebooks as a personal wiki, Zettelkasten, document archive, task manager, or long-term writing space. Capture quick notes, turn them into actionable tasks, combine text fragments into chapters, organize research, or keep business documents separate from personal journals — without ever switching apps.
Designed to help you stay focused and work at your own pace, Notebooks grows with your needs and is always ready to support you.
WRITE AND CREATE
Create beautifully formatted documents with styles, attachments, tables, checklists, and optional tables of contents. Choose from ready-made styles or design your own.
Write in different ways:
Formatted text (WYSIWYG)
Plain text, with smart handling of lists, automatic character pairing, and a focused writing view
Markdown, supporting MultiMarkdown and Discount, with syntax highlighting, dedicated keyboard keys, wiki-style links, and interactive checklists
Sketch ideas or annotate images and PDFs using Apple Pencil.
STORE AND ORGANIZE
Notebooks stores all documents as regular files in standard formats. You always remain in control — no lock-in, no export worries, fully compatible across devices and over time.
Organize your work in books and nested hierarchies without limits. Import PDFs, emails, web pages, MS Office and iWork documents, images, audio, video, and more. Use full-text search to find even the most deeply nested document.
PLAN AND ACT
Turn books into project lists and documents into tasks. Assign due dates and alerts, create nested projects, and track progress naturally — right where your work lives.
Use simple checklists in formatted documents or Markdown for lightweight task tracking.
STAY FOCUSED
Link documents together to build knowledge over time. Use wiki-style links, backlinks, contexts, and smart books to keep everything connected and within reach. When you rename or move documents, links stay intact.
A PLACE YOU CAN RELY ON
Sync your documents between iPhone, iPad, Mac, and PC. Work on documents stored in other apps, compile selections into PDFs or eBooks, scan documents and extract text using OCR, and trust that your data stays accessible — now and in the future.
With time, Notebooks often becomes the one place users rely on to keep everything that matters close at hand.
WHAT USERS SAY
“Notebooks is a wonderful app — sophisticated in an unassuming way. I feel more productive without spending time managing the app itself.”
“You are GTD in every way that makes it efficient — and makes me efficient.”
[Edit]Still working very well to maintain research notes & book catalogs with live links to GoodReader. Wanted to mention that I’m using DropBox to back up my Notebooks notes & catalogs and synch them between my iPhone and iPads. After setting it up, Notebooks does it all automatically, flawlessly. Fantastic![/Edit] [Edit] After some email dialog with the developer, changes were made to the app to fix every problem I was having with the app. Resulting app works extremely well with GoodReader for research notes and indices. I highly recommend this app(and its developer). Six stars if I could give them.[/Edit] Notebooks 8 was a gem, used in combination with GoodReader, I could build lists, indices and papers containing live links into my extensive PDF library contained in GoodReader. It was simple: copy the link of a PDF doc in GoodReader and paste as markdown in Notebooks. Then use all of the expressive capabilities of Notebooks to describe and annotate the link. A match made in heaven. When Notebooks 8 stopped working for me I had no problem purchasing Notebooks 10. Such a great program is worth the money, right? Well Notebooks 10 breaks the links to GoodReader by inserting extra escape characters in the document URL on its own. Now none of my links to GoodReader work. There is no option to turn this “feature” off. The problem is definitely on the Notebooks 10 side; I checked by pasting a doc URL into a text editor. GoodReader is not adding the new escape characters. Why in the world isn’t there a setting to turn this new “feature” off if it potentially breaks compatibility with other apps? So disappointed.
Developer Response
As discussed by mail, this is a glitch in Notebooks 10, but we have corrected that for the upcoming update (10.2). It is currently waiting to be released by Apple... We're sorry for that.
Fabulous! One detail needs attention
Bobcatukbb
Absolutely LOVE this awesome app! Does EVERYTHING I can imagine doing for organization of many varied interests. Deserves 5 stars except for one vulnerability that cost me a lot of lost time. I went back to a file that I’ve been building for 2 years that had a ton of important information that I access daily … and it was GONE! I have noticed it’s REAL EASY to ACCIDENTALLY run my finger across a BOOK title and it gives option to delete without second stop of “Are you sure?” In normal folder I can set it to “Read Only” and it’s protected. But if that same protected folder is within a BOOK and I accidentally swipe on the BOOK it is GONE! Fortunately, my valuable data is backed up to Drop Box and I could find it there, but to get it back into Notebooks I have to go book by book, document by document to reconstruct it. Fix that one important vulnerability and I will go back to a 5 star rating. I recommend this app to everyone and use it more than any other app on my iPad and iPhone.
Developer Response
Thank you for your feedback, we are glad to hear you are enjoying Notebooks. - Regarding accidental deletion: Notebooks usually asks for confirmation when you delete an item, unless you set Notebooks to keep deleted items in the Trash and explicitly turn off the option "Show Warning Before Moving to Trash". You find that in Notebooks' Settings > General. - When Notebooks deletes an item without extra confirmation, you should always find it in the Trash, from where you can restore it with a few taps.
Have used daily for years
Tomnovint
I’ve been using Notebooks for years. It is the perfect app for taking a variety of different kinds of notes and maintaining documents. It is a solid, bug-free app with Dropbox support (important for me for backups), most importantly with no required subscription! I keep a camping todo list, lists of movies and tv shows I want to see, gift ideas, and many categories of ideas that pop into my head… I get a good idea, I pop out notebooks and write the idea in a short note in one of the nested folders for whatever the category is that I want to remember something. I don’t do a ton of app reviews but my phone just asked for one, and this is one of the few apps I use where I feel a good review is actually “owed” to the developer for such a quality product that I use daily for years ;) I opened this review request in the middle of writing a note, so I better get back to it before I forget what I wanted to record and remember.
This is the app.
Aner3129
TLDR;If you have been looking for a notebook app that is not a subscription with portable data and deeply integrated in the apple ecosystem system, this is it. I looked a long time at different note apps. I would not have found this if I hadn't been on the forum for another app. I guess that's the only real issue with it is that the name makes it a little hard to find the App Store. Notebooks does a great job of leveraging things like iCloud and Apple’s technology, including intelligence, so that you don't end up paying for duplicate features or a separate cloud. It also means it can to interact with other apps that use iCloud or Finder. For example it works well with DEVONthink. Also, It saves an open formats like markdown and HTML. Even if this app disappeared tomorrow you would have no issues. The developer is great and responsive. The app has been around for a while, so you feel like you can actually trust investing in a purchase. I looked at everything from Evernote, Bear to Obsidian, but in my opinion, this is goto notebook app if you're in the Apple ecosystem and share priorities as mentioned aboveThe developer does not chase every feature and the focus is on notes. For a development team of that size, I think he makes the right call in terms of focus. Documentation is also great.
Thank you for your feedback on Notebooks 13. - In this update, context menus are better organized with submenus, renaming or moving documents and books can be undone with a three-finger swipe, you can immediately continue editing formatted documents when switching between apps. The Print and Create PDF options for images are back, JXL image format is now supported, and sharing from Safari and other apps works more consistently. Settings have been tidied up with clearer names and new options, including a "Start at" setting and the return of "Show Sidebars", the Classic Icon and a few other options you have been asking for.
The full list of changes is available on our website.
Version 13.1
The developer, Alfons Schmid, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More