What is the best note-taking app?

I think it's UpNote.

I gave the conclusion right away, but there must be quite a few note-taking app refugees out there, given the deterioration of Evernote and the high barrier to entry for Notion.

I am a heavy user of a note-taking app called Bear, and my notes exceed 5,000, including those in the trash.

The appeal of Bear is that it is lightweight, easy to use, and beautiful.
It has a wide variety of themes, and I think it is the most beautiful note-taking app.

At the same time, it is feature-rich, with unique charms such as the ability to import websites and view them cleanly, fast search, and a variety of export formats.

However, the price has increased to 400 yen per month, and it can only be used on Apple products.

Is there a note-taking app that is cheaper, more feature-rich, and can be used on more devices...?

Yes, there is. That is UpNote.

Like Bear, UpNote supports rich text in addition to Markdown, and you can categorize notes not only with tags but also with folders.

Folders are so gorgeous that you can even set images for them.

Moreover, it can be used on iOS, Mac, Windows, Android, and Linux, and it syncs across all of them.

And it even has a one-time purchase option.

However, UpNote's prices have also risen sharply; it went from 150 yen to 300 yen per month, and the one-time purchase price went from 3,000 yen to 4,500 yen.

It will likely continue to rise in the future.

However, it has many features that Bear does not, such as excellent web importing, folder categorization, markers in various colors, text colors, and automatic code syntax highlighting.

This is a welcome feature for those who want to highlight with multiple colors.

The web import feature imports almost perfectly, even things that seem difficult to import, such as tables.

I think it surpasses Evernote, Notion, and others as a note-taking app.

But even so, I still use Bear.

You might be thinking, "Wait, you're recommending Bear after introducing UpNote?"

Actually, Bear has strengths that UpNote lacks.
That is, even in the free version, there is no limit to the number of notes you can create on a single device.
UpNote limits you to 50 notes in the free version, but Bear allows you to create as many as you want, even if you can't sync them.

And above all, there is the character count.
In fact, the smartphone version of UpNote does not allow you to see the character count of a selected range.
This is painful for writers who need to keep track of character counts, such as when aiming for 24 characters per line.
You can see the character count in the desktop version of UpNote, but I use Bear because I often write on my iPad.

So, which note-taking app should you use in the end?

I think it's UpNote.
I said exactly the same thing at the beginning, but that doesn't change.
Bear is an option if you don't want to pay, but when you consider paid features and using it across various operating systems, I think UpNote is the most balanced, or rather, the most excellent choice.

I think I would switch to UpNote if the character count feature were improved.