Standard Notes syncs everywhere for free, in plain text only

65 puts Standard Notes in our Usable band and eighth in this category, and the total hides more than usual. Its four pillars run from 40 to 92, the widest spread of any note-taking tool we score.

Freedom at 92 is near the top of the category: AGPL-3.0 with a self-hostable sync server, encryption on by default rather than as a setting you find later, per-note passwords, and full export in encrypted or plaintext form.

Feature depth at 40 is the lowest here by a distance, and it is judged against the other free tiers in this file rather than against paid software. No rich formatting, no file attachments, no backlinks or graph view, no web clipper. Encryption is the reason, because server-side features cannot work on data the server cannot read, and the daily limitation is real regardless of the reason.

Generosity at 76 is the free sync doing its work. Nothing else here hands you encrypted hosted sync across unlimited devices at no cost.

Sentiment at 52 rests on G2 4.0, Trustpilot 3.0 and Capterra 4.5 (checked 24 July 2026). That is a wide split we cannot explain from what we hold, and all of it rates the product rather than the free tier.

The free plan has no counters at all. No note cap, no device cap, no storage cap, no trial clock. What it has is one boundary, and everything below is a consequence of it (as of July 2026).

Free is plain text. No headings, no bold, no checkboxes in a rich editor. The richer content types are handled by editors that sit on the paid plans, starting at $90 a year. This is a bigger daily limitation than it sounds when you read it in a list.

No file attachments at all. Encrypted file storage arrives on Professional at $120 a year with 100 GB. So Standard Notes cannot replace Evernote for anyone who saves PDFs and images, and that is most people leaving Evernote.

Minimal note history. A year of revision history is a Productivity feature.

No backlinks and no graph view. This is a notes app, not a knowledge base, and no plan changes that.

Search is basic compared with anything indexing plaintext on your own disk.

Encryption rules out server-side features generally, so there is no content-extracting web clipper, no AI, no collaborative editing, at any price. If those are on your list, this is the wrong tool rather than the wrong tier.

One consequence of plain text is worth naming as a positive, because it cuts both ways: what you can leave with is exactly what you were able to write. There is no proprietary formatting to lose in an export.

Productivity is $90 per year and it unlocks Super notes and the full set of editors, daily encrypted email backups, and one year of note revision history. Put plainly, the first paid step is where formatting lives, which is an unusual thing to sell and a defensible one given the architecture.

Professional is $120 per year and adds 100 GB of encrypted file storage, maximum revision history and family sharing. If attachments are why you are here, this is the tier, and $120 is not a small annual number next to a category where several tools give you attachments for nothing.

Five-year plans exist at $299 for Productivity and $349 for Professional, which is a genuine discount if you are confident about a five-year horizon. Refunds run 14 days on Productivity and 90 days on Professional, and a 90-day refund window is generous enough to be worth noting.

Prices are in US dollars and adjust by region.

There is a fourth option: the sync server is AGPL-3.0 with a documented Docker setup, so you can run your own and point the official clients at it. That solves hosting and does not unlock the paid editors, so it is an ownership answer rather than a formatting one.

Yes, within limits, and the limit is a single well-defined line rather than a counter you creep toward. Unlimited encrypted notes on unlimited devices, syncing for free forever, is a complete answer to this category's hardest problem. It is also plain text, and that is not a limit you can work around with discipline.

Who can genuinely live here: journalists, lawyers, therapists and anyone with a real confidentiality requirement, people who write in plain text by preference, anyone wanting a long-term archive that will still open in decades, and self-hosters who want to run their own sync server. Who cannot: anyone who saves PDFs and images, anyone who wants formatting in their daily notes, and anyone building a linked knowledge base, because there are no backlinks here at all.

If free encrypted sync is what drew you but the plain-text rule is not workable, Joplin's free plan gives you Markdown, attachments and optional encryption to storage you already own, and Obsidian's free plan gives you the fullest free app in this category. Free Evernote alternatives and best free note-taking and docs tools rank the swaps.