Best AI Note Taking Apps in 2026: What Reddit Actually Recommends

The r/AINoteTaker subreddit and its crossposted threads on r/productivity reveal a consistent pattern: no single AI note-taking app wins across all use cases. Reddit users segment their recommendations sharply based on what you are actually trying to do.

For Meeting Transcription

Fireflies.ai and Otter.ai split the meeting transcription recommendations in Reddit threads, with different strengths. Fireflies wins on integration depth: its automatic Slack summaries and CRM sync get cited far more than any Otter feature. Otter wins on free tier usability: the 300 minutes per month free plan covers casual meeting note-takers who attend 2-3 calls weekly without paying.

One user in r/AINoteTaker with 340 upvotes summarized the choice: "Otter is better if you're just transcribing your own meetings and want a solid free tier. Fireflies is worth paying for if you need to push summaries somewhere automatically, especially Slack or a CRM."

A recurring Otter complaint in 2025-2026 Reddit threads involves accuracy in noisy environments: "Works great in quiet calls but as soon as there's any background noise the transcription quality drops noticeably." Fireflies receives similar accuracy critiques on technical jargon, which its custom vocabulary feature is meant to address.

For Student and Academic Notes

Google NotebookLM gets the strongest recommendation-to-complaint ratio in r/studytips and r/college threads. The source-grounded approach, where the AI only answers from your uploaded documents rather than its training data, solves the hallucination problem that makes tools like ChatGPT unreliable for academic fact-checking.

From r/studytips: "NotebookLM is completely free and the fact that it won't hallucinate outside your sources makes it the only AI note tool I actually trust for studying. Everything else I have to double-check."

Mindgrasp AI gets recommended specifically when students need automatic flashcard generation in addition to summaries. The $9.99/month Scholar plan covers unlimited document uploads, making it cost-effective for active academic schedules.

For Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

Obsidian with AI plugins dominates the PKM recommendation threads on r/ObsidianMD and r/productivity among users willing to invest setup time. The local-first file storage model addresses the cloud-dependency and vendor lock-in complaints that appear in nearly every Notion AI and Evernote thread.

The trade-off is explicit in Reddit discussions: "Obsidian has a steep learning curve and the plugin ecosystem is overwhelming if you're new to PKM. But once you're set up, you own your notes completely. No subscription can take them away." The AI plugins most cited are Smart Connections (semantic note discovery) and Text Generator (local LLM integration via Ollama).

For Team Collaboration Notes

Notion AI is the most-mentioned team note tool on Reddit, with the AI features being supplementary to its core workspace capabilities. The pricing model, however, receives consistent criticism: the $8/month per-user AI add-on makes Notion AI expensive for teams of 5-10, where the cost approaches $400-1,800 per year just for the AI layer.

Reddit threads in r/AINoteTaker and r/productivity frequently discuss the gap between tool pricing pages and actual costs for their specific use cases. Here is the breakdown users document:

Fireflies.ai Pricing

Free plan: unlimited transcription but AI summaries capped. Pro at $10/month per seat covers the features most users actually need: full AI summaries, action item extraction, and all integrations. Business at $19/month adds analytics and API access. Users on r/productivity confirm the Pro plan covers most individual and small team needs without needing Business.

Otter.ai Pricing

Free plan: 300 minutes per month of transcription, limited AI features. Pro at $8.33/month (billed annually, $16.99 monthly): 1,200 minutes per month, AI summaries, action items. Business at $20/month per user: unlimited minutes, advanced team features. Multiple Reddit threads note that 300 free minutes works for 4-6 one-hour calls monthly, making the free tier genuinely functional.

Google NotebookLM Pricing

Completely free as of early 2026 within Google account limits. No paid tier required. This is why its recommendation frequency in Reddit threads disproportionately exceeds its feature set versus paid tools: zero price barrier with no transcription limit. NotebookLM Plus is available within Google One AI Premium at $19.99/month, which adds higher usage limits and priority processing.

Obsidian Pricing

Free for personal use on desktop. Obsidian Sync at $4/month enables device sync without third-party services. Publish at $8/month for public note sharing. AI plugins themselves are typically free on GitHub. Most Reddit users on r/ObsidianMD use the free Obsidian core and pay only for Sync.

Evernote (The Warning)

Evernote free plan is now widely described as "basically useless" in Reddit threads from 2025 onward. The free tier limits notes to 1 device and 60MB monthly upload, which users describe as actively designed to push to paid. Personal plan at $10.83/month gets described in multiple r/productivity threads as poor value given sync reliability issues. The most-upvoted comment in a 2025 r/productivity Evernote thread: "I've had notes vanish and revert to old versions twice this year. Not worth paying for something this unstable." The standard Reddit recommendation is to migrate away from Evernote to Notion, Obsidian, or Apple Notes rather than continuing on any paid tier.

Granola emerged as the most-discussed newer AI meeting tool in late 2025 Reddit threads, specifically because it takes notes without adding a visible bot participant to the call.

The standard approach from Fireflies, Otter, and similar tools sends a bot that joins your meeting as a participant named "Fireflies Notetaker" or "Otter Assistant." This creates problems in some client-facing scenarios where the presence of a recording bot changes meeting dynamics or raises client concerns about recording consent.

Granola captures system audio directly, invisibly, without joining as a participant. From a thread on r/AINoteTaker: "Granola is the only meeting tool I can use with clients who get weird about bots. It takes notes from the audio on my Mac without any bot appearing in the participants list. The summaries are solid."

The limitations users note: Granola is currently Mac-only, which restricts it to a subset of the meeting tools audience. Its free plan covers 25 meetings before requiring a paid upgrade at $18/month. Users on Windows cannot use it at all in 2026.

The bot-visibility concern is one of the most active debates in r/AINoteTaker: some users argue transparency about recording is ethically required regardless of convenience, while others point out that meeting platforms like Zoom already record by default when hosts enable it and the bot distinction is arbitrary.

Beyond pricing, Reddit threads surface specific limitations that vendor pages do not mention clearly.

Transcription accuracy in noisy environments

Both Fireflies and Otter receive consistent accuracy complaints when audio quality is poor: background noise, non-native English speakers, strong accents, or low-quality microphones produce transcripts that require significant manual correction. Multiple r/AINoteTaker users recommend against these tools for in-person meeting recording specifically due to microphone distance and room noise.

AI summary hallucination

Several Reddit threads document meeting summaries that include action items or conclusions not present in the actual meeting. The pattern appears most in shorter or less structured meetings where the AI fills in implied meaning rather than stated content. NotebookLM avoids this because it only works from your uploaded sources, not from inferred context. Meeting tools cannot replicate this constraint since they capture live conversation.

Sync reliability (Evernote specifically)

Evernote sync failures get documented in r/productivity threads with alarming regularity in 2025-2026. Note reversion, sync conflicts, and occasional note disappearance across devices are cited in multiple high-upvote threads. The r/Evernote subreddit has detailed workaround threads for preventing sync loss, which is itself evidence of how significant the problem is.

Free tier degradation

Multiple tools that launched with generous free tiers have progressively restricted them. Notion reduced free plan block limits. Otter capped free transcription more aggressively. Users in r/productivity consistently flag this pattern: the tool you adopt for free may become significantly more expensive 12-24 months later as the company monetizes its user base.