The best note-taking apps recreate the feeling of a well-organized notebook. The free Google Keep is closer to a fridge covered in haphazardly written sticky notes. Everything about Keep's design suggests it's meant to host notes and lists that you write down quickly, refer to for a few days, and then hide or delete. There's nothing wrong with sticky notes, and Keep offers more than a few interesting tricks, though it has a subpar web clipper and lacks some basic features like offline desktop access and desktop apps. If you need a more powerful note-taking app for notes meant to last, try Editors' Choice winners OneNote or Joplin instead.
How Much Does Google Keep Cost?
Google Keep is completely free—almost aggressively so. All you need is a Google account. Images and audio stored in Google Keep do not count against your Google storage limit. Images are limited to 10MB each, and text notes are limited to 19,999 characters. Paying for additional Google Drive storage does not raise these limitations.
Google Keep isn't the only free note-taking application, but most free apps have data storage limits. For example, OneNote and Apple Notes are both free, with storage limited to the 5GB you get with their respective cloud storage services (OneDrive and iCloud), though that 5GB is shared with other apps. Obsidian and Joplin are both completely free, too, if you don't need online storage or are willing to bring your own. Google Keep is different. It's simply free, and you can't pay for extra storage even if you want to.
Where Can You Use Google Keep?
Google Keep runs in your browser. It officially supports Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. There are no desktop apps for Google Keep. There used to be a Chrome app for offline access, but Google shut it down; there is now no way to access your Google Keep notes offline on a computer.
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For mobile, there's a Google Keep app for Android and iPhone. Both mobile apps let you access your notes offline.
Getting Started With Google Keep
All you have to do is either go to keep.google.com in any browser or open the mobile app, and you can start using Keep. As long as you're logged into your Google account, you should see the main interface.
Keep's main selling point is how quickly you can create notes with it. In the web app, a text box at the top of your notes says Take a note... Click it, and you can immediately start typing a new note. You can optionally attach an image or turn the note into a list with checkboxes. Every note can also have a reminder added to it for the date and time you set or the place you set if you use the Google Keep mobile app with geolocation enabled.
You can also choose a background color for the note, which completes the sticky note metaphor. To add a label, you can either include a pound or hash symbol (#) before any word or use the label dialogue. Labels give you a rough way to sort your notes, though you don't get common organizing tools found in other note-taking apps, like sections, notebooks, or groups of notebooks.
All your notes sync almost instantly between the mobile and web versions. In the mobile app, creating a note means clicking the prominent + button in the bottom-right corner and then typing. The mobile version of Keep offers a few features not in the web version, namely, voice notes and drawing.
In keeping with the sticky notes metaphor, your Google Keep notes are arranged loosely in columns. If a note has a lot of content, it elongates to become a skinny rectangle, but eventually, it ends, and your note's text is cut off from view. You have to open the note to read more. Since Google Keep doesn't have notebooks, all your notes are grouped together on one huge scrolling screen. Using the search bar or clicking on a label is the main way to clear extraneous notes from view.
No Formatting and Limited Attachments
Google Keep is missing a few key functions. The first and most striking is formatting. You can't bold, italicize, or add other variations to your notes. Anything pasted from another app shows up as plain text.
Second, you can't attach anything to a note that isn't an image. Only GIF, JPEG, JPG, and PNG files are accepted. If you want to upload PDFs or any kind of document, you need to look for another note-taking app. OneNote is particularly good at managing attached files. You can upload a PDF, output every page to a note, highlight portions of text, and also add your notes in the margins. Google Keep isn't meant for that kind of work. Keep is designed around quickly adding thoughts for future reference and archiving them when you're done.
Minimal Tools for Organizing Your Notes
Google doesn't seem to think of Keep as a place to store long-form notes for long-term use. The way Keep is built and designed makes it merely a place to quickly jot down a few thoughts, as you would with physical sticky notes. A wall with too many sticky notes isn't helpful, though, but Keep doesn't give you many tools for organizing everything you put in it. You can drag notes into whatever order you like and pin notes so that they always show up at the top. You can also archive notes you no longer want to see on the main page.
Beyond that, the only way to organize and sort your notes is with labels, as mentioned earlier. Labels in Keep work the same way they do in Gmail. You can add as many labels as you like and then browse all notes with the same label by clicking it in the sidebar.
Most other note-taking apps, including OneNote and Evernote, let you sort notes into notebooks, at the very least—in addition to supporting tags, which are effectively the same as labels.
A Disappointing Web Clipper
Keep has a web clipper, as do OneNote, Joplin, Evernote, Zoho Notebook, Bear, and many other note-taking apps. Keep's is the worst, though.
A web clipper is a browser extension that saves content from a web page to your account with one click. Say you find a recipe online and want to save it to Google Keep. The idea is that the clipper grabs the whole recipe, so you don't have to cut and paste the content. That way, you can refer to the recipe by looking at your notes without having to visit the web page again. Another common use is to clip online articles to read later offline.
But Keep's clipper only saves the URL! It doesn't actually save any content. Evernote and OneNote both have much more useful Web clippers that let you save an entire page, a simplified article stripped of ads and extra Web page junk, or just a screenshot of an area you select. Most other note-taking apps can clip video, too. Keep doesn't. Even worse, it's only for Chrome—Firefox and Safari users are out of luck.
Other Integrations and Features
Google Keep can grab the text from any photo and add it to your note. I tested this, and it works perfectly on printed text and serviceably on hand-written text, depending on the quality of the handwriting. It's useful for capturing short documents—but if you're hoping to scan and upload multipage documents, you should use a note-taking app with a more in-depth scanning feature, like those offered by OneNote, Evernote, and Bear.
You can collaborate on notes in Google Keep, but again, with few tools to help you. When you invite a collaborator by adding their email address, the person gets an email link to the note. If they are signed into a Google account when they click the link, the note is automatically added to their Keep account, and they have full editing rights. There's no way to restrict a note to view-only or comment-only the way you can when sharing other Google documents.
You can set Google Keep to show up in the right-side panel of Gmail and Google Docs. You can use this sidebar to browse your notes while writing emails or to create a note with an email attached. You can also drag the contents of any note over to a Google Doc.
Speaking of Google Docs, you can send any note over to a new Google Doc in just a couple of clicks, which is perfect if you want to expand on a note somewhere with more formatting options or if you want to take your notes as a starting point and turn them into an actual document.
Not a Keeper for Most
Google Keep isn't for taking notes and processing them in the same place. Rather, it's built for quickly writing down a thought or two. If that's all you want, Google Keep might be acceptable, especially since it's free. Most people who are interested in a note-taking app want more than that, though, which is why we recommend Editors' Choice winner OneNote for its breadth of features, and Joplin for a slightly pared-down app with a bring-your-own-storage option.
Google Keep is great for quickly jotting down notes, but it isn't useful for much else.
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