Short answer
The best note taking app with AI depends on whose AI it is. Notion builds its assistant in and bills it per member. Reflect Open and Obsidian keep notes as files you bring your own AI to. For a team, Baalda lets each person's Claude or ChatGPT read and write one shared vault over MCP, within their access.
The best note taking app with AI depends on which AI you mean, because "with AI" now describes two different products. One kind builds an assistant into the app and bills you for it per seat, like Notion. The other keeps your notes somewhere an assistant you choose and pay for yourself, such as Claude or ChatGPT, can read and write them, which is how Reflect Open, Obsidian and Baalda work.
Most round-ups for this query list the two kinds side by side and grade them on the same summary button. They are not the same purchase. The first kind sells you a model. The second sells you a place for notes and lets you bring the model. For one person that is a matter of taste. For a team it decides how many AI bills you pay and whether the notes still work the day you switch assistants.
If you landed here looking for a meeting recorder, Otter or Granola or similar, that is a third job again: software that turns a call into a transcript. Note taking apps for teams do one of two jobs covers that split. This page is about the notebook.
What is the best note taking app with AI?
Here is where the AI comes from in the apps people usually mean, checked on 26 October 2026.
| App | Where the AI comes from | Who pays for the model | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notion | Built in: Notion Agent, Custom Agents, AI Meeting Notes | Notion, per member, on the Business plan | A team already living in Notion databases |
| Evernote | Built in: AI Assistant, AI Edit, semantic search, plus a listed MCP connection | Evernote. Which plan carries which feature is on its pricing page | Someone with years of notes already in Evernote |
| Reflect Open | Your own OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or OpenRouter key, on local markdown | You, directly to the model provider | One person on a Mac who wants files they own |
| Obsidian | Nothing built in. Community plugins, or an outside assistant over MCP | You, through whichever plugin or assistant you choose | One person who wants the largest plugin ecosystem |
| Baalda | Nothing built in. Any MCP client the team already uses, reading and writing the shared vault | Each person, through the assistant they already subscribe to | A team that wants one set of notes every assistant can reach |
If your team is already in Notion and the AI you want is the one inside Notion, Notion is the answer and nothing below beats it. The rest of this page is for everyone else, which turns out to be most teams that already pay for ChatGPT or Claude.
Built in or connected: which kind of AI do you actually want?
Built-in AI is convenient because it is already there. It knows the app's structure, it shares the app's permissions, and nobody has to configure anything. Notion's help pages say Notion Agent has the same permissions you do: if you cannot view or edit something, the agent cannot either. That is the right design, and it is the main reason built-in AI is easy to recommend.
The cost is that the AI only works inside that app, on notes stored in that app's database. The assistant you use for everything else, the one with your projects and your habits, cannot reach those notes unless the app also opens a door for it. Notion does open one (it hosts an MCP server), but the notes themselves still live in Notion.
Connected AI works the other way round. The notes sit somewhere neutral, as files or behind a protocol, and the assistant comes to them. You pick the model once, in the assistant, and every tool that reaches the notes uses it. When a better model arrives, you change the assistant, not the notebook.
What does built-in AI cost a team?
Notion is the clearest example because its pricing page spells it out. As shown on notion.com/pricing on 26 October 2026, Plus is $10 per member per month and Business is $20 per member per month. Free and Plus get a "Trial of Notion AI". The full set, Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes, Enterprise Search and Custom Agents, is on Business. Notion's AI page adds that each member gets 1,500 Standard credits a month, for work where Notion picks the model, and 500 Select credits, for work where you pick it yourself. A workspace owner decides which providers and models members may choose, and the high-consumption models stay off until an owner turns them on.
None of that is unreasonable. Notion is model agnostic in its own words, and the picker is real. But look at what a team of ten is buying: a notes app, plus a second metered AI allowance on top of whatever the same ten people already pay for ChatGPT or Claude. Two AI bills, two sets of limits, and two assistants that each know half the work.
Evernote's pricing page lists AI Assistant ("search, organize, and enrich your notes from a chat"), AI Edit, semantic search, AI Transcribe and "Connect Evernote to AI tools (MCP)". Which of those sit on which plan did not come through when I read the page, so check it yourself before you buy.
Obsidian sells no AI at all. Its pricing page lists Sync, Publish, the one-off Catalyst supporter licence and a commercial licence, and nothing in its help index is an assistant. That is a choice, not a gap: the AI arrives through community plugins such as Smart Connections and Copilot, or from outside the app over MCP.
What does it look like when the AI is the one you already use?
For one person, this already works well. Reflect Open, released on 14 July 2026, stores notes as markdown in a folder you choose and runs AI on a key you supply. Obsidian with a filesystem MCP server lets Claude read and edit the vault. Both are good answers for a single notebook on a single machine.
The trouble starts with the second person. A key in one person's app, or a filesystem server on one person's laptop, gives one assistant one person's view of the notes. Nobody else's assistant can reach them, and there is no way to say that the contractor's ChatGPT may read the project folder but not the pricing notes.
Baalda is built for that case. It is a team second brain on plain markdown files on your own disk, with real-time multi-user editing, per-file permissions, and an open source Apache-2.0 codebase you can self-host. It has no assistant of its own that you can use in the current release. Instead, the server exposes the vault over MCP at POST /api/mcp, and each person connects whichever client they already use: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any other MCP client. Setup is in the MCP setup guide.
What each assistant can do is decided by the person it connects as. A few of the tools it gets:
search_notesruns semantic and keyword search over everything that person can access, including text extracted from attached files such as PDFs and spreadsheets.read_notereturns the note with a revision number.edit_notemakes targeted edits (replace exact text, insert before or after an anchor) without resending the whole note, and refuses the whole call if an anchor is missing or matches twice.- Passing the revision back as
expectedRevisionrefuses the write if a teammate changed the note since the assistant read it.
So Priya uses Claude, Marco uses ChatGPT, and both of them write into the same meeting note while a third colleague watches the edits arrive in the desktop app. Each assistant sees what its person can see and nothing else. Nobody bought an AI seat from the notes app, because the notes app is not selling one. The team pays for notes ($0 for two people and one synced vault on the managed backend, then $10 per seat per month, minimum three seats) and keeps paying for the assistants it already chose.
And when the team changes its mind about models, nothing in the vault moves. The notes are .md files. Notes outlive the model that reads them is the longer version of that argument.
Which app should you pick?
Pick by who has to read the notes and which AI they already pay for.
- You are on your own, on a Mac, and you want your own AI key: Reflect Open.
- You are on your own and want the most plugins: Obsidian, with an AI plugin or an MCP server you trust.
- Your team's knowledge is Notion databases and you want the AI inside Notion: Notion Business.
- You have a decade of notes in Evernote: stay, and check which plan carries the AI features you want.
- Your team already pays for Claude or ChatGPT and wants those assistants reading and writing one shared set of notes, with permissions: Baalda.
Where Baalda is the wrong choice
Be clear about what you would be giving up.
- There is no built-in assistant to click. If you want an AI button inside the note editor that works with no setup and no outside subscription, Baalda does not have one in the current release. Notion and Evernote do.
- Someone has to connect each assistant. Built-in AI needs zero configuration. Connected AI needs each person to add the vault to their client once, and ChatGPT in particular cannot reach a server running only on your laptop, so a team using it needs the managed endpoint or its own HTTPS deployment.
- Markdown is not a database. If your notes are really relational tables with views and rollups, Notion is better at that, and the Baalda and Notion comparison says so.
- It does not record meetings. No transcription, no bot in the call. Pair it with a recorder if you need one, and let the assistant file the summary into the vault.