PCMag Asia Software & Services Productivity
Milanote
byJill Duffy Jan 14, 2021
Good (3.0)
Milanote is a web-based note-taking app that thinks of notebooks more like canvases than legal pads. It's designed for visual people but leaves out too many features to truly satisfy them, for now.
US Street Price$9.99
Scrapbook/pasteboard style notes
Works well for images and notes related to design
Commenting and real-time collaboration supported
No tree structures showing where notes are stored
Milanote is a note-taking app designed for creatives. A pasteboard style interface holds images, color swatches, links with previews of their web pages, arrows, emoji, and text. Oddly, you can't freehand sketches or add notes your handwriting, however. You can publish your boards for others to view or share them with collaborators who can add comments or coedit them in real time. When Milanote first launched, it was a limited, web-only release. It's now available on desktop and mobile devices, and it has a web clipper as well. The price has come down since the first release, too. Milanote remains an interesting app for creatives, but still has it has a lot of room for improvement.
In the category of note-taking apps, PCMag has three Editors' Choice picks: Microsoft OneNote (which also gives you a pasteboard interface), Evernote, and Joplin. Evernote really set expectations for what a note-taking app is in the first place, and OneNote is the only app that offers nearly as much as Evernote does. Joplin is our top pick for free, open-source alternatives to the other two. Milanote veers a little bit from the category, overlapping slightly with diagramming apps, and while Milanote has an innovative take, it needs to improve in a few areas to be worth its price.
How Much Does Milanote Cost?
Milanote offers three plans. There's a limited free version, a paid version for individuals, and a plan for teams.
The free tier lets you save 100 images, notes, or links; upload 10 files; and share as many boards as you want. The search bar is disabled in the free version, however.
The paid version for individuals costs $12.50 per month or $119.88 per year. With this plan, there are no limits on how many notes, images, lines, or file uploads you can have.
The team account costs $49 per month for up to 10 people, or $99 per month for up to 50 people. You get everything that's in the paid individual account plus priority support.
How Do Milanote's Prices Compare?
Compared with other note taking apps, the price for Milanote's individual paid account is high, but the team account is not a bad deal. For example, Evernote costs $69.99 per year for Premium (that's for individuals) and $14.99 per person per month for Business.
Microsoft OneNote packs a lot of value, no matter if you use it for free or pay for a Microsoft 365 account for a handful of extra features and a lot more storage space. The reason is that paid Microsoft 365 accounts start as low as about $6 per month and include a bunch of other Office apps, too. You get a lot of bang for your buck there.
Joplin is totally free, although you have to bring your own storage so you might end up paying for it, indirectly. Joplin works with Dropbox and OneDrive, among a few other services, which are fairly easy to set up and work reliably.
Bear only costs $1.49 per month or $14.99 per year, though it's light on features and only available on Apple devices.
Getting Started With Milanote
To get a Milanote account, all you need is an email address and password, though you can also authenticate using a Google or Apple account. The app starts you out with some sample material to help you get the hang of how it works.
Milanote is available as a web app, as well as on desktop for macOS and Windows, and as a mobile app for Android and iPhone. There's a web clipper extension you can install in your browser to quickly save web page content to your Milanote account, too.
The structure that Milanote uses is unusual. You get one main board, and on that board, you either can place materials or make stacks of notes. Stacks of notes appear as little icons on the board, and when you click one of those icons, you essentially dive one level deeper into a sub-board, on which you now can view all the notes in the stack. You can repeat the process, making yet another sub-board of a sub-board. At the top of the app, you see a breadcrumb trail showing how your current board is embedded in (or located in) other boards.
The problem with a breadcrumb trail is it only shows your board and its parent boards, rather than all your boards. It would be easier to navigate the app and find the notes you want to find if Milanote also offered a tree structure view similar to what you get with traditional computer folders and subfolders, or in Evernote notebook stacks with notebooks (which are effectively folders and subfolders).
Note-Taking Features
Milanote gives you a variety of tools and types of materials that you can put on your boards. Images and PDFs, text boxes and preformatted text, like bullet lists and check mark boxes for to-do lists. There's a neat one that's a color swatch. It's a little card containing whatever color you choose, and the alpha-numberic hex value shows up automatically beneath it.
Paste a URL onto the page, and Milanote gives you a preview of the page with an image when available and a few lines of text. You can add emoji, arrows, comments, and more.
One neat feature I have not seen in other note-taking apps is a drawer off to the right of your board where you can keep materials, such as images, until you figure out where to put them.
The mobile app has a quick-note option. When you make a note using it, the results appear at the top of the interface in the desktop or web app, helping you remember that they're ready to be placed on one of your boards.
Milanote's mobile apps are otherwise a little disappointing because when you open a board, all the materials on it get streamlined into a scrolling view. If you've designed your board in such a way that its layout contributes to how you understand and interpret it, then all that information gets lost the moment you see the reconfigured view on the smaller screen.
Milanote also has templates, which are great at giving you more ideas for how you can use the app.
Real-Time Collaboration
Milanote's real-time collaboration works well. You can share any board by entering a collaborator's email address or copying a link and deciding whether the person should have read-only or editing privileges.
When another person with editing privileges joins your board and begins making changes while you're still viewing and editing the board, you see the objects they select highlighted and marked with their initials. It's similar to the way real-time collaboration looks in Google apps.
There aren't any extra tools for collaborating, though, so you won't see dedicated spaces for having an asynchronous chat conversation, for example. You could always create a text box on the board and simply use it to write notes back and forth to one another—a less elegant but viable solution.
If you want to share boards in other ways, you can export them to a variety of formats, such as PDF, PDF canvas, Markdown text, plain text, and Word documents.
Milanote doesn't have a few features that seem apt, based on its creative bent. For example, support for handwriting and sketching seems like it should be included, but it's not—nor is there a version history of your boards or notes, something creative types could certainly use.
The app is missing a few other features that are becoming commonplace in other note-taking apps, such as mobile scanning for documents and email forwarding (meaning you can send an email to a special address to have the content of the message saved as a new note).
Milanote also lacks tags. Given its unusual design, however, it's debatable how tags would work. Tags usually let you narrow down a search for notes. For example, you might have a note taking app with a notebook for Sweet Recipes and another notebook for Savory Recipes, and you want to find all notes labeled "gluten-free" regardless of which notebook they belong to. The way Milanote uses boards and materials on them, rather than notes per se, makes it difficult to imagine how tags would work anyhow.
At this time, Milanote does not offer any integrations with other services offered nor is there an API, although those are next on the roadmap for Milanote.
Worth a Spin
Milanote has made serious strides since its debut. It's a unique service that may appeal to creative types for being much faster and easier to use than, say, diagramming software or heavy-duty illustration software. It certainly has its appeal. Support for handwriting and sketching really ought to be added, however, and the way the app structures notes to be within notes to be within notes gets confusing. While we can't recommend Milanote enthusiastically for average user, we do think it's worth a peek if you're in the market for a more creative spin on note-taking apps.
Bear (for Mac)
About Jill Duffy
Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.
Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, …
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