Best Meeting Note Software - Top Apps for 2025

Teams spend a significant portion of their week in meetings–about one-third of the workweek as reported in Forbes.

Capturing decisions, ideas, and action items in a clear format is vital for follow-through. Further, using the right meeting note software can make note-taking more efficient and collaborative.

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This report highlights the top meeting note tools (with their key features), provides a quick comparison, and outlines best practices for evaluating these solutions. 

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PerformYard’s Role in the Meeting Notes Ecosystem

PerformYard Meetings provides a customizable, intuitive workspace for managers and employees to stay on track, collaborate seamlessly, and remain organized in their 1:1 meetings. 

It streamlines one-on-one sessions with collaborative, two-way agendas that both participants can update at any time. These shared agendas ensure that both manager and employee are aligned and prepared for productive discussions. 

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During each meeting, PerformYard supports flexible note-taking so managers and employees can include performance highlights, key decisions, and follow-up action items directly in their shared notes.

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An integrated task management feature converts discussion topics into actionable tasks with clear deadlines, so meeting outcomes turn into instant action plans.

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The platform also supports recurring meetings, making it easy to maintain consistency and momentum across regular check-ins.

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Best Option for General Note Taking: Evernote

Evernote is a versatile note-taking app that syncs across devices and lets you organize notes (text, images, to-do lists, audio clips) in one space. It offers features like templates, tagging for powerful search, and it integrates with popular apps (Google Drive, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.) to fit into your workflow.

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Evernote has become one of the most popular, generic note-taking apps. It can be used by many business types. Consider, for example, Soapbox Influence. This Arkansas marketing agency uses Evernote to document internal meetings and brainstorming sessions in a centralized digital notebook. The agency’s founder, Bethany Stephens, and her team capture client meeting notes, one-on-one discussions, and project ideas in Evernote, creating a single source of truth for their work. ​

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Evernote effectively became their second brain, allowing the team to save every important detail without fear of losing track​. This helped Soapbox Influence organize information for easy retrieval and ensured better follow-up on action items, streamlining their meeting preparation and follow-ups across the company.

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Best for Office/Windows Users: Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is a free-form digital notebook that integrates closely with the Microsoft Office suite​. Users can type or handwrite notes, embed images/files or clip web content, and organize everything into notebooks with sections, tags, and searchable text​. Notes sync via OneDrive, making them available across all your devices automatically.

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Microsoft is ubiquitous; it is used across any and all types of organizations. In the legal industry, a standout success story is Grant Thornton LLP. This large accounting and consulting firm piloted Microsoft OneNote to replace paper-based note-taking for both internal meetings and client engagements​. Their consultants used OneNote to capture meeting minutes, client requirements, and brainstorming ideas in structured digital notebooks instead of scattered documents​.

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By sharing these OneNote notebooks across teams, Grant Thornton improved knowledge transfer and collaboration. Team members could easily contribute to or reference notes in real time. The switch to OneNote ultimately boosted productivity (by reducing time spent transcribing or emailing notes) and made meeting outcomes more transparent across the firm.

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Best for Collaborative Teams: Notion

Notion is an all-in-one workspace designed for writing, planning, and organizing information with extensive customization. Teams can create pages or databases for meeting notes, customize templates, and link notes to tasks or project docs. It supports real-time collaboration and even offers built-in AI that can summarize notes or extract action items from meetings. 

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Headspace, a popular mindfulness app, offers a great example of how to leverage Notion’s platform across departments. Their product design team relies on Notion to keep all meeting agendas, design decisions, and project notes in one collaborative workspace​. As they plan new features, what used to be dozens of separate conversations and meetings are now logged centrally in Notion, where product, design, and engineering stakeholders can all contribute and review updates​. 

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This living document approach means everyone is literally on the same page. The team can discuss feedback within a single Notion page and “act as one” unit during development​. The result is more streamlined meetings and faster execution, since information is organized and accessible to all, improving cross-functional alignment and reducing redundant status meetings.

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Best for Easily Shareable Notes: Google Docs

Google Docs provides a simple, cloud-based solution for collaborative meeting notes​. Multiple people can edit the same doc in real time from any device, which is great for team meetings. Many use a Google Docs meeting minutes template or an agenda outline to take structured notes as the meeting progresses. After the meeting, the notes are immediately shareable via link, and you can export them in formats like PDF or Word.

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As a tangible example, consider Oxa’s implementation. An autonomous transportation technology company, they use Google Docs to capture and share meeting notes across globally distributed teams​. The company creates highly organized Google Docs for internal meetings (such as project syncs and planning sessions), allowing every participant to collaborate and add notes or action items instantly during the discussion.

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This real-time co-editing capability provides a structured way to record ideas and decisions and immediately disseminate them. Making Google Docs the default for meeting minutes has streamlined Oxa’s meeting workflows: everyone leaves with a clear, shared record of next steps, saving time on post-meeting follow-ups and ensuring no important detail is missed in email threads.

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Best for Improving Structure and Fostering Accountability: Fellow.app

Fellow is a dedicated meeting management platform that streamlines meeting agendas and note-taking​. It provides ready-made agenda/notes templates, and as the meeting runs you can fill in key points collaboratively in real time with your team​. Additionally, the tool also helps track action items within the notes and offers customizable agendas to ensure meetings are structured and productive​. 

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HubSpot is an example customer that has leveraged these key features of Fellow. Their sales department adopted it to bring more structure and consistency to their recurring meetings with sales reps​. One senior sales manager introduced template-based agendas in Fellow for her weekly one-on-one meetings, ensuring that each conversation covers key topics like pipeline updates, challenges, and follow-ups​. Team members prepare by filling in their updates in the Fellow agenda beforehand, which the manager reviews so the meeting time can be focused on strategy rather than status catching-up.

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This approach has significantly reduced the time spent after meetings on clarifying missed points and improved accountability. Important action items are tracked in Fellow, and as a result the sales team saw more efficient meetings and better follow-through on their goals​. 

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Best for Automated Note-Taking: Otter.ai

Otter.ai is an AI-powered assistant that automatically records and transcribes meeting audio into written notes. It can join virtual meetings (Zoom, Teams, etc.) and generate transcripts in real time, complete with speaker identification and timestamps. The transcribed notes are searchable and can be edited or annotated afterward, making it easy to review what was said or share minutes with others​. 

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Otter.ai is particularly popular among sales teams. Take, for example, the team at Aiden Technologies. They integrated Otter.ai into sales calls to automate note-taking and free up their team’s focus for the conversation​. Previously, Aiden’s sales reps took manual notes during client meetings, which was cumbersome and often caused them to lose focus. Now with Otter.ai, every Zoom meeting or client call is automatically recorded and transcribed, producing detailed meeting notes without any manual effort​.

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Sales representatives can concentrate on engaging with prospects while Otter captures the dialogue, and afterward they use the transcripts to quickly review details or bring a colleague up to speed on a deal’s status​. The team spends far less time writing up notes and more time closing deals. It even allows sales managers to easily search the transcripts for coaching insights, enhancing collaboration and meeting productivity across the sales organization.​

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Key Criteria for Evaluating Meeting Note Tools

When assessing which meeting notes software best fits your team’s needs, consider the following factors:

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• Integration with other tools: The software should connect with your existing workflows (e.g. project management or calendar apps) so action items and decisions flow seamlessly into your project or task system​. This avoids double work and ensures nothing falls through the cracks.
  
  
• Real-time collaboration: Especially for team meetings, look for the ability for multiple people to contribute and edit notes simultaneously. Collaborative editing ensures all perspectives are captured and the final notes are consensus-based​.
  
  
• Action item tracking: The tool should make it easy to flag decisions and follow-ups and assign owners and due dates. Turning meeting outcomes into trackable tasks (and even syncing them to your task management system) is key for accountability​.
  
  
• Searchability and organization: Over time, you’ll accumulate many notes. Strong search and organizational features (tags, notebooks, folders, etc.) let you quickly find information from past meetings​. This is crucial for continuity, so you can reference prior decisions and avoid repeating discussions.
  
  
• Export & sharing options: Ensure you can easily share meeting notes with stakeholders who weren’t present. Good tools allow exporting to PDF, Word, or direct sharing via links/email so everyone can access the information in a convenient format​.
  
  
• Ease of use and adoption: The tool should streamline your workflow, not complicate it. A user-friendly interface and minimal setup/training will help teams actually use the software consistently (the goal is to make life easier, not add another cumbersome tool to your stack. Consider starting with trials or free versions to ensure the team finds value in it before fully rolling it out. 

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Key Benefits of Meeting Note Software 

Meeting note software delivers tangible productivity gains by automating and streamlining the capture of meeting information. Features like automatic transcription and real-time collaborative note editing free participants from manual note-taking, allowing them to focus on discussion and saving valuable time during meetings. 

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The software organizes notes, decisions, and action items in one accessible place, which makes follow-ups more efficient and ensures nothing is overlooked. Shared agendas and integrated task tracking further keep everyone aligned on responsibilities, creating a single source of truth that fosters accountability for agreed-upon tasks and outcomes.

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These benefits extend across the entire organization. For example, HR teams leverage meeting note software to maintain consistent records of interviews, training sessions, and policy meetings. Sales teams use it to capture key client discussions, track commitments, and streamline follow-ups, while product development groups document design decisions and action items from sprint planning or review sessions. 

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By integrating seamlessly into each team's workflow, the tool breaks down silos and promotes a unified, collaborative approach to managing meetings. Ultimately, adopting meeting note software enterprise-wide encourages a culture of transparency, collaboration, and accountability, ensuring every meeting yields actionable outcomes and maximum value.

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