Matthew Ritchie

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Because two brains are better than one, amirite?

Your brain isn’t good enough.

That’s the sad, simple truth: try as you might, you’re always bound to forget a few things.

Every day, our brains encounter reams of information that could fill a hard drive.

Most of it is useless. But some of it is useful. If only we had the brainpower to remember and make sense of it.

That’s where building a second brain comes in.

Building a second brain, popularized by productivity expert Tiago Forte’s course and book of the same name, is an antidote to the overwhelming amount of information we encounter in modern life.

Every day, we take in thousands of articles, podcasts, webinars, books, and conversations that form the basis of our knowledge.

But it’s increasingly difficult to capture, store, organize, find, and use information when it matters.

“Without a little extra care to preserve these valuable resources, our precious knowledge remains siloed and scattered across dozens of different locations,” Forte argues.

Just think about how many thoughts, to-dos, and reminders you’ve written down over years, only to forget about them. Chances are, the number is high.

“How many brilliant ideas have you had and forgotten? How many insights have you failed to take action on?,” he asks. “By offloading our thinking onto a ‘second brain,’ we free our biological brain to imagine, create, and simply be present. We can move through life confident that we will remember everything that matters, instead of floundering through our days struggling to keep track of every detail.”

According to Fore, a second brain is “a system for knowledge management — a trusted place outside your head to preserve and protect your most valuable knowledge.”

For many, that takes the form of a digital note-taking app.

Although Forte says a second brain “isn’t one piece of software,” note-taking apps certainly form the centerpiece of it, acting as a “long-term memory bank where all your important information gets sent for safekeeping,” and is the tool most people initially gravitate towards when building a system for capturing, organizing, and retrieving knowledge.

Why?

Forte says digital notes apps are “perfectly suited for the demands of modern work”: they’re “informal and messy,” allowing you to capture ideas and snippets of information quickly; they can store different types of media (like text, videos, photos, and audio recordings); and information can be endlessly edited, updated, and adapted for future use.

The idea has its skeptics.

“It’s tantalizing to consider: the idea that the answers to all of our questions are searchable in our own history and experiences, so long as we’re able to save everything (and arrange it in an orderly manner),” Sophie Haigney writes in The Cut, connecting the idea of building a second brain to the “knowledge-management systems” and “personal-knowledge bases” of the past.

“Do we really need all of that information?” she asks.

The answer, for many, is yes.

Let’s face it: having a single, centralized place outside of our brains to store all the thoughts and information we want to remember clearly has its benefits.

And that’s why we’ve created this list of the best apps for building a second brain.

For this list, we’re only focusing on apps mentioned in Forte’s building a second brain resources page (with one exception, which we’ll get into at the bottom of the page).

Some of them are simple. Others are complex. But they’re all powerful in their own right.

Pros: Apple Notes (also sometimes referred to as Notes or iCloud Notes) is a built-in note-taking app that comes pre-installed on all Apple devices (including iPhone, iPad, and Mac). Its easy-to-use, simple interface makes it ideal for jotting down quick notes and managing to-do lists. Apple Notes also syncs across devices, so you can take notes and access them on the go.

Users can create different folders and subfolders to organize their notes. And Apple Notes supports multimedia content, like images, drawings, audio, and videos, so you can store different types of information.

Cons: One of Apple Notes’ biggest downsides is that it’s only available on Apple devices, meaning that if you’re an Android or Windows user, you’re going to have to use Google Keep if you don’t want to download a third-party note-taking app to use as a second brain.

Some users say it also lacks advanced organization features, such as tagging or linking between notes, which can make it difficult to find information quickly, especially as you add a large number of notes to your second brain.

Price: Free for 5GB of storage (additional iCloud storage starts at $0.99/month)

Further Reading: The 6 Best Note-Taking Apps for Mac and iOS Users in 2023