NotePlan

NotePlan is a calendar-integrated markdown editor for Mac that unifies daily notes, tasks, and long-form writing inside a single, keyboard-driven workspace.

What is NotePlan?

NotePlan is a daily planner and note-taking app that treats every day as a markdown document — your calendar events, tasks, and freeform thinking all live on the same page. Built by Eduard Metzger and actively developed, it sits at the crossroads of a bullet journal, a GTD system, and a plain-text knowledge base.

The core premise is deceptively simple: open today's note, see your calendar events pulled in automatically, write tasks with #hashtags and @mentions, and move anything unfinished to tomorrow with a single keystroke. Nothing gets lost in a separate app; the plan and the thinking coexist.

What does NotePlan do best?

NotePlan excels at closing the gap between capturing a thought and acting on it — a gap that trips up users of every other combo of Obsidian plus Things 3 or Bear plus Reminders.

The daily note is where everything converges. Calendar events from Apple Calendar (and Google Calendar) render inline, so you write your meeting prep directly beneath the event. Tasks carry due dates and schedule themselves into future daily notes automatically. The weekly overview gives you a bird's-eye scan without leaving plain text. Backlinks let project notes reference the days you worked on them, so your knowledge base and your schedule grow together rather than in separate silos.

• Calendar sidebar shows real events beside your writing canvas — no context switching
• Scheduled tasks cascade forward when you don't finish them; no manual rescheduling
• Markdown-first storage — your notes are plain .md files, readable anywhere forever
• Backlinks and references let notes cite each other like a lightweight wiki
• Plugins extend behavior (AI integration, habit trackers, Templater-style prompts)

Is NotePlan free?

NotePlan offers a free trial that lets you evaluate the full feature set before committing. After the trial, it moves to a subscription — there's also a one-time purchase option for users who prefer to avoid recurring fees.

Compared to Bear (subscription only) or Obsidian (free core, paid Sync and Publish), NotePlan's pricing is straightforward for what you get: a maintained, native app with iCloud sync baked in. The free tier is generous enough to form a real opinion before you pay.

Who should use NotePlan?

NotePlan fits people who already think in plain text but keep bouncing between their calendar app and a notes app to stay organised. If you've tried Things 3 or OmniFocus and found them too divorced from your writing, or tried Obsidian and found it too open-ended for daily planning, NotePlan is the middle path.

I'd point it at: independent consultants who need to log billable hours alongside client notes, developers who keep engineering journals, and anyone running a personal GTD system who wants everything in one file format they own. It's less suited to teams — there's no shared workspace or collaborative editing; it's an opinionated single-user tool and proud of it.

How does NotePlan compare to Obsidian?

Obsidian is a bottomless knowledge graph; NotePlan is a daily driver with a calendar spine. Both store plain markdown files, and both support plugins and backlinks — but the similarity stops there.

Obsidian rewards weeks of vault design before you get daily value. NotePlan is useful on day one: open it, see today's calendar, start writing. Obsidian has a richer plugin ecosystem and more customisation headroom; NotePlan has tighter calendar integration and first-class task scheduling that Obsidian's community plugins still can't fully match. I use both: Obsidian for long-lived reference material, NotePlan for anything tied to a date.

What are the best NotePlan alternatives?

The closest rivals are Craft (beautiful, block-based, weaker on task scheduling), Bear (excellent prose editor, no calendar), Logseq (open-source daily notes with outliner, steeper learning curve), and Agenda (also calendar-linked notes, but less markdown-pure). For pure task management without the notes layer, Things 3 and OmniFocus remain the gold standard on Mac — but they won't replace a writing environment the way NotePlan does.

Does NotePlan work on iPhone and iPad?

Yes — NotePlan ships native apps for iOS and iPadOS alongside the Mac version, with iCloud sync keeping everything in step. The mobile apps are genuinely usable for capturing quick thoughts or reviewing the day, though the Mac app is where the full power lives.