The short answer first. If you want it free and on your iPhone, use Apple's own Notes, Reminders and Calendar, which are already on your Mac and already sync. If other people work in the same pages as you, use Notion. If you want plain files and enjoy building your own system, use Obsidian. If you plan your day from the calendar and need that plan on your phone, look at NotePlan, or at Sunsama and Akiflow if your tasks arrive from email and chat. If you want habits and mood tracking with encrypted sync on every platform, Linux and Android included, use Lunatask. If you want documents that look finished, use Craft. And if you work on one Mac and want no account, no subscription and a clipboard manager in the same window as your notes, that is Cyanote.
I make Cyanote, so weigh this accordingly. It is the right answer for the smallest group on that list, and each section below says where the other app beats it.
The short version
| App | What it puts together | What one person pays | Pick it if |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Notes, Reminders and Calendar | Notes, to-dos and a calendar, synced through iCloud | Free; iCloud+ from $0.99/mo past 5 GB | You want it free, on your iPhone, with nothing to set up |
| Notion | Pages, databases and shared workspaces | Free; Plus $10/mo, 20% less yearly | Other people work in it with you, or you want databases |
| Obsidian | Markdown notes in a folder, plus plugins | Free; Sync $4/mo yearly or $5/mo | You want plain files and like building the system |
| NotePlan | Markdown notes, tasks and your calendar | $99/yr or $12/mo | You plan from the calendar and need it on your phone |
| Lunatask | Tasks, habits, mood, notes and people | Free tier; $6/mo yearly, $8/mo, or $300 once | You want encrypted sync everywhere, Linux included |
| Craft | Documents, tasks, daily notes, a calendar view | Free to 1,500 blocks; Plus varies by country | You want documents that look finished |
| Akiflow | One task inbox, time-blocked on your calendar | $19/mo yearly or $34/mo | Tasks arrive from other tools and you plan in time blocks |
| Sunsama | A guided daily plan over tasks and calendar | $17/mo yearly or $22/mo | You want a planning routine at the start of each day |
| Cyanote | Notes, to-dos, board, calendar, habits, routines, clipboard | $7.99 once on Mac; Windows is a separate $7.99 | One Mac, no account, no subscription, no sync needed |
Prices are USD, checked 2 October 2026 on each company's own pricing page. They change, so check them again before you decide anything.
What "all-in-one" means here
Nobody needs an app that does everything. What people searching for one usually mean is narrower: the notes, the to-do list and the calendar should stop living in three places that know nothing about each other. I wrote about that gap in a calendar that lives next to your notes, and about what it was costing me when I added up five subscriptions that each did one part of the job.
So every app below covers at least two of those jobs in one place. For each one: what it combines, what it costs, who it suits, and where it beats Cyanote, because nearly all of them do somewhere.
Apple Notes, Reminders and Calendar
What it combines. Three apps rather than one, but they share your Apple account and sync to your iPhone and iPad through iCloud with nothing to configure. Notes has folders, tags, checklists, tables and password-locked notes. Reminders has lists, due dates and alerts. Calendar is a calendar. Since macOS 26, Spotlight can also keep a short clipboard history. It is off by default and keeps things for a week at most.
What it costs. Nothing; they come with the Mac. Every Apple account gets 5 GB of iCloud storage free, and iCloud+ starts at $0.99 a month for 50 GB once photos have eaten the free allowance.
Best for. Most people. If you have an iPhone and the job is somewhere to put things, this is the answer, and the case for moving off Apple Notes is weaker than most people expect.
Where it beats Cyanote. Price, the phone, sync, and being installed already. Cyanote has no phone app and no sync.
Where it falls short. It is three windows, and nothing connects them except you. There are no habits, no board and no focus timer, and the Spotlight clipboard is a short-term list rather than somewhere to keep the address you paste every week.
Notion
What it combines. Pages, databases, wikis, project boards and a large template gallery, in a browser, a desktop app and phone apps. Notion Calendar is a separate app that connects to it.
What it costs. Free for one person, with unlimited pages and blocks. The free plan's limits are 5 MB per uploaded file and seven days of page history. Plus is $10 per member a month, 20% less billed yearly. Business is $20 per member a month. See notion.com/pricing.
Best for. Teams, and anyone whose system is really a set of databases: a reading list with five views, a small CRM, a content calendar.
Where it beats Cyanote. Collaboration, databases, any device with a browser, and a free plan that one person rarely outgrows. If anyone else needs to read or edit your pages, stop here. Notion is the better buy, and Cyanote cannot do that at all.
Where it falls short. It runs at the speed of your connection, it needs an account, and it hands you a kit rather than a finished system. I went through that trade in what you give up leaving Notion, and the Notion comparison has the feature table.
Obsidian
What it combines. Out of the box, notes: Markdown files in a folder you choose, linked to each other. Task lists with due dates, a calendar and kanban boards come from community plugins.
What it costs. The app is free for every purpose, including work. The commercial licence, $50 per user a year, is optional. Sync is $4 a month billed yearly or $5 monthly, and Publish is $8 a month billed yearly or $10 monthly, per site. See obsidian.md/pricing.
Best for. People who want their notes as plain files that will open in anything in thirty years, and who enjoy building and tuning the system that sits on top of them.
Where it beats Cyanote. Plain files on disk, where Cyanote keeps everything in one database. Phone apps, sync if you pay for it, and a plugin ecosystem that can turn it into nearly anything. It is also free.
Where it falls short. The all-in-one part is something you assemble and then maintain. That maintenance is the usual reason people leave, which I wrote up in leaving Obsidian.
NotePlan
What it combines. Markdown notes, tasks and your calendar, organised around a daily note that sits next to the day's events. The notes are plain Markdown files, and it runs on Mac, iPad, iPhone and the web.
What it costs. $99 a year, which works out at $8.33 a month, or $12 monthly. There is no free tier and no one-time option. The yearly plan has a 7-day trial and the monthly one a 3-day trial. See noteplan.co/pricing.
Best for. People who plan from the calendar outward and want that plan on their phone.
Where it beats Cyanote. Sync and phone apps, plain-text files, plugins, and calendar-first daily planning that goes further than Cyanote's calendar does. Of everything here it is the product closest to Cyanote, and the NotePlan comparison goes through it row by row.
Where it falls short. Habits are something you build out of templates, there is no clipboard manager, and five years at the yearly rate is $495.
Lunatask
What it combines. Tasks with automatic prioritisation, habits, notes, mood tracking and a list of the people in your life, end-to-end encrypted and synced across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android.
What it costs. The free plan is real: two areas of life, seven daily habits and 30 relationships, with notes and mood tracking included. Premium is $6 a month billed yearly or $8 monthly. A lifetime licence is $300 once, though Lunatask says it is not available in the mobile apps or the Mac App Store version. See lunatask.app/pricing.
Best for. People who want privacy and sync at the same time, and want the app to notice how they are doing as well as what they are doing.
Where it beats Cyanote. Encrypted sync on every platform, a free tier, and far more on the personal side: mood, energy and stress tracking, relationships. The Lunatask comparison is the one on this site where I like the other app most.
Where it falls short. It needs an account, calendar integration is a Premium feature rather than a built-in calendar, and there is no clipboard manager.
Craft
What it combines. Documents built from blocks, a task list with Inbox, Today and Upcoming, daily notes, and a calendar view that puts scheduled tasks beside events from Apple, Google or Outlook calendars. It runs on Mac, iPhone and iPad, and on Windows and the web.
What it costs. The free plan stops at 1,500 blocks, with 1 GB of storage, a 25 MB upload cap and seven days of version history. Plus removes those limits. Craft sets its prices in local currency for each market, and its page would not show me a US price from where I checked, so see their site for yours.
Best for. People who write documents other people will read, and who care how those documents look.
Where it beats Cyanote. Design, sharing a document as a web page, collaboration, and sync across your devices. Nothing local looks like a Craft document.
Where it falls short. It is a cloud app with local caching, and the free plan's ceiling is counted in paragraphs, which arrives sooner than people expect.
Akiflow and Sunsama
These are a different kind of all-in-one. Neither tries to hold your notes. They gather the tasks that already live in other tools and lay them out against your calendar, so the plan for the day is one screen.
Akiflow collects tasks into one inbox from the tools they arrive in, and has you time-block them onto your calendar. It is $19 a month billed yearly ($228 a year) or $34 monthly, after a 7-day trial that needs a card. It also sells time up front: $357.60 for two years, or $699 for five. See akiflow.com/pricing.
Sunsama is built around a guided daily plan: pick today's tasks from your list and your integrations, estimate them, and fit them around your meetings. It is $17 a month billed yearly or $22 monthly, after a 14-day trial with no card. One answer in Sunsama's own FAQ still quotes $20 and $25, so go by the plan card on sunsama.com/pricing.
Best for. People whose work arrives through email, chat and a project tracker, and who need one place to decide what happens today.
Where they beat Cyanote. Integrations with the tools work actually comes from, apps on your phone, and a planning routine that is the product rather than something you bring yourself. Cyanote's only connection to anything outside it is importing a calendar file or subscribing to one.
Where they fall short. Neither is a notes app, and they are the most expensive apps here: $204 to $228 a year at the yearly rate.
Cyanote
I make this one, so read this section as the maker's description rather than a review.
What it combines. Notes with tables, sub-pages, [[ links and syntax-highlighted code. To-dos with priorities, due dates and reminders, which also show as a board. A calendar that can import an .ics file or subscribe read-only to one. Habits with streaks, routines and a Pomodoro timer. And a system-wide clipboard manager with unlimited history and pinned snippets, opened over any app with a hotkey. All of it sits in one SQLite file on your own disk, with no account.
What it costs. $7.99 once for the Mac, sold through Lemon Squeezy, with a 14-day refund and no reason needed. There is no free tier and no subscription. The Windows version is a separate $7.99 purchase on the Microsoft Store, and buying one does not get you the other. The pricing page has the detail.
Best for. One person on one Mac who wants notes, tasks, a calendar, habits and clipboard history in one window, without a monthly bill.
Where everything else beats it. There is no sync, no iPhone or iPad app, no web version, no collaboration and no plugins. If any of those matters to you, one of the apps above is the better buy, and I would rather you bought it than asked me for a refund.
What it has that the others do not. A system-wide clipboard manager with unlimited history, kept in the same file as your notes. Apart from Apple's week-long Spotlight history, none of the other apps here has one, and it is the piece that usually stays a separate purchase. The clipboard page compares it with Paste, Maccy and Raycast.
What a year costs one person
At the cheapest rate each app offers for the full product:
| App | First year | Five years |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Notes, Reminders and Calendar | $0 | $0 |
| Notion (free plan) | $0 | $0 |
| Obsidian, with Sync | $48 | $240 |
| Lunatask Premium | $72 | $300 (lifetime licence) |
| NotePlan | $99 | $495 |
| Sunsama | $204 | $1,020 |
| Akiflow | $228 | $699 (five-year plan) |
| Cyanote (Mac) | $7.99 | $7.99 |
Craft is left out because its price depends on your country. The free rows are really free: if Apple's apps or Notion's free plan already do the job, nothing on this page saves you money.
The subscriptions mostly pay for sync and servers, which is a fair charge if you use them. On one Mac that you never leave, it buys nothing.
Choosing without a spreadsheet
Two questions settle most of this list before features come into it.
Where do you need it? If the answer includes your phone, Cyanote is out, and the choice is between Apple's apps, Obsidian, NotePlan, Lunatask, Craft and the planners. If the answer is one Mac, most of what those subscriptions pay for is sync you will never use.
Who else is in it? If anyone, use Notion. Nothing else here is built for that as well, and Cyanote is not built for it at all.
After that it comes down to taste: plain files (Obsidian, NotePlan), a planning routine (Sunsama, Akiflow), the personal side (Lunatask), how it looks (Craft), or one local window with the clipboard in it (Cyanote). Whichever you pick, read the productivity app you keep replacing first, because the switching is usually the expensive part.
The honest version
Most people searching for an all-in-one productivity app on a Mac already have one: Apple's three apps, free and synced to the phone in their pocket. Teams should use Notion.
Cyanote is for the narrower case: one Mac, no account, no subscription, and the notes, tasks, calendar, habits and clipboard in one place. If that is you, it is $7.99 once. If it is not, the comparisons page has the longer arguments, and every one of them says when to buy the other app.