Bean Notes

Write, sketch, import, and organize ideas in a cozy local-first notebook built for iPhone and iPad—with Pencil support, folders, tabs, search, and flexible exports.

Bean Notes is a cozy, local-first notebook for handwritten ideas, study notes, sketches, and imported documents.

Capture thoughts naturally with Apple Pencil or touch, then keep everything organized in color-coded folders and note tabs. Choose a page style that fits your work—from plain, lined, dotted, grid, and Cornell pages to music staff, planner, and customizable chalkboard backgrounds.

Bring existing work into your notebook by importing PDFs, images, CSV files, Word documents, presentations, and other files. Keep writing on imported documents with PDF and image version history, so annotations stay attached to the source material. When you are ready to share, export individual pages or complete notes as PDF, PNG, or JPEG, or share original attachments.

Find what you need with note search, revisit recent notes, and recover archived folders when you want to return to an older project. Local autosave, storage cleanup, backup and export support, and recovery behavior for damaged stores help protect your work.

Bean Notes also includes a share extension for quickly creating a note from a PDF or image, or adding that file as a new version of an existing document note.

Your notes stay on your device. Bean Notes does not require an account, does not use CloudKit, and does not collect data for tracking.