Craft review: the best-looking notes app, and what that costs

Filed under Review

By Gerald · 1 September 2026

Rows of metal letterpress type arranged in a printing form, representing the deliberate document design Craft is known for

I opened Craft next to three other note apps on the same screen and it was not close. Craft's documents look finished. Everything else looks like a text box.

That is the whole pitch, and it is a real one. The question worth asking after a few months of use is whether the look changes how the tool behaves once you leave the Mac, and once you try to get your writing back out.

Short answer: Craft is the best tool I have used for a document you plan to send to another human being. It is a weaker choice as the single place your entire note archive lives, mostly because of what happens once you are not on Apple hardware.

Craft is a design tool that also takes notes. Judge it as one and the tradeoffs make sense immediately.

What Craft is genuinely better at

Craft's core unit is a document built from blocks, and the blocks come with real layout options. Columns, cards, image grids, toggles, callouts, a cover image with a title treatment. None of this is unusual on its own. What is unusual is how good the defaults look without you touching a single setting.

Typography is the clearest example. Line height, heading weight, spacing between blocks, all tuned by people who clearly cared. Paste the same rough outline into Craft and into a plain markdown editor, and the Craft version reads like something you could hand to a client. That difference shows up constantly if you write proposals, project pages, or anything meant to be read by someone outside your own head.

The daily note and calendar integration are solid too. Linking a document to a date, jumping between days, pulling in a calendar event. It is a small feature that a lot of competitors treat as an afterthought.

The block model in daily use

A designer sketching on a tablet with a stylus, representing deliberate visual layout work — Craft treats a document the way a designer treats a page, which is both its strength and its limit.

Here is where the good design starts to have a cost. Every block is a decision. Is this a paragraph or a callout. Should this list be a toggle. Do these two points deserve columns.

For a finished document, those decisions pay off. For a fast capture of a half-formed thought at 11pm, they get in the way. I found myself reaching for a plain text app when I just needed to dump something down, and reaching for Craft only when I already knew the shape of what I was writing.

That is a real split in use case, not a complaint about the software. A tool built to make documents look good will always ask more of you at the moment of capture than a tool built purely for speed.

Sharing documents with people who do not use Craft

This is where the polish runs into a wall. Craft's sharing is built around Craft's own rendering. A shared link looks great and behaves like a Craft document, not a generic web page, which is fine when the recipient is casually browsing on a phone or laptop.

Problems show up at the edges. Recipients without a Craft account cannot comment or collaborate the way they can inside a shared Notion page, and the shared view does not always degrade gracefully for accessibility tools or very old browsers. If your work involves handing documents to clients who live in Google Docs or Notion, expect friction the moment they want to edit rather than read.

Export is the honest test of how much you can leave with. Craft supports exporting to PDF, Markdown, Textbundle, and Word (DocX), which is a genuinely good list. The catch is platform-dependent: on Mac and iOS you get the full set including PDF and DocX, while the Windows and web clients currently only export to Markdown and Textbundle. If your daily machine is a PC, the nicest export formats are not available to you at all, which matters if you are the kind of person this guide is written for.

Platform coverage and offline behaviour

Craft ships native apps for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows, and Android, plus a web app. The Windows client exists and receives regular updates, so this is not a dead or abandoned build, but the visual polish and export completeness both still favour Apple's platforms first. The Android app is the newest addition, launched in late 2025, and it is still catching up on features the iOS app has had for years.

Offline editing works across platforms. Sync is fast when it works and, like most block-based editors with a proprietary format, a sync conflict is more disruptive than it would be in a plain text tool, because two versions of a richly formatted document are harder to merge by eye than two versions of a paragraph.

Pricing and what the free tier allows

Craft's pricing, as shown on the official pricing page in July 2026, is Free, Plus at 8 US dollars a month billed monthly or about 4.80 US dollars a month billed yearly, and Family at 15 US dollars a month billed monthly or 9 US dollars a month billed yearly for up to five accounts.

The free tier is workable for someone testing the product but tight for daily use: it caps you at 1,500 blocks total, 1 GB of storage, a 25 MB media upload limit, and seven days of version history. A block is any paragraph, image, or list item, so 1,500 fills up faster than the number suggests once you are writing regularly.

If you plan to live in Craft, budget for Plus. The free tier is a trial, not a real home for a note archive.

The built-in AI assistant

Craft's assistant is metered by credits rather than sold as unlimited, and the tiers matter more than the marketing copy suggests. As shown on Craft's own AI credits page in July 2026, the assistant runs on three model tiers: Fast, Core, and Max, with Max reserved for heavier work like long-document rewrites and research-style summarization.

Free gives you 15 credits a month and access to Core and Fast only, which is enough to try the assistant, not to lean on it daily. Plus raises that to 50 credits a month and adds access to Max. If you burn through the allowance, Craft sells additional credit packs on top of your plan rather than an unlimited upgrade tier.

For occasional cleanup of a rough outline, the free allowance is fine. For anyone who wants an AI assistant running inside every document they write, budget for Plus and expect to watch the credit meter the way you would watch a mobile data plan.

Who should use Craft and who should not

Craft is the right choice if you write documents meant to be read by other people: proposals, project briefs, pitch decks in document form, a personal site built out of Craft pages. The visual result is worth the subscription for that use case alone.

It is a weaker choice if your daily machine is Windows and export quality matters to you, if most of your writing is fast, low-structure capture rather than finished documents, or if you want your note archive to survive a subscription lapse without becoming a pile of Markdown files stripped of their formatting.

Flow solves a narrower, different problem: notes plus a short task board plus one capture inbox, with less visual range than Craft and a one-time price instead of a subscription. If your week is mostly quick notes and a handful of active tasks rather than polished documents, that is a real reason to look at Flow instead. It will never make a document look like Craft does.

Frequently asked questions

Is Craft available on Windows and Android? Yes. Craft ships native apps for Windows and Android alongside Mac, iPhone, iPad, and web, though the newest features and the fullest export options still land on Apple platforms first.

How much does Craft cost? As shown on the official pricing page in July 2026, Craft Plus is 8 US dollars a month billed monthly or about 4.80 US dollars a month billed yearly, and Family is 15 US dollars a month billed monthly or 9 US dollars a month billed yearly. A free tier exists with a 1,500 block cap and 1 GB of storage.

Can I export my Craft documents? Yes, to PDF, Word (DocX), Markdown, and Textbundle on Mac and iOS. On Windows and the web app, export is currently limited to Markdown and Textbundle, so the richest export formats depend on the device you use.

Is Craft a good Notion replacement? Only for a specific slice of Notion's use. Craft beats Notion on document design and typography, but it has no databases, relations, or the workspace flexibility Notion offers, so it replaces Notion's document side, not its systems side.

Does Craft work offline? Yes, on every platform, with sync resuming once you reconnect. Merge conflicts on a heavily formatted document are more disruptive to resolve by eye than a conflict in a plain text file, which is worth knowing before you rely on it across spotty connections.

My verdict

Use Craft for the documents you want to look considered the moment someone opens them. Do not make it the only home for a large, fast-growing note archive unless you are fully on Apple hardware and comfortable with the subscription. The design is real. So is the price of that design, in dollars and in what you get back on Windows.