Simplenote
simplenote.com
Plain-text notes that sync everywhere and never ask you to format anything
keep.google.com
Sticky notes that sync with your Google account and can read a photo.
Keep is the quickest capture surface if you already live in Google: colour-coded cards, checklists, voice notes it transcribes, and reminders that fire on your phone. It will also pull the text out of a photographed page. It is deliberately shallow — organisation stops at labels and colours, so it works as an inbox you clear into something else rather than a place things live.
Questions
Free to use, but you have to register before it will do the job. There are no folders or nesting — only labels and colours, which stops scaling after a few hundred notes.
Yes. Google Keep sends your input to its own servers to process it. That is fine for public material; for anything containing personal data, use one of the on-device tools instead.
There are no folders or nesting — only labels and colours, which stops scaling after a few hundred notes.
Alternatives
Same category or same task, ordered by how closely they overlap.
simplenote.com
Plain-text notes that sync everywhere and never ask you to format anything
anotepad.com
Opens straight into a blank note you can type in without signing up
notion.com
Builds a workspace out of pages and databases instead of a folder of files
standardnotes.com
Encrypted notes where the sync server only ever holds ciphertext
todoist.com
Type a due date in plain English and it becomes a repeating task
workflowy.com
One infinite bulleted list you can zoom into at any level