Musing Notes vs Underway
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Musing Notes
Capture and find notes using natural language search, voice input, and image recognition. This app organizes your thoughts without traditional folders or tags, making it ideal for creative individuals on the go.
- Natural language search
- Voice to text transcription
- Image recognition for notes
- Contextual note capture (location, time)
- Web search integration
- Distraction-free interface
Read full descriptionHide full description
Some ideas arrive half-formed — at a café in the rain, on a walk, the moment before sleep. Musing is built to catch them, and to give them back to you exactly when you need them. You don't file. You don't sort. You don't tag. You just write — or speak — and move on. Later, you find any note the way you'd ask a friend: "What was that wine I liked?" "The café idea when it was raining." FREE · PRIVATE · ON YOUR DEVICE Musing is free — no ads, no account, no subscription, no credits. Capture, context, photos, and text search work on every supported device. Ask answers and semantic recall use Apple Intelligence on devices that support it — otherwise search stays useful without them. No server ever reads a note by default, nothing trains a model, and notes sync only through your own private iCloud — across iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac. SEARCH BY THE MOMENT Every note quietly keeps its moment — neighborhood, weather, time of day, the kind of place. So you can ask by it: "coffee shop notes," "rainy day ideas," "notes from Traverse City," "late night notes" — or combined, "receipts from Oak Park last month." Instant, even offline. JUST ASK Search isn't a keyword box. Type what you're looking for in plain language and Musing surfaces the notes that match — even when you don't remember the exact words. Questions get answers grounded in your own notes, citing the notes they came from. CATCH IT HOWEVER IT ARRIVES Type a quick thought. On iPhone, speak a voice note — transcribed on-device; on Mac, dictate straight into the composer. Attach a photo and Musing reads what's there on your device — a receipt gets its total, a grocery list becomes a checklist. Check in to save a place. On iPhone: Home Screen widget, Siri, Shortcuts, Apple Watch, and the share sheet. On Mac: a menu-bar capture that never needs the main window, plus a Reading Room for asking and browsing. YOUR PLACES A quiet map of everywhere you've paused — most-visited spots and neighborhoods, on iPhone and in a dedicated Places window on Mac. WHEN YOU RETURN Walk back into a café you've written in and that note can meet you on Home — a quiet lock-screen banner too, if you ask. A year on, an echo: Time Recall brings the note back with the weather and the street still on it. Place Recall and Time Recall (Echoes) stay off until you turn them on. Hospitals, clinics, and places of worship stay unnamed, and never trigger. FIVE ROOMS TO WRITE IN Choose how Musing feels. Foolscap, Inkwell, Verdant, Dusk, or Harbor. Light and dark work in every theme. BRING YOUR OWN AI SERVICE Optional Pro Mode lets you paste your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key so Ask and web lookup can use GPT or Claude. You choose the provider, use your own account, and keep usage and costs under your control. Off by default — not a paid upgrade inside Musing. Capture, search, and tags stay on this device. Nothing trains a model. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Sensitive places — clinics, hospitals, places of worship — are never named. Every context signal has an off switch. NO FOLDERS. NO FEED. NO BUSYWORK. Capture a half-formed idea. Find it later. Free. Private. Yours.
Underway
Read full descriptionHide full description
Open Underway and you land on today. Type one plain line and it becomes a dated entry. Scroll back a month and it is all still there, ticked off, on the day you did it. The days behind you sit just above, the days ahead just below, and you scroll straight through them, back through last year or forward into next. If you have ever dated a page in a paper notebook and written one line per thing, this is that, typed. Write "lunch with Sam friday 2pm #work" and Underway pulls out the date, the time and the tag on its own. Type ! or !! to mark a line important. No forms, no fields, no five taps to write down one thing. A line can be a trip, a day off, a bill, an appointment, a birthday, or where someone else in the family is that afternoon. A calendar wants a start time and an end time. A to do list wants a checkbox. A lot of life is neither, and all of it can go in here and still be findable months later. Finished tasks do not vanish. They stay on the day you did them, quietly greyed, so scrolling back through last month shows you what you actually got done. Your plan for the year and your record of it are the same thing. There is nothing to set up. No projects, no lists to build first. You open it and start typing. WHAT IS IN IT • Dates and days of the week are tinted, so a glance tells you where you are. • A switch to hide finished lines, if you would rather see only what is left. • Overdue in one move. A banner counts what slipped and offers to bring it all to today, or clear it. • Tags and priorities you type, not pick from a menu. # for a tag, ! for important. • Search across everything, still fast at tens of thousands of entries, and a calendar view to jump to any date. • Vault, for anything that has no date yet, with an optional nudge to look through it. • Repeats. Daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, ending on a date or after a count. Change one, or change this one and every one after it. • Optional reminders on anything with a time, and birthdays brought in from Contacts once so they come back every year. • Widgets on your Home Screen and Lock Screen. Tap one to land on the task. • Apple Watch. Today, overdue and the week ahead on your wrist. Tick things off, or dictate a new line and it arrives on your phone. • A look back, if you want one. How often you finish on time, what you added and completed, and how long your streak is. • Themes, palettes and paper textures. • Backups you keep. Take out a full copy, or a lightweight one you can read in any text editor, and import it back whenever you like. NO ACCOUNT, NO SERVER No sign in. No ads. No trackers. Your tasks are not sent to us, and there is nowhere for us to send them. Everything lives on your iPhone, your watch talks straight to your phone, and you can take a copy out whenever you want. Free, with nothing to buy inside. Available in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Underway at none against Musing Notes's 2. Underway also leads on iOS requirement (18.0 vs 26.0). On price, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Musing Notes sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. Underway asks for nothing beyond the download.
| Parameter | Musing Notes | Underway |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.9 (7 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 7 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 3 days | — |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | — |
| Devices | iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch | iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch |
| Requires iOS | 26.0 | 18.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 10 MB | 10 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | RIPUL JAIN | Cylandea Systems LLC |
In-app purchases
Musing Notes
- Musing Plus$2.991 Month
- Musing Pro$9.991 Month
Underway
No in-app purchases









