Guide
How to sync Apple Notes to Notion
There are four ways to do this and they are not equivalent. Which one is right depends almost entirely on whether you are moving your notes once or keeping them current forever.
First, decide which job you actually have
Moving a few notes, once. Copy and paste. Genuinely. For under about twenty notes it is faster than setting anything up, and Notion handles pasted rich text well. Nothing below will beat it on effort.
Moving everything, once. Export your notes and import the files. You will lose your folder structure and your images will detach from the text, but it is free and it is finished in an afternoon.
Keeping both current, indefinitely. This is the hard one, and it is the only case that needs software. Nothing built into macOS can watch your notes for changes, so something has to run on your Mac and do it. The reason why comes down to Apple shipping no Notes API, which also explains why Zapier and IFTTT can't help.
The rest of this page is the third case. Each of the other methods is examined in detail here, including where exactly it breaks.
Setting up continuous sync
This is the setup for Margin, the Mac app this site is about. It takes about five minutes, most of which is macOS asking you for permission. macOS 11 or later, Apple silicon.
Install the app
Download the beta and drag Margin to your Applications folder. Every release is notarized by Apple, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning and updates itself in place from then on.
Let it read your notes
On first launch macOS asks whether Margin may control Notes. This is the standard Automation prompt, worded by Apple, and it is the only permission the app needs to sync. The connection is read-only: Margin reads, and that is the entire extent of what it can do to your Apple Notes.
Margin also offers Full Disk Access, which is optional. It does one thing: it lets the app notice a new or renamed folder straight away rather than at the next scan. Sync works without it.
Create your Margin account
Sign in with Google, or with a link sent to your email address. This is what your licence and settings attach to. Your notes are not part of it. They never reach Margin's servers, which the privacy page documents field by field.
Connect Notion and hand over one page
Margin opens Notion's own authorisation screen, so there is no API key to generate or paste. Notion will ask which pages the app may access: pick or create a single empty page. Margin builds your whole folder structure underneath it, and everything else in your workspace stays invisible to the app. It cannot read a page you didn't give it.
The resulting connection is stored in your Mac's Keychain, and you can revoke it from Notion whenever you like.
Choose what gets mirrored
Open Folders and tick what you want. Accounts stay separate (iCloud, On My Mac, and any Gmail or Exchange accounts), and Margin only ever exports the folders you checked. Everything else is left unread.
Set the cadence and let it run
Auto-sync starts at every 15 minutes or on your schedule, and you can stretch the interval whenever you want the app to be quieter. From here on it lives in your menu bar: the first run creates the pages, and every run after that touches only the notes that actually changed.
What arrives in Notion
Notes are rebuilt as native Notion blocks rather than pasted as one lump of text, which means headings stay headings and checkboxes stay checkboxes: editable and searchable on the other side. Headings, bulleted and numbered lists, checkboxes, tables, code blocks, quotes, dividers, bold, italics, strikethrough, underline, inline code, links and images inside notes all carry across.
PDFs and other file attachments do not sync yet. The full list of what Margin doesn't do, with the reason for each, is kept deliberately public.
Living with it afterwards
Editing in Notion. Apple Notes wins. Margin only rewrites a page when the note behind it has changed, so your Notion edits survive until you next edit that note. If you would rather nothing was ever rewritten, switch off Sync updates and Margin will create pages without touching them again.
Deleting a note. Nothing happens in Notion by default. Turn deletion on and the page moves to a Deleted folder rather than being destroyed, so a mistake is always recoverable.
Reinstalling. Margin keeps a small local table linking each note to the page it created, so setting the app up again mirrors onto the existing pages instead of duplicating your library.