Note

A Note in Salesforce is the legacy standard object (Note in the API) that stores short, plain-text annotations attached to a parent record. Each Note has a Title, a Body field (up to 32 KB of plain text), a polymorphic ParentId pointing to almost any standard or custom record, an OwnerId, and an IsPrivate flag that hides the note from anyone except its owner. Notes were the original way users captured ad-hoc context on Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, and other records before Salesforce introduced Lightning Notes (the ContentNote object) with rich-text formatting, file attachments, and modern collaboration features. The classic Note object remains in every org for backward compatibility and is still surfaced through the Notes & Attachments related list, but Salesforce recommends using Lightning Notes for all new notes — they support inline formatting, images, multi-record sharing, and survive Lightning Experience migrations cleanly.

The Note object is one of the simplest standard objects in Salesforce — Title, Body, ParentId, OwnerId, and a small handful of system fields — but its simplicity is also its limitation. Body is plain text only, capped at 32 KB, with no formatting, embedded images, or markdown rendering. There is no version history, no concurrent-edit handling, and no support for attaching the same Note to multiple records. These gaps are exactly what Lightning Notes (ContentNote) was designed to fix.

Lightning Experience continues to render legacy Notes alongside Lightning Notes through the unified Notes related list, but new notes created through the Lightning UI default to ContentNote unless the admin has specifically disabled Lightning Notes (rare, and not recommended). Salesforce documentation has long flagged the classic Note object as legacy, and most new development should target ContentNote through the Files framework — but Note records cannot be migrated automatically, so existing Note data continues to live as Note records indefinitely.

Reporting on classic Notes is awkward — there is no standard report type that covers both Notes and ContentNotes, so admins who need cross-record annotation reporting often build a custom report type or an Apex-powered dashboard component. Permissions follow the parent record's sharing model, with the additional IsPrivate flag restricting visibility to the owner only when set. There is no way to share a private classic Note with a specific user other than transferring ownership.