One app for tasks and notes or two separate ones across three devices Tools

Counter view: I merged two years ago and it was the right call, specifically because I was losing things in the handoff exactly like you are. One inbox, one search box, one thing to open. It's a worse notes app than the one I left and I don't care, because I stopped losing things and that was the actual goal.

Two apps, and fix the gap instead of merging them, because the gap is a habit problem rather than a tooling one.

The rule that solved this for me: notes are allowed to contain tasks, but a task is not real until it exists in the task app. So when I close a meeting note, the last thing I do is copy any action out of it. Ten seconds. The note keeps the context, the task list stays the single place I look.

Merging into one tool usually produces a system where your task list is full of half-written paragraphs and you stop trusting it. The combined apps are genuinely good at one of the two jobs and mediocre at the other, and which one they're good at is easy to find out in a week of use.

On your actual constraint, browser access on a locked-down work laptop is the thing to test first, before anything else. Some corporate setups block the exact domains these tools use, and that's a much shorter list of candidates than the feature comparison suggests.

Whatever you pick, test the phone experience first rather than last. You'll do 70% of your capture there and most of these tools are designed on a desktop and grafted onto mobile afterwards. If adding a task takes more than about four seconds from a locked phone, you won't do it, and then nothing else matters.

Also make sure you can get your data out in a plain format before you commit. You will move again in three years, everyone does, and the difference between a markdown export and a proprietary blob is the difference between a Sunday afternoon and never bothering.