I second the recommendation of Musescore for free software. If your DAW doesn't provide a scoring tool, then this is really very good, for the money.
I find it crash prone on the mac, but that's pretty livable. I don't use it enough to be a real expert at it, and so at times do find myself googling a lot to figure out how to accomplish something with it, but in the end there's always been a way.
I wish inputting notes was a little simpler, but to be fair you have to make the choices of type, duration, etc. someplace and once you get used to it, you can pretty quickly enter data.
I've used it for creating chord charts showing specific voicings so others can solo against those.
- bill