Note-taking app zoo on the App Store
*Disclaimer: I am not sponsored by anything and these are all my personal opinions, I encourage everyone to do their own research
I recently obtained an IPad (Air 4, with apple pencil), mainly to annotate/read papers digitally as well as notetaking and remote meetings. I have seen peers recommend switching to digital many times now, and particularly for people in theory it seems like a good idea.
However as someone new to the iPad world, a big question was what specific “note-taking app” to get. From initial conversations, the top apps recommended to me were Goodnotes and Notability. However after looking at their comparatively large price tags ($30 and a $15/yr subscription annually respectively), I was incentivized to look for other options.
For background I wanted a tool that allowed me to annotate papers and notes (PDFs), handwrite notes (with the option of exporting them as PDFs), and do some combination of the two. Obviously cost was the biggest constraint for me, which is why I even made the effort of looking into competitors instead of just settling for one of the “big two”. Note that everyone’s use case is different, so if any of the features I listed are appealing to you specifically you should try them out yourself!
Below I’ll describe my thought process and some apps I tried. Hopefully this will make other’s app choices more streamlined in the future. To find alternatives other than Notability and GoodNotes, I looked at reddit posts where people complained about the said products, and people’s replies of what they found worked for them. I find this method quite good when looking for alternatives to a lot of things in general.
“The Big 2”
Notability and GoodNotes combined seem to have a large marketshare in note taking apps. They both have free versions that allow you to try out before purchasing (with restricted features). Both apps come with a giant library of pen types, colors, and templates ranging from calendars, to-do lists, flashcards, and even coloring pages.
The big 2 apps have also have “AI integrated” into their apps, with features like auto-correcting your handwritten spelling mistakes while mimicking your handwriting, and the ability to transform your handwritten notes into text. What seemed really cool from GoodNotes5 was supposedly transforming your handwritten math equations into typed LaTeX, until I gave it a try and realized it wasn’t all that great for anything more complex than the Pythagorean theorem. (Perhaps it is simply my messy handwriting.) A nice feature from Notability (that isn’t in GoodNotes5 at the time of this post) is the ability to toggle dark mode. The app transforms the page (and even PDFs) while keeping your note colors the same. As a big user of dark mode this was something that appealed to me.
Recalling my original use case, I didn’t care much about all these features (other than the dark mode). I couldn’t justify myself spending (comparatively) a lot more money for a product where I would only use ~10% of their features. In addition it seems like both apps are sneaky with their subscription based pricing models, forcing you to pay over $10 a year to access your notebooks. Even for the supposed one time fee of $30 for GoodNotes5, it seems that with the eventual release of GoodNotes6 you will have to repurchase the app again (this is what happened to GoodNotes4 users when they were essentially forced to pay for GoodNotes5).
The rest of the pack
I’ll speedrun through a few notable ones, and list some pros and cons. Its good to give these “competitors” a try, since they market themselves as alternatives and are much cheaper.
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element ($9.99 one time purchase, $3.49/year)
A simple app that fit my use case of editing PDFs and handwriting notes. Also has a similar dark mode toggle from Notability that I liked. A deal breaker for me was the inability to screenshot/copy paste with the lasso tool on PDFs. Sometimes I like to screenshot a theorem statement or equation to insert elsewhere and this is not possible with this app.
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nebo ($8.99)
An interesting app that tries to combine handwritten and typed notes in one. There are some need things you can do (like creating toggle boxes and bullets with just your handwriting). I think this could be good for some people, but it doesn’t fit what I want out of a note taking app.
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CollaNote ($11.90)
Has an interesting live collaboration feature, so perhaps people can draw/take notes together. It’s a couple bucks more expensive, and I won’t be using the live collab feature so looked for something else.
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Noteful ($5.99)
Fit what features I was looking for from a note-taking app (this was the app I eventually purchased). But it didn’t have a toggle dark mode unfortunately. A couple things that stood out to me that I thought was nice that others didn’t always have:
- the app allows you to keep tabs on open documents so you can switch between PDFs/notes quickly
- Has a “pointer” tool, useful when you are sharing your screen on Zoom.
- Has a “hand tool” that allows you to use the Apple Pencil to scroll through the document instead of your fingers.
Conclusion
There are a ton more apps out there, but I was under a time constraint since the semester already started and I didn’t want to spend all my time looking. Again I encourage you to try them yourself and see what fits your needs.
Reflecting on this experience I realized I was being a stickler for money even though the price differences between some of these apps was less than that of a candy bar or bus fare. The alternative was to simply settle with one of the big 2 apps which will likely contain all the features you would ever want, and save you a few hours: the classic time vs money tradeoff.