Best note-taking apps for iPad and Apple Pencil 

CollaNote is one of the good options which has most features from notability and good notes, and is completely free! It should be considered by any new iPad users 🙂

In GoodNotes you can change the size of the box if you select the shape tool an then select the shap you Wand to edit. Also if you draw colorfilled shape and hit the back button one, you remove the color outline and have only the infill left.

For STEM students or anyone who has to work with mathematics in their notes, I highly recommend Nebo

Super helpful video! It helped me decide what was best to use and uncovered some features I didn’t know were there. Thanks!

Very good analysis. Concise, clear, straight to the point. Perfect balance between giving personal opinions and providing information about alternatives.

Hey, really enjoyed the vid, I think I'll be switching my note app based on it! I found it a little confusing which app you were talking about though, as you jumped around: would be helpful to have it shown on the video somewhere (light text). Thanks!

thanks for this video, I was actually trying to decide what fits better for me

The feature of highlight behind text on Goodnotes and Notability only works with light papers but on darker papers does not work because it uses the Apple Pencil API to enhance the contrast. Another thing to note with the drawing feature on Notability though that provides a lot of features, the grid system they use is quite stiff and usually I had to battle around for a few moments trying to move my lines to an specific place because they will snap to other points. It is important to note that the grid system for drawing is the same used when you use the highlight-to-line-shortcut: if you hold and press, it will not snap to where you are pressing but to the nearest anchor and if you try to move it, it is all ill-conditioned as the line feature. Drawing is powerful but not a smooth experience. Drawing and highlighting is smoother on Goodnotes BUT you are lacking some serious features: dotted lines, editing filled figures, changing the line thickness with ease and so on.

Very helpful video I like how you compare all different apps at the same time for each specific feature.

thanks. you explain all of them very clearly and easy to recreate. have a good day

Great video and exactly what I was looking for.

As a student, the Notability recording/playback feature he mentions for lectures is THE BEST tool I could ever imagine. I use the Blackboard app on my iPad, which allows me to download a copy of the professor's pdf or PowerPoint lecture slides directly onto a Notability Note. Then I take notes onto the slides as I record lectures, and I play the lecture back later while watching my notes populate in real time (you can speed up the playback up to 2x). This is incredibly helpful for learning. I also download homework pdf worksheets from Blackboard and use the Apple Pencil to select and copy one problem at a time by pasting it as a screen clipping. Then I show my work below each problem. (BTW, the Apple Pencil has a double-tap feature. You can double tap the pencil with your finger to switch between pen and eraser, so you don't need to reach over to the eraser icon all the time.) I can also text screenshots of notes or worked problems directly with classmates. Zooming out allows me to select a pretty big area with the Apple Pencil, and the text button is a one-click operation. Super convenient. The ONLY thing that could be improved about Notability is a direct connection to upload notes onto Blackboard, so I could turn in my homework directly from the app. (Notability does have this kind of link with Canvas, so if your school uses Canvas, you're golden.) I work around this by uploading my homework to Google Drive and then using my Windows machine to save it as a pdf to my laptop. Then I turn it in to Blackboard from my laptop. This is a bit cumbersome, but it's manageable. All told, Notability is just amazing for students. The lecture recording/note-playback feature is invaluable and, in my opinion, makes this the absolute best app. P.S. I use the PaperLike screen protector--I love the feel of this, compared to the unprotected screen.

Good content, subscribed, I love that I can concentrate on what you are saying without the 'music' that most people seem to think is needed. I use Apple notes and notability, but am always looking for more, Always improving workflow. Thanks.

Danke Tom! Ich habe wieder was neues von dein Video gelernt.

I am really surprised how useful the original apple reminder and note app are ! The Original Apple Note App has OCR on Images :) + Handwritting Recognition + good format style to show my notes on iPhone :)

Thank you for the videos. I came across your page 2 months ago when I chose to buy an iPad Air & watched your video about the Logitech crayon. Now I'm trying to choose a good note taking app so I appreciate your review. You mentioned that you always prefer note taking apps that can leverage conversion to text and I was wondering if that is my biggest request to have whole handwritten pages converted in 1 go rather than line by line + searchability of handwriting&pdf doc's text, would Nebo be your top recommendation based on what I heard on your video? (I want to handwrite all my business ideas but export them into editable text on my laptop). Although, you did also say Nebo has many downsides. What are they? And on balance would those downsides interfere with usability when my top goal is the above? I also want to research textbooks/non-fiction books and make notes adjacent to the margins and highlight paragraphs but then have my annotations, notes, ideas & collation of my research topic- which might span several books- turned into text to easily search through & turn into pieces of editable content on the computer. Any recommendations for this? Happy to have 2 different note taking apps for the 2 above uses if 1 can't serve them both. Thank you once more

Hi..I am wondering what the name of brand for the screen protector that you've been used?

This was a very helpful video. Great information about multiple ways to use these apps. Helped me narrow down what app to use.

This is great! Thank you

I’d like to go from handwritten notes and diagrams to pdfs I can share / email. Still don’t know how to proceed in that direction. And, if I wanted to watch this video and take notes as I listened, would one of the apps u listed be good for that?

Loved the comparison!! subbed 👍

Hi, could you please tell me how i could download the journal into my application notes?

Awesome comparison! Thanks!

Do you have a video on how to add your digital journal in to Evernote that would allow editing on a tablet/the app?

is the standard iPad fine to take notes , using the pencil OR should I upgrade to the iPad air? or Pro?

Hello it was really nice and informative🤯. I want to know who to make or get that interaction PDF for myself.!!👌✌

Awesome! Thanks mate 🙏🏻

In goodnote, you can edit the shape after drawing it by press it

does scribble convert any words or letters? or it must be in english or common language ? because i write in short and my mother tongue is rare and want to know if it will work for my class notes

The only Apple product I have is an iPad. I use Windows 10, ChromeOS, and Android. Looking for the best option that works with all that!

I'm looking for a new note app, but I just can't find it. I want something like notion but being able to handwriting freely, typing a text and add handwriting notes on top of it. What I've found is being able to type but when I want to handwrite I have to add a separate part, recognized as a picture. Can u help me?

Good video! I think the issue in Apple Notes where it was not recognizing the highlighted handwritten words when copying as text was due to the stroke. It seems to recognize if you’re highlighting horizontally but not if you scribble up and down, which I’m used to doing as well. I wish Apple Notes handled highlighting better in general - I’d be inclined to use it more. Cheers

I was wondering this yesterday, and you uploaded this video 2 days ago, I feel so lucky

This is great for me ❤

Thanks!

Thank you for this Video

I love Nebo

With convert to text, if I have to take a hours worth of notes, can I do something like #chapter5 and it be a chapter/mark that I can auto jump to like in apple notes

OneNote now supports Scribble like Apple Notes so you can get that pencil to text conversion by selecting the right pen.

Excellent video.

Is there any way to use apple pencil with pdf forms and have the handwriting converted to text?

amazing video, all the others online was talking too much but giving no further insight

One thing I miss about notability (if you know how to fix it pls let me know) but it use to convert my writing straight to text on the page (as if I was typing) and not into a text box (as it does now)

I just spent a couple of hours reviewing your videos. I've also watched your Best Note Taking 2022 Video. Which of the applications provide better functionality for us left handers ? I usually will turn my notepad to be portrait and write down the page (if that makes sense). Most of the demos show you writing left to right across the page vs o the page in portrait and you writing down the page ... I hope this makes sense....

Hi , great video and presentation! A question not really relevant to the video but I’m just curious. What is the watch face on your watch? Looks exactly like what I’m looking for!

Does Nebo work on ipad mini 6?

I've been looking for a notetaking app that has the 'pencil' feature that apple notes have. I am referring to the actual writing style. I find the 'pencil' tool far superior compared to the 'pen' style which is available in most other tools. Does anyone have suggestions for notetaking apps that have this writing style available?

I like this good work🇪🇬🇪🇬🇪🇬🇪🇬👍

What’s important in one note is that the search tool will search your handwriting. For me there is no need for converting writing into text especially when you have serval drawings in between the writing (z.B. chemical Structures ) . And you may use the scribble tool for some kind of go around

Wondered what you think of liquid to?

I would like to know if any of the handwriting recognition programs are suitable for recognizing and using the Hungarian language ??? On Ipadon 9 generations, the doodle named os 15 is unfortunately unsuitable for it. I confess great disappointment.

How can I download collanotes on my android tablet? Aghh I really want it! It's so amazing

A lot of good info in your video, but honestly too quick for me. I could not keep up with which app you were in. I wish you had a small spreadsheet with all the features in the left column and on the top row list all the apps across the top. Then you could check off which app had what feature for visual comparison. Excellent video, I'm just a little slow it seems. ;-)

Nice overview. I have GoodNotes with my new iPad mini but I'm not really in love with it. I like the user interface of Nebo but it misses some features of competitors.

What happened with Rocketbook?

I would like to join the community you mention this video was awesome

Hi, is it possible to annotate PDF with handwriting and then have it recognised and converted to text on the pdf? which app is the best for this?

This is about Scribble's hand-writing to text conversion. There are two things that don't work very well (ios 15) 1) Scribble does not register capitals. It doesn't matter how large I write the letter, it only seems to do lower case letters. 2) If I want to write continuous text, ie like this paragraph, the text sometimes keeps to same line and then suddenly in the middle of a sentence Scribble starts on a new line. (like this). This occurs completely willy-nilly and there seems to be no logic to it It's just as if the pen, programme or whatever has a mind of its own.Even if you bring your pencil back to where you want to continue writing, it keeps jumping to a new line again. I have tried to look up this up, and it seems there are others having the same issue, but I cannot find a solution for this. If anybody has a solution for this, I would love to hear it. 😀

Neebo seems awesome..

Plz make a video on flexcil app😀

I was pretty happy with your video and took the decision to just buy an ipad pro and start writing my journals with the Notes app. The issue i found is a kind of a glitch (actually there are a few that are being constant). The notes take so much space. with 5 notes (a total of 10 up 12 letter pages each) were taking 225 Gb!!! YES. This left my ipad death and then everything starts to crush... I found many people with the same issue in forums. The most weird thing is that I'm writting my notes on the icloud... (i have 2T of space) and it is still taking space in my ipad. Likely I had my ipad backup in my icloud. When I saw that the notes were still existing in my Mac, I decided to delete and reset my ipad (scary, because I was afraid to loose my notes). It worked. Since then I had to learn how to live with the glitch... The ipad space fluctuates (going from few Mb to big Gb) for the same notes... so sooner or later you will find yourself with this issue too. Everyone had the same scary experience.... Since you can't storage the notes anywhere else than on the app itself ... I'm starting to look for alternatives... The One Note for ipad its just retarded...

I want an app on which I can read my pdf and on side I can make notes, I can make arrow to important line in the pdf and when I tap it directly take me to the line in pdf

I think I understand why you did not review it here but I use Craft as my notes program both with a keyboard and Apple Pencil

What about Note Plus X?

Does paperlike damage the apple pencil? Or does it only ruin the replaceable tip? And how long would you likely be able to use it before having to replace anything with moderate use of the pencil for only note taking?

Nebo definitely feels great to write in. The conversions are usually spot on and the edit gestures makes for a great experience. The Math input is also insanely good. The one thing that bugs the hell out of me though is how the text behaves when converting. It shrinks, it doesn’t stay on the same line you wrote it on, the lines jump and you have to double tap it to go into edit mode again. Somehow this really triggers my OCD and gives me stress. And that’s not what you want from a handwriting notes app.

Collanote , as of now in ipad os 16 is buggy.

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Hello, thank you for this video, but can you please make a video of comparison apps when there are two apps open on the screen? I usually open a book and a notebook app, and the scaling is a problem. Because, for example, Nebo keeps the size of letters the same and it's cool, but there is a hyphenation, which doesn't work that well. But Notability doesn't scale your writings at all, which makes you drag the sheet a lot

You can change the highlighter size on apple notes too… just tap the highlighter again, then there’s options

REALLY enjoying your content. Very relevant for me as a business professional. There seem to be a lot of productivity gurus for students and for solo-entre-preneurs but less for us 9 to 5 monkeys. Your content hits the spot.

Which of above apps are free & easy to use for day to day note taking ?

Do you know what note app would be best for this scenario please?.. I want to put a whole digital Bible into the app, and be able to find chapters and verses quickly and easily. But also have another part for notes that are all linked to the places in the Bible - bi directional links preferably. I have set up a One Note Notebook with all that. It has potential to be a good app but One Note is not well made. I can't even export that notebook as a PDF any more, because there is a very old bug that MS can't be bothered to fix. I have a onepkg file of the whole Bible, plus notes; it's about 11mb. That same notebook saved in One Drive is 600mb >.< Ridiculous. It seems like I can't trust One Note at all for this task - it's destined to break, or destroy the Notebook, or some other bug will make 100s of hours of work get lost. I need something else... Most note apps use Markdown, and they refuse to let people use the normal formatting we are used to from Word etc. Like buttons to Bold, Italics Underline and colour text. They force you to learn Markdown code and shortcuts; but I'm not doing that. I can't stand how bland the text looks on these apps. People like the blandness apparently because it's "un-distracting".

Notesnook? Obsidian? Notion?

It's better you add text overlay to show what apps you're using. Not everyone knows all the app interface especially if they're first time users

No ZoomNotes? I find it really powerful and functional beyond these

Can handwriting be converted to text in real time?

what about pages？

I really wish Apple Notes had multi-page support. Without it, each Note can become really long, unwieldly. And a lot of notes can make the app crawl.

Made video for apple FreeForm

At 03:56 I show that you can actually zoom in Apple Notes (kind of). :)

Aye

What about other language?

Title of video should have been: Testing handwring to text conversion.

how-do-you-access-notes? Lol!

Why make a video if for everything you say if you want to know more..bla bla bla. Just review the apps.