It is important to take notes on your iPad. There are many apps that allow you to do this and they can be used by anyone. Some of these apps are free and some are paid. The best note taking app for iPad with Apple Pencil is Notes Plus.
This app comes with a number of features that will make it easier for you to take notes on your iPad. This app allows you to create notebooks, write notes and even draw things like graphs and diagrams if necessary. You can also share these notes with other people so they can see what is going on in your life as well as what you think about certain topics!
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Best Apps For Taking Notes On Ipad With Apple Pencil
With the new 9.7-inch iPad, the Apple Pencil at last comes to the masses. Apple’s recent push to get its scrappy tablet back in schools means you no longer how to shell out mountains of cash if you want to use the iPad like a digital legal pad, and that’s good news for all of us regardless of whether we’re in boardrooms or third-grade history class.
Even better for Apple Pencil newcomers, the App Store is already stuffed with note-taking apps that use it to its full potential. Here are our favorites, chosen after years of enthusiastic experimentation. (We’ve updated this article with a video demonstration. We’ve also included Cardflow+, which is a different type of note-taking app than the others we’ve discussed, but it’s no less effective.)
Apple Notes: The best free app
I used to think Apple’s Notes app was only good for one thing: trying out the Apple Pencil when you’re in a store. Once you brought the Pencil home, you’d have been better off spending most of your time with any of the other apps on this list.
iPadOS 13 changed a lot of that. Notes still isn’t my favorite app for the Apple Pencil, but Apple greatly improved it by giving us 120 colors to choose from and the ability to change the stroke weight for the pen, pencil, or highlighter. The new version also comes with a pixel eraser, dark mode, and the ability to move the palette to any edge of the screen you wish.
Apple Pencil in iOS Notes App
One of the most impressive features of Notes is that its “pencil” setting really looks like you’re writing with a pencil. No other app really comes close.
As before, it’s got a killer selection tool, and you can even use Spotlight to hunt down handwritten phrases in Notes documents, provided you wrote them in something more legible than chicken scratch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it syncs swiftly with your other devices through iCloud.
So it’s better, and if you’re not looking for much more besides a robust writing experience, Notes will serve you well. It also remains the only app that’ll open a blank page when you tap the glass of a locked iPad with an Apple Pencil.
Notes remains too stuck in the mindset of working with “real” paper for my tastes, though, so you won’t find features like the helpful “infinite canvas” that you’ll see elsewhere. That can be a pain when you’re making mind maps or adding illustrations to your notes.
Ginger Labs Notability: The best all-purpose app
Notability, fittingly enough, is by far the most notable app that supports the Apple Pencil, and for good reason. If you’re going to spend money on any handwriting-compatible app, consider spending $10 on this one. Not only does Notability lets you do everything from annotating PDFs to making shapes, but it also captures the experience of writing with a pen or pencil better than any of its competitors. The strokes are fluid and precise, allowing you to forget about trying to get the stylus to work properly and simply focus on your writing.
Notability on iPad
Notability doesn’t offer many fancy options for writing tools, but the options it does give you work so well that others rarely feel needed.
The appeal doesn’t end there, though. Notability also excels by letting you choose between nine styles of lined and unlined paper, and it gives you 15 choices for paper color as well. (Weirdly, none of those choices mimic the sulphuric yellow of a legal pad.) It’s easy to import PDFs and webpages and mark them up as though they were paper. You can record audio while you’re writing by hand, and you can hear exactly what was being said when you wrote a note.
Notability’s iCloud support works like a dream, so you can easily write out notes from your iPad and consult them on your (separately sold) Mac app within seconds. You’ll find that feature in traditional note-taking apps like iA Writer, but the ability to call up your handwritten scrawl on your phone at any time counts as a major plus.
Time Base Technology GoodNotes 4: The best for organizers
GoodNotes 4 lives up to its name. It’s not quite as intuitive as Notability and so it falls short of “great,” but it offers many of the same options found in its notable rival and even a couple of better ones for good measure. (You can’t record audio, though.)
For one, you can easily create shapes such as triangles, circles, or rectangles. Simply click on the appropriate menu item, doodle the shape on the screen with your Apple Pencil, and GoodNotes automatically converts it into the perfectly formed circle or triangle you had in mind. It doesn’t fully convert your handwritten notes to typewritten text as some apps do, but its handwriting recognition is good enough that you can search all of your notes for specific words.
GoodNotes 4
I’m also not a fan of the way the page doesn’t fit the screen without adjustments when you quickly flip to landscape mode.
Need to scribble in a few notes between lines? Just use the magnifying tool, which boxes off a rectangular “window” into a smaller part of the page without the need to pinch in. GoodNotes even does a slightly better job of organizing notes by subject than Notability, as it lets you keep separate notebooks for each class or project, each with their own covers.
In some ways, this similarity to print works against it. GoodNotes remains committed to the idea of writing on digital paper as though it were real paper, so it’s not as easy to scroll through multiple sheets of paper, moving the sheet down as you write in one continuous motion. Much as with a regular sheet of paper, you’re stuck with whatever dimensions the page gives you until you flip over on a new one, resulting in the same scrunched-up notes in corners you might recall in school. This design may help with the ton of exports GoodNotes offers for printable paper sizes, but such restrictions feel especially limiting on a 9.7-inch iPad.
MyScript Nebo: The best for handwriting recognition
We’re still a long way from the days when technology can translate your doctor’s scrawl into a crisp line of 12-point Arial, but MyScript Nebo reminds us that we’re getting much closer. It’s our current favorite pick for handwriting recognition, as it takes carefully written longhand script and —with little more than a tap of the line—transforms it into something you can email. It even gives you a “preview” of how it’s “reading” the line so you know what to correct before a full conversion.
nebo
Seriously, though: Even though getting it to read like this takes a little longer (with my handwriting), this is seriously impressive.
Combine that with a smooth Pencil experience that’s reminiscent of Notability and textual interaction that resembles Notes Plus, and you’ll find it makes a good overall notebook. Just keep in mind that its handwriting recognition isn’t going to magically keep you from doing any transcription. I find that getting the best results out of Nebo requires writing slowly and deliberately, which for me nixes the appeal of writing by hand in the first place.
Microsoft OneNote: The best for collaboration
Much of the bad blood that formerly existed between Apple and Microsoft is yesterday’s news, and in fact, Microsoft supports Office on iOS with such devotion that you’d think it was Microsoft’s own operating system. You’ll find that same kind of attention and support in its OneNote app, which offers a wide selection of features as well as support for the Apple Pencil.
You’ll need a Microsoft account to use it, but there’s a good chance you’ll have one anyway if your workplace or school is heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s a little like Apple’s own Notes in that it’s mainly there so you can have a place to collect all the little notes you scribble out, but Microsoft goes further than Apple by allowing variations in stroke width and a few extra colors to choose from.
OneNote on iOS
Dogs and cats living together—mass insanity!
I also admire OneNote for the sheer size of the canvas it offers. Pinch on the page to zoom out, and you’ll find that you have an absolutely massive amount of room to work with, which makes OneNote ideal for mind maps and similar brainstorming exercises.
Unfortunately, that’s probably also why it doesn’t let you export documents to easily sharable files like PDFs like almost every other app listed here. That said, it’s a handy space for note collection, and it offers quite a few more features than Apple it does. As a bonus, OneNote’s Office integration makes it easy to collaborate on projects with friends and colleagues who have Microsoft accounts.
WriteOn Notes Plus: The best use of ‘digital paper’
Notes Plus offers the least pleasing writing experience out of all the apps listed here, but it makes the cut because no other “understands” writing on an iPad quite so well. GoodNotes 4 may do a lot of features Notes Plus offers better these days, but Notes Plus continues to have a few tricks up its sleeve.
notesplus
This took far more time than I expected because of the inferior Pencil handling, and you can see a couple of spots where I made corrections.
Here (as in Notability), there’s no flipping to a new page to start writing on another sheet; instead, you can just keep scrolling the pages down, comfortably keeping your wrist in one spot. Need to erase something? Don’t bother with an eraser tool—instead, just scratch out the word and it’ll disappear. You don’t even need a selection tool, as Notes Plus automatically selects script when you draw a circle around it. Much like GoodNotes, it lets you make a box for squeezing in a few liner notes. It’s even got an impressive handwriting-to-text tool. It’s not anywhere near as smart as the tool you’ll find in MyScript Nebo, but it usually gets the job done.
It’d probably be perfect if it weren’t for the writing performance. The strokes the Pencil lays down feel “sticky,” especially while using the fountain pen and calligraphy tools. Most of the time I found myself sticking with the ballpoint pen and wet brush settings, but even after tinkering with the viscosity and thickness settings, Notes Plus still doesn’t offer as satisfying a writing experience as virtually every other app.
Even so, I still find myself returning to it, mainly out of admiration for how well its other pieces fit together.
Qrayon Cardflow+: The best index card app
Screenwriters and novelists will often tell you that index cards make organizing scenes and general themes so much more intuitive than regular outlines. Vladimir Nabokov, for a bit of trivia, even wrote the entirety of some of his novels on index cards, as they allowed him to easily rearrange paragraphs as needed.
cardflow
This is a fairly simple spread for the sake of legibility, but these boards can be huge.
Normally, though, using index cards feels like slaughtering a forest just for the sheer thrill of it. Thank goodness for the digital age, and thank Qrayon for Cardflow+. This app mimics the act of spreading a bunch of index cards on a table and arranging them as needed, and no other corkboard, mind-map, or storyboard app “gets it” quite like this.
Just tap anywhere on the gray background and a new card will pop up, and you can write notes on it with either the Apple Pencil or a keyboard. You can rearrange the cards singly with the Pencil or your finger, or you can group them together and have the app itself align them more neatly.
There’s a wonderful free version, but I gladly paid the $10 for the full version for the ability to sync saves to iCloud, draw on the board, change ink colors, insert photos and hyperlinks, and more. As a drawback, sometimes the app will crash when too many cards litter the screen (although the iCloud-syncing feature ensures that I’ve never lost a project), Even so, it’s a fantastic way to outline articles, and I frankly wish it was on the Mac as well.
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what app to use for taking notes on ipad
The best note-taking apps for the iPad Pro provide a simple way to create and manage documents.
Although Apple provides its own Notes app with iPadOS, this is only intended to provide a simple and basic functionality. Luckily, there are other notepad applications developed specifically for use on the iPad Pro which further develop and improve on this functionality – and here are a few of the best note-taking app for iPad devices around today.
This is not least because the iPad Pro has long been promoted as a useful business tool in itself, so third-party software can extend its use and application for a specific range of business purposes, which coincidentally can also provide value and purpose for general consumers.
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Google Workspace : Collaboration + productivity apps
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Try it free for 14 days.
A particular track that the best note-taking apps take is to harness the strong multimedia features that the iPad can offer, so you don’t just have to work with text but can also add in images, video, and audio.
Of course, all these apps work across the range of iPads as well – so here’s or pick of the best note-taking apps for the iPad.
We also feature the best iPad Pro deals and sales available right now.
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Website screenshot for Notability
(Image credit: Notability)
- Notability
The Swiss army knife of note-taking apps
TODAY’S BEST DEALS
VISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Annotate PDFs
+Work with multiple input formats
+Share notes via the cloud
REASONS TO AVOID
-Higher cost
Notability from Ginger Labs, is an excellent, general purpose note-taking app for the iOS platform. It has won multiple awards over the last several years.
This app allows the user to combine multiple inputs, including typing, sketching, handwriting and photos, in a single place. It also supports annotating PDFs. Notes can be shared via email, and cloud-based services including AirDrop, Google Drive and Dropbox.
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Website screenshot for Evernote
(Image credit: Evernote)
- Evernote
Note-taking app with cross-platform support
TODAY’S BEST DEALS
VISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Free version
+Lots of features
+Also supports Android
REASONS TO AVOID
-Need premium version for collaboration
For those looking for a note-taking platform that works with their iPad Pro, but also Android devices, Evernote straddles the two mobile platforms with ease.
Evernote is a great app to collect multiple inputs, including images, text notes, recorded messages, and clippings of web pages – all in one file for storage and collaboration. They can then be accessed via the iPad Pro, Android, or a PC though the web browser interface for ease of workflow. Also, a further boon is that the notes are searchable.
The iOS app is free, and offers in-app purchases. However, the free product is restricted to syncing only two devices, and uploads are limited to just 60MB per month. Step up to the Premium tier to sync all your devices, gain a more generous 10GB of uploads in a month, as well as the additional features of live chat support, and offline access to your notes. Alternatively, for collaborations, there’s a business plan with increased limits and additional features.
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Website screenshot for GoodNotes
(Image credit: GoodNotes)
- GoodNotes
The note app that focuses on handwriting
TODAY’S BEST DEALS
VISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Flexible digital note-taking
+Handwriting to text conversion
+Searchable handwritten notes
REASONS TO AVOID
-No free tier
Those who want to use their iPad Pro to easily take handwritten notes should check out GoodNotes . With the focus on handwriting, this app makes it easy to enter complex mathematics and chemical formulas that can border on the impossible via a traditional keyboard.
The GoodNotes approach can also be used to annotate PDFs, plus you can search handwritten notes and convert handwriting into text. The notes are also synced via iCloud, and can be backed up to your choice of cloud providers, including Dropbox, Google Drive, or Box.
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Website screenshot for Nebo
(Image credit: Nebo)
- Nebo
The advanced note-taking app
TODAY’S BEST DEALS
VISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Affordable price
+Handles more complex documents
+Exports to multiple formats
REASONS TO AVOID
-Requires an official Apple Pencil
For note-takers with needs that go beyond the basic, Nebo can handle the challenge. While plenty of note-taking apps allow text to be entered, Nebo can also easily structure notes, allowing you to add paragraphs, titles and bullet lists for organization.
It also handles ‘rich content,’ such as diagrams, sketches (with different colors and pen widths), flow charts, and formulas, letting you integrate them into the document. Once completed, documents can be exported in a variety of formats, including Word, PDF, and even HTML.
Nebo is available for multiple platforms, including Windows 10, Android, and of course iOS.
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Website screenshot for Whink
(Image credit: Apple)
- Whink
The gel ink pen approach to notes
TODAY’S BEST DEALS
VISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Mimics a gel pen on paper
+Perfect geometric shapes
+Affordable
REASONS TO AVOID
-No cloud integration
Whink is an iOS app that is equally at home taking notes via handwriting, as it is with text. Whether you prefer to write with a stylus, type text, or draw with a finger, Whink makes the process as simple as using real paper.
Other media can be added and incorporated including photos, diagrams with colors and “perfect geometric shapes”. Documents can also be marked up, and it supports multi-tasking so notes can be taken while reading another document (we have witnessed folks walking around with two tablets to accomplish this feat when it is not supported).
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Website screenshot for Apalon Notepad+
(Image credit: Apalon)
- Notepad+
TODAY’S BEST DEALS
VISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Type or use handwriting
+Color and image options
+Works with multiple file formats
Notepad+ provides a digital notepad for you to do pretty much anything you’d like to that you would in a normal blank notepad. There’s the ability to type notes, of course, as well as make lists, but you can also use it for sketching as well as adding images.
There are also additional features, not least for annotating other files, such as PDF files, as well as files from Excel, Keynote, and Numbers. A drag-and-drop function allows images from other apps to be copied into your notes, regardless of the file format used.
There are a wide range of formatting options that take Notepad+ away from standard note-taking software, with the ability to use different fonts, colors, and highlighting, as well as support for handwriting.
Icons and smileys can also be added to notes, and you can add text next to them. A zoom feature allows you to change perspective if you need to move in closer or further away, which can be especially useful when using images.
Notepad+ is available in 12 different languages.
Also consider these note-taking apps
The success of the iPad and iPad Pro mean there are a lot of apps available for similar functions, and note taking is no different. Different apps focus on different areas, such as just text, rich text editing, including images, sketching images, and even integration with other platforms. We’ll consider additional options which take the simple idea of making notes and expand on it:
Notes Plus allows you to make handwritten notes and then convert them into text files which you can then export to other file formats, such as PDF. Alternatively, you can import PDF and .doc files. Integration options include Dropbox, Google Drive, and Evernote.
Zoho Notebook is a powerful app for taking notes, editing text documents (such as Word or PDF files), adding images or creating sketches, spreadsheets, and even including audio recordings – all in the same note file. This makes it particularly versatile, and all saved files are synced your devices in the cloud. Even better it’s free, and there are no ads.
OneNote may be a Microsoft production, but it’s a full-featured digital notepad for the iPad Pro and other iOS devices. Aside from the fact that it has a lot of functionality – and it’s free – it also integrates with Microsoft Office, which could be a big plus for a lot of people.
PDF Expert isn’t anywhere near as comprehensive as the above programs for working with text. Instead, it’s focused only on working with PDF files, not least annotating, highlighting, or signing them. It’s only a simple feature-set, but PDF Expert does it well. It’s frequently cited as the best app for working specifically with PDF files.
Conclusion
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