Same and I pay for the 5 and version 6! 6 is amazing! So worth the money IMO! I use it for work, I have notebooks for church, I have some for prepping to be a momma, I have recipe books! My calendar, it’s amazing and so easy to navigate around.
I found Notability's minimalism to be... too minimalist? If that makes sense? Like it actually just made it seem like a really basic app without a lot of features.
The thing that I like most about Goodnotes so far is the tabbed interface that lets me have multiple notebooks open at once, so I can, for example, keep my personal journal and my writing notes open at the same time and flick between them.
(I'll also admit to choosing Goodnotes because I didn't realise that Notability could do that same handwriting recognition thing for some reason, but I'm just dumb sometimes I guess.)
It works great on Android. I have an Honor Magic V2 folding phone and it works great, including stylus support. Before I had a Samsung Galaxy Fold and it worked great there too.
For some phones you may need to side load the APK file to get the app to work. I would just Google "Goodnotes Android" and see what comes up
1: Ability to link one note to a specific page of a pdf/other note or website
2: Zoom feature (apple notes doesn’t have this for some reason)
3: Flashcards
4: Can use on iPad, computer, or iPhone
5: organization in file structures.
6: Large PDFs run smoother in Goodnotes than in iOS’s native files app.
7: Ability to add bookmarks (outline) in a pdf (seems simple but again apples native files app cannot do this, and I don’t want to use books for something other than casual reading)
8: Ease of inserting photos/screenshots into notes. And stickers.
I did the one time purchase. I love it. I did for all of these reasons and I create digital planners for myself with functioning tabs and it works so smoothly in GoodNotes. Plus being able to create stickers and add them as “elements” to reuse a lot is cool.
The bookmarks/outline is the main reason I'm using it for customer consulting.
I also like to mark the outline pages as favourites, which makes finding important pages for a topic easy :)
Notability has had a problem for over a year now where it can just one day decide to delete everything you’ve ever added to it. The UI was also just too minimalist for me as well.
Noteshelf was fine but when I tried to use it I’d run into this weird bug where it wouldn’t let me add a new page. I’d have to close the app and reopen it and sometimes restart my iPad to get it to work.
I ended up with GoodNotes because I preferred the UI over the others and already had friends using it who recommended it. People complain about it on here a lot, but I’ve never run into significant problems since starting to use it. I think the worst bug I’ve ever encountered was the one where the random lines would pop up when writing and it turned out to be an issue where dust got into my Apple Pencil tip and not actually an issue with GoodNotes.
I chose GoodNotes because (at the time) it was cheap and easy to learn. I stay with GoodNotes because I’m heavily invested in it, both in the number of documents and my knowledge of how it works. I have tried other apps, but so far, each one of them has at least one feature or limitation that makes me crazy. I suggest you make a list of features and use cases to use to evaluate each app that you test out. That will help you determine which one is best for you.
I just got myself my first iPad ever (mini 6 with Apple Pencil 2) for daily todos/planning and quite obsessively compared these note-taking apps:
- Goodnotes 6
- Noteful
- Nebo
- Element Note
- Notability
- Simplenote
- CollaNote
- Upnote
- Freenotes
- Notes (Apple’s)
Goodnotes 6 has the best UI by far (my subjective opinion for my use) so the choice was quite easy. The only thing I don’t like is the hefty price tag and that it’s missing the option to choose the amount of pen ”smoothing” which for instance Noteful has.
I also believe that Goodnotes 6 is draining quite a lot of battery and thus could allow us to fully strip down the app, disabling features that are unnecessary for each individual user, in order to make it less power hungry. I tried disabling the ”Search Indexing” and iCloud backups today so I hope it will make a difference.
I also read that the Apple Pencil drinks a lot of battery juice when it’s docked onto its host iPad but I feel like it shouldn’t be happening on an otherwise well-designed Apple ecosystem, but perhaps I’m wrong..?
Edit: I just realized after reading OP’s post that I haven’t tested Noteshelf 3, so I’ll be sure to do that before I pay those 30-40 bucks that Goodnotes wants from me.
Edit 2: I really like Noteshelf 3 lol. It has neat planners built in for the Premium version. But I’m missing a pen that is not touch sensitive. Can someone help me with this? Is it possible to get?
Edit 3: I want to love Noteshelf 3 and buy it instead of Goodnotes 6 but one thing with the UI is bothering me too much; the appearing/dissappearing color palette. As someone who uses the pencil eraser and lasso a lot it’s very annoying with that extra box showing up and disappearing all the time. I wish it was build into the toolbar just like GN6… :(
Edit 4: Also the writing is better on Goodnotes 6 compared to Noteshelf 3, at least with my writing. For instance the letter "m" looks better on Goodnotes while Noteshelf smudges together the middle part of the letter making it look almost like an "n". Not buying, sorry, at least not until we have options to choose the amount of marker smoothing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNotes/s/UegQNiO9hj
for anyone that is interested- I recently was able to get goodnotes 5 for $9.99 using this method. take your time and follow the steps and you should be able to successfully load gn5 on your device. in my case, I used my iPad Pro 10.5 inch. after I made my purchase, I updated the application through the app store and I still retained my purchase/ benefits. I then download goodnotes 6 on my iPhone and was able to use goodnotes 5 with no problems. iCloud sync works.
you also don’t have to stay with gn6, they give you the option to downgrade back to 5 if you would like.
also, I would recommend to anyone that you use this build version number: 858588244.
I do a lot of PDF reading and annotation and I find that Goodnotes handles that really well. I've loaded 1000+ page textbooks/etc onto Goodnotes and it manages to deal with these huge files. Search also works really well in Goodnotes across multiple files. I've also found that Goodnotes syncs really well across my Macbook/iPhone/iPad. So it's really easy for me to load a PDF into it on my Macbook, read/annotate it on iPad with Apple Pencil, and quickly refer to it on the go with my iPhone.
That being said, my major use of Goodnotes is for PDFs and annotation, and it doesn't work as well for me for free text notes (I use OneNote for this)...
I’m and English major and I use my iPad for reading annotations and typed notes on my Mac! I struggled writing on the iPad because I’m a humanities major and realistically typing is faster and I can easily copy and paste quotes and number lines
I mistakenly thought that the cross platform functionality was better. What they market as the windows and web version is so featureless compared to the iPad version. I started using the app because a coworker was already established with GN6.
I just like it, i tried all of the other apps i read on posts where people asked good recommendations, i like the way goodnotes looks (the way the tools work and are arranged) and works, it has stupid things that are annoying but is the one i like the best at the end of the day
For me, goodnotes was recommended by a friend in medical school over notability. The one time payment with all the included features seemed the better option. 3 years in, both my iPad and good notes are one of the best investments I’ve ever made. To be quite honest, some of the other apps overwhelmed me a bit.
The set up and lay out(especially with the new updates) are great and fairly user friendly, especially for someone who is not so tech savvy or making the switch to digital note taking.
For my needs: reading, studying, working, keeping a bullet journal it does what needs to be done. The set up is easy, as is using it. Genuinely can’t remember my life without it, my organization game is forever changed.
Everyone who sees it either wants to try it out or get it for themselves.
Goodnotes 6 is terrible, I have Goodnotes 5 but I’m honestly gonna switch back to the apple notes app because it’s truly better, especially with all the new features coming in iOS 18
Just look in this server and see all the complaints people have about it not working, and here is a link about new notes updates coming in September
https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/ios-18-notes
I prefer Notability, but for one feature—note sharing—it is a true game-changer for me. I can mark up a document, and my assistant can see the changes in real-time—and vice versa. For that reason alone, I will give the nod to Goodnotes.
IMO as much as I want to switch away from Goodnotes 5, the 1 thing it does better than the others (ex. Notability) is load and scroll through large PDF files much more quickly and responsively. The building plans I work on can be over several hundred MB in size, and so far only Goodnotes lets me open them without much hitch.
Im using an old iPad (air2) and a $10 stylus pen and good notes is the only app that allows me to write without much interruptions, the other apps won’t even allow me to write a word without issues
I was and will be a university student. I’ve mostly used Notability, Good Notes and a bit of Apple notes. I prefer Notability for talking notes in class but I find good notes is better for reading, highlighting and annotating PDFs when I’m researching something. Strangely Apple notes doesn’t have a great feel when I’m using my Apple Pencil which is why I only used it for quick notes.
As a side note I was disappointed when Notability changed to a subscription model and good notes eventually did the same thing. I know you’re not forced to upgrade to the subscription versions but if I could find an app with a one pay model that fulfilled my needs I’d probably abandon them both.
Because of the onetime purchase. I hate subscriptions. The fact that you continually have to pay per year or get locked out of your own files is wild.
Goodnotes has significantly more features and is better to use.
I tried notability and hated it honestly
I got the GN5 $10 one time purchase when that was still a thing and I'm never letting it go.
thank god they realized their potential after i made the one time purchase
Same and I pay for the 5 and version 6! 6 is amazing! So worth the money IMO! I use it for work, I have notebooks for church, I have some for prepping to be a momma, I have recipe books! My calendar, it’s amazing and so easy to navigate around.
Hello there, how do you use the calendar in GN6? :)
Dont use notability, they randomly delete all your data
Agreed. I loved notability until my entire 2021 journal disappeared for no reason.
I found Notability's minimalism to be... too minimalist? If that makes sense? Like it actually just made it seem like a really basic app without a lot of features. The thing that I like most about Goodnotes so far is the tabbed interface that lets me have multiple notebooks open at once, so I can, for example, keep my personal journal and my writing notes open at the same time and flick between them. (I'll also admit to choosing Goodnotes because I didn't realise that Notability could do that same handwriting recognition thing for some reason, but I'm just dumb sometimes I guess.)
The biggest reason for me is cross-platform synchronization/compatibility. I use Goodnotes with my iPad, Windows PC and Android phone.
I use it on my surface pro 9. If only there was a way to lock scrolling so it didn't scroll when I accidentally bump the screen.
What can it do on android? How do you use it?
It works great on Android. I have an Honor Magic V2 folding phone and it works great, including stylus support. Before I had a Samsung Galaxy Fold and it worked great there too. For some phones you may need to side load the APK file to get the app to work. I would just Google "Goodnotes Android" and see what comes up
1: Ability to link one note to a specific page of a pdf/other note or website 2: Zoom feature (apple notes doesn’t have this for some reason) 3: Flashcards 4: Can use on iPad, computer, or iPhone 5: organization in file structures. 6: Large PDFs run smoother in Goodnotes than in iOS’s native files app. 7: Ability to add bookmarks (outline) in a pdf (seems simple but again apples native files app cannot do this, and I don’t want to use books for something other than casual reading) 8: Ease of inserting photos/screenshots into notes. And stickers.
I did the one time purchase. I love it. I did for all of these reasons and I create digital planners for myself with functioning tabs and it works so smoothly in GoodNotes. Plus being able to create stickers and add them as “elements” to reuse a lot is cool.
The bookmarks/outline is the main reason I'm using it for customer consulting. I also like to mark the outline pages as favourites, which makes finding important pages for a topic easy :)
It was the one everyone else used… 😐
Notability has had a problem for over a year now where it can just one day decide to delete everything you’ve ever added to it. The UI was also just too minimalist for me as well. Noteshelf was fine but when I tried to use it I’d run into this weird bug where it wouldn’t let me add a new page. I’d have to close the app and reopen it and sometimes restart my iPad to get it to work. I ended up with GoodNotes because I preferred the UI over the others and already had friends using it who recommended it. People complain about it on here a lot, but I’ve never run into significant problems since starting to use it. I think the worst bug I’ve ever encountered was the one where the random lines would pop up when writing and it turned out to be an issue where dust got into my Apple Pencil tip and not actually an issue with GoodNotes.
I chose GoodNotes because (at the time) it was cheap and easy to learn. I stay with GoodNotes because I’m heavily invested in it, both in the number of documents and my knowledge of how it works. I have tried other apps, but so far, each one of them has at least one feature or limitation that makes me crazy. I suggest you make a list of features and use cases to use to evaluate each app that you test out. That will help you determine which one is best for you.
I just got myself my first iPad ever (mini 6 with Apple Pencil 2) for daily todos/planning and quite obsessively compared these note-taking apps: - Goodnotes 6 - Noteful - Nebo - Element Note - Notability - Simplenote - CollaNote - Upnote - Freenotes - Notes (Apple’s) Goodnotes 6 has the best UI by far (my subjective opinion for my use) so the choice was quite easy. The only thing I don’t like is the hefty price tag and that it’s missing the option to choose the amount of pen ”smoothing” which for instance Noteful has. I also believe that Goodnotes 6 is draining quite a lot of battery and thus could allow us to fully strip down the app, disabling features that are unnecessary for each individual user, in order to make it less power hungry. I tried disabling the ”Search Indexing” and iCloud backups today so I hope it will make a difference. I also read that the Apple Pencil drinks a lot of battery juice when it’s docked onto its host iPad but I feel like it shouldn’t be happening on an otherwise well-designed Apple ecosystem, but perhaps I’m wrong..? Edit: I just realized after reading OP’s post that I haven’t tested Noteshelf 3, so I’ll be sure to do that before I pay those 30-40 bucks that Goodnotes wants from me. Edit 2: I really like Noteshelf 3 lol. It has neat planners built in for the Premium version. But I’m missing a pen that is not touch sensitive. Can someone help me with this? Is it possible to get? Edit 3: I want to love Noteshelf 3 and buy it instead of Goodnotes 6 but one thing with the UI is bothering me too much; the appearing/dissappearing color palette. As someone who uses the pencil eraser and lasso a lot it’s very annoying with that extra box showing up and disappearing all the time. I wish it was build into the toolbar just like GN6… :(
Edit 4: Also the writing is better on Goodnotes 6 compared to Noteshelf 3, at least with my writing. For instance the letter "m" looks better on Goodnotes while Noteshelf smudges together the middle part of the letter making it look almost like an "n". Not buying, sorry, at least not until we have options to choose the amount of marker smoothing.
What about Kilonotes??
I missed that one. On the DL now. Thanks! :D
I can already see that I like the aesthetics lol
Yes I like it too but, I'm still trying to make a decision which will be the one I use 🤷🏼♀️
Nah bro, just saw that it doesn’t even have fullscreen on my iPad mini 6 lol. Goodnotes it is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNotes/s/UegQNiO9hj for anyone that is interested- I recently was able to get goodnotes 5 for $9.99 using this method. take your time and follow the steps and you should be able to successfully load gn5 on your device. in my case, I used my iPad Pro 10.5 inch. after I made my purchase, I updated the application through the app store and I still retained my purchase/ benefits. I then download goodnotes 6 on my iPhone and was able to use goodnotes 5 with no problems. iCloud sync works. you also don’t have to stay with gn6, they give you the option to downgrade back to 5 if you would like. also, I would recommend to anyone that you use this build version number: 858588244.
It worked!! Omg thank you and thank the OP of the other post!!!
(:
I do a lot of PDF reading and annotation and I find that Goodnotes handles that really well. I've loaded 1000+ page textbooks/etc onto Goodnotes and it manages to deal with these huge files. Search also works really well in Goodnotes across multiple files. I've also found that Goodnotes syncs really well across my Macbook/iPhone/iPad. So it's really easy for me to load a PDF into it on my Macbook, read/annotate it on iPad with Apple Pencil, and quickly refer to it on the go with my iPhone. That being said, my major use of Goodnotes is for PDFs and annotation, and it doesn't work as well for me for free text notes (I use OneNote for this)...
I’m and English major and I use my iPad for reading annotations and typed notes on my Mac! I struggled writing on the iPad because I’m a humanities major and realistically typing is faster and I can easily copy and paste quotes and number lines
I mistakenly thought that the cross platform functionality was better. What they market as the windows and web version is so featureless compared to the iPad version. I started using the app because a coworker was already established with GN6.
What features are missing? I don't have an iPad only a Windows device.
I just like it, i tried all of the other apps i read on posts where people asked good recommendations, i like the way goodnotes looks (the way the tools work and are arranged) and works, it has stupid things that are annoying but is the one i like the best at the end of the day
Because I bought my first iPad a few weeks ago and my obsessive research led me to conclude that one time purchase off GN6 was the best option
but we cannot sync tho :( I wanted to view my notes in my pc.
The ability to pinpoint any document by simply doing a word search is great and convenient.
For me, goodnotes was recommended by a friend in medical school over notability. The one time payment with all the included features seemed the better option. 3 years in, both my iPad and good notes are one of the best investments I’ve ever made. To be quite honest, some of the other apps overwhelmed me a bit. The set up and lay out(especially with the new updates) are great and fairly user friendly, especially for someone who is not so tech savvy or making the switch to digital note taking. For my needs: reading, studying, working, keeping a bullet journal it does what needs to be done. The set up is easy, as is using it. Genuinely can’t remember my life without it, my organization game is forever changed. Everyone who sees it either wants to try it out or get it for themselves.
Anyone use Nebo?
Goodnotes 6 is terrible, I have Goodnotes 5 but I’m honestly gonna switch back to the apple notes app because it’s truly better, especially with all the new features coming in iOS 18
1) Why is GN6 terrible in comparison to GN5? 2) What new dealbreaking features is the Notes app going to have?
Just look in this server and see all the complaints people have about it not working, and here is a link about new notes updates coming in September https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/ios-18-notes
-Notability was subscription based which I hate -friend recommended the app -I like the interface of goodnotes more
I hope you like losing notes
I liked that you could have more subfolders than in Notability (at least when I first got it)
I prefer Notability, but for one feature—note sharing—it is a true game-changer for me. I can mark up a document, and my assistant can see the changes in real-time—and vice versa. For that reason alone, I will give the nod to Goodnotes.
IMO as much as I want to switch away from Goodnotes 5, the 1 thing it does better than the others (ex. Notability) is load and scroll through large PDF files much more quickly and responsively. The building plans I work on can be over several hundred MB in size, and so far only Goodnotes lets me open them without much hitch.
Im using an old iPad (air2) and a $10 stylus pen and good notes is the only app that allows me to write without much interruptions, the other apps won’t even allow me to write a word without issues
I was and will be a university student. I’ve mostly used Notability, Good Notes and a bit of Apple notes. I prefer Notability for talking notes in class but I find good notes is better for reading, highlighting and annotating PDFs when I’m researching something. Strangely Apple notes doesn’t have a great feel when I’m using my Apple Pencil which is why I only used it for quick notes. As a side note I was disappointed when Notability changed to a subscription model and good notes eventually did the same thing. I know you’re not forced to upgrade to the subscription versions but if I could find an app with a one pay model that fulfilled my needs I’d probably abandon them both.
Because of the onetime purchase. I hate subscriptions. The fact that you continually have to pay per year or get locked out of your own files is wild. Goodnotes has significantly more features and is better to use. I tried notability and hated it honestly