Student Life

GoodNotes And Notability: Which App Is Better?

Even though there are many note-taking apps available in 2022, Notability and GoodNotes remain the two market leaders. For students and business professionals who want to use their iPad and Mac devices as a digital whiteboard to capture handwritten notes and put together detailed documents, Goodnotes and Notability are both potent tools. Which is therefore the better for you to take notes on? Please read this article to learn more about Goodnotes and Notability.

Benefits Of Taking Notes

  • focus and attention span improvements.
  • faster information retention and recall.
  • Better ability to prioritize and organize.
  • increased understanding and learning.

Deeper insights into a particular subject or topic as well as increased engagement with your notes are additional potential advantages.

Whether you’re using a pen or a new-age app to take notes, it not only makes you an efficient person, it saves you from the burden of knowledge intake in larger amounts.

Goodnotes

Goodnotes is a fantastic app. You can easily organize everything, take handwritten notes, import PDFs and photos, and more. It’s simple to find what you’re looking for thanks to the excellent search function.

However, notability is a little bit more constrained. It’s a fantastic app for taking notes and annotating PDFs, but it lacks Goodnotes’ level of organization and searchability.

goodnotes

Pros

  • Every book can have a unique page style. This implies that you can have backgrounds for your pages that are variously colored and designed.
  • countless options for templates.
  • has an outline view, which is helpful when browsing through a PDF that has many pages.
  • It automatically switches back to pen mode after you finish erasing your writing in eraser mode.
  • allows you to open the app in separate windows and tabs. When switching between books while multitasking, this can be really helpful.
  • If you save a custom paper as a template, it’s simple to reuse it in the future.
  • The highlighter works really well.

Cons

  • When students reach the bottom of a page and want to continue writing, the separation of the pages may annoy them.
  • It is a little tedious to copy and paste. 
  • GoodNotes makes it difficult to quickly take a note, so most users opt to use the standard Notes app.
  • It lacks Notability’s audio recording feature, which lets you skip to a specific part of a lecture and listen to your notes.
  • The app stutters a little when opening bulkier PDF files.
  • You must double-tap the screen each time you turn on your iPad in order to rotate the page.
  • Any object, including images, cannot be selected and moved between pages.

Notability

Users can create and manage digital notes using the app Notability. These notes may include text, pictures, audio files, and other types of media. Additionally, Notability provides a number of features that make it simple to share and organize notes.

For iOS and macOS devices, Notability is available. Both users and critics have given it glowing reviews, and it is frequently cited as one of the top note-taking apps out there.

notability

Pros

  • For students, the audio recording feature is very useful because it enables you to listen to the lecture again and compare it to your notes. Additionally, you can scroll and access different pages while the audio remains in sync.
  • enables you to write without being distracted by having to add a new page by automatically adding pages as you go.
  • When you’re pressed for time and need to know the hex code for a particular color, has a color selector tool that can be very helpful.
  • The UI is very responsive.
  • Shape drawing is much more natural.

Cons

  • The same note cannot be opened in more than one window.
  • The premium package, which includes all the good features, costs money.
  • It is difficult to collaborate on notes with others.

Difference Between Goodnotes And Notability

Although both Goodnotes and Notability are excellent note-taking apps, there are some significant distinctions between the two. A quick summary is provided below:

  • More customization options are available with Goodnotes, such as the ability to design custom notebook covers and modify the background color and paper type. These alternatives aren’t available in notability.
  • Since Notability’s handwriting recognition is a little bit better than Goodnotes’, it is simpler to search for handwritten notes there.
  • In contrast to Notability, Goodnotes integrates with Evernote. This entails that you can sync your Goodnotes notes with Evernote to make them available across all of your devices.
  • Finally, Goodnotes is a little more affordable than Notability; it costs $5 as opposed to $10.

Comparison: Goodnotes Vs Notability

To be honest, there are a ton of applications on the market that offer the same functionality as GoodNotes, and each one offers its users a unique set of extraordinary advantages.

However, there are numerous programs available, including Noteledge and Microsoft Notes. Many people believe that the Notability app is the only one that can be compared to the GoodNotes app. 

These two programs also give users the option to use Auto-Backup to backup their files to external cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.

Box and WebDAV are more options in Notability, and both programs’ backup procedures are essentially the same.

Users can choose their preferred service and have a second one-way backup created for it using Auto-Backup. iCloud sync will continue unless it is individually disabled.

Although users can export files to share with other devices in both GoodNotes and Notability, each program handles sharing in some ways uniquely. 

Viewers can access the link without registering with Notability, despite the fact that users must create an account in order to share content via a link. celebrity links can be viewed on any browser and any device.

But in contrast to Notability, Good Notes focuses more on collaboration than on sharing links. By sharing links, GoodNotes enables collaboration between multiple users on the same document. 

Unfortunately, the application prevents non-users from viewing notes via a browser or from a location other than its native platform. On their devices, users must install the most recent version of the app.

In general, these sharing options are very helpful if you need to access your data using a PC or an Android device. In this situation, you can email your notes or export them as PDF files to one of the services offered and send them off.

Final Words

Depending on these comparisons, there might be varying perceptions of the same views. If you’re looking for a note-taking and PDF annotation app that does it all, Notability is a great option. If you want a digital note-taking app and are willing to spend a little more money on additional features, Goodnotes is a better option.