Neither has a PC desktop or a web access app.I work as management consultant and the iPad+Apple Pencil+OneNote combination has been a game changer for my workflow. Both are superior for PDF and photo markups. GoodNotes has the best handwriting feel of any app that I used, but less feature full overall. But it only supports portrait orientation. Notability has voice recording synchronized with handwriting, and a better overall typed text functionality. When you physically print or export to PDF, you have no control over page breaks, it can page break in the middle of a picture (the workaround is to export to Word first but you need a desktop for that).īoth Notability and Godnotes offer superior handwriting experience, PDF and picture markup experience, and overall shine as pure note taking apps. When you mark up a picture the ink is not grouped with it so if you ever accidentally move the picture you risk messing up the markups. Using pen in it is fine but doesn’t feel as fluid as with either GoodNotes or Notability. The interface is too busy for simple notes.

A little slower to start, although not a big deal on a newer iPad. All PSFs get OCR if you use the printout feature (however only the first xx pages, forgot the number, 60-100?) With Apple notes you’re pretty much stuck, as there’s no mass export. You can export the entire notebook (again, using the desktop app). You can export your notes as PDF or Word (using PC desktop app). you can add file attachments to notes, sync with PC desktop, you get almost full featured web app (Apple notes web access app is pathetic, it’s nearly useless outside of Apple ecosystem, and the other two apps don’t have it at all, although you can have them automatically save PDF copies of notes to cloud storage).

OneNote has extremely powerful features that other apps don’t.

Onenote apple pencil