I’ve used both Notability and Goodnotes over the years, but preferred the simplicity of Notability. However, the pricing of Notability has gone nuts in my opinion. They now have 3 tiers of pricing (see image) Plus is £17.99.
What is everyone else using with the apple pen?
I am using Notability plus for $20 a year. I agree with your statement about its simplicity. It serves my Apple Pencil needs adequately. It also syncs well with my Mac. I mostly use it to take notes during informal observations of teachers (I’m an elementary school principal).
I use what used to be called Nebo and is now called, I think, Myscript Notes. It’s really good for me since it excels at single page / single doc notes (rather than pretend to be a cute multi-page book with a fancy cover). I use mine all the time for meetings, and then export these single note PDFs (which are automatically OCRd for search) to DEVONthink for long term storage.
I do have MyScript Notes, but not used it much. So do you have an infinite canvas?
I use MyScript Notes and Freeform for my infinite canvas.
I have a grandfathered, no subscription version that includes most of the Plus features. I’d be happy with the Lite version. I prefer the interface over Apple Notes (can’t adjust zoom for writing) and Goodnotes (toolbar at top, less space for writing).
Main workflow: write notes on iPad, export PDF version to Devonthink on Mac.
I use the “Bellemond Paper” film to make ipad writing more comfortable.
I’m curious how many people actually “Chat with your notes” in these apps. My handwriting isn’t illegible, but it doesn’t convert to text well, so chatting with my notes would be pretty painful.
Katie
I use Muse and really like the Pencil-first UX and the minimal color palette. It’s subscription but has a free tier that’s generous if you mostly use ink and not text boxes. It’s also in SetApp. Closer to Freeform or Figjam (spatially oriented apps) than notebook-oriented apps.
I suggest you check out Defter notes if you want something simpler. It has infinite canvas, iOS/iPad/Mac apps that sync (with soon to be released v2), one time payment and a cool concept - wormholes (bidirectional linking). Plus it looks and feels so much better than the other 2 imo.
Defter hasn’t been updated in 11 months, and last review is 2 years old. Doesn’t inspire confidence,
Did you intentionally skip the “soon to be released v2” bit? 
It’s under active development with an available discord community, I’m running it through TestFlight which is being updated almost every week.
I’ve quite liked Noteful and Freeform
I prefer Goodnotes. Smoother writing and the notebook/paper set up works well with how I think.
this used to be one-time paid app. I bought it like 3-4 yrs ago. Lol, now they subscription. this is nuts.
My understanding is that the classic version that some of us may have will continue to work as is. Don’t know about any updating but at least it isn’t gone.
If I used it often, and liked using it, and it helped me get my work done, I’d think the mid-tier price is a bargain.
In pricing theory, it’s good to have 3 tiers, but in this case the highest tier is disproportionately high compared to the lower tier prices, and probably should be £39 or £49.
Apologies, I only looked on the App Store not their website and tend to skip down to reviews and release dates. I’ll give it another look.
Hi no actually and I don’t care for it much for regular note-taking. I like the confines of horizontal page, but the it does infinitely on the vertical (the page never runs out of space, and a PDF export puts the page breaks in automatically). I try canvas-like apps every now and then and think that I should like them more, but my brain just doesn’t really work like that.
Here are some very good Open Source Alternatives listed:
I use Joplin with git backup (Markdown files)
have a lot of fun
Thank you! These are good, but I am looking for something similar to Notability that works on the iPad with the Apple Pencil.
