Notability Vs. GoodNotes 5 - The Ultimate Comparison Guide!

as my graduate year of college comes to an end I've been reflecting on my journey here and what tech products have had the largest impact on me over the past five years there's really only one that comes to mind and that's my iPad I got this halfway through my junior year and it completely changed how I learned the iPad is the perfect tool to help students succeed in University but the iPad is just what you write on and it's the medium that transforms your physical motions into digital notes what really allows the iPad to be as useful as it can is through the right note-taking app and there are really only two apps that give you all the features you could ever possibly need and those two are notability and good notes five I have been switching back and forth between the two of them trying to figure out for myself which application is truly the best so before you spend your money based on just a few Awards grab a snack get comfy because this is my ultimate comparison between notability and good notes 5. [Music] hey yo what's going on everyone Nathan here so just before I get started with this ultimate comparison guide I do want to cover a few quick things the first thing is that I am not being paid by either notability or good notes 5 I purchased both of these with my money a couple years ago and I've just been switching back and forth between the two kind of taking mental notes on what I like about each of them so everything you're about to hear are my own true thoughts and feelings about each product and it's not sponsored in any way so the second thing is that I'm going to cover the five main categories I think make up a no ticket application and that's going to be its prices their organizational systems the customization you can expect with each of them their specific features and then I'm also going to go over the features that I like that are specific to each of them and the ones I like more than the other ones and then at the end I'm gonna go over and give you my recommendation but I do expect this video to be pretty long so if you want to skip to a specific part then I'll also leave chapters down in the description and finally I just want to say that if you're new around here then welcome and also if you're enjoy doing what you're seeing right now then consider subscribing because I put a lot of effort into these types of videos so with that being said let's get into it with the first category and that's their pricing capability has two different versions there's a free version which gives you the basics of what most no ticket applications have to offer such as handwritten or text notes you get most of the tools and the gallery gives you a limited number of downloadable templates and the notability also has their plus version which is an annual subscription model and this is going to cost you 14.99 a year which is pretty expensive so because I bought this application a couple years ago when it was set at a one-time price I get grandfathered in so I don't have the free or the plus version I have a classic version which is somewhere in the middle of both and I get most of the features that you could get with plus so like that's what I'm going to be using in this comparison video but with the plus version you get access to things such as handwriting recognition a ruler and the ability to favorite notes and also conversion tools to turn handwritten notes into math text so good notes 5 also has two versions available to you there's a free version which is very very limited I'm not gonna lie but I think it's more so just to let you test out the application because if you end up liking the free version it's just a one-time purchase of 8.99 and you're not committed to like a yearly subscription model like in notability so they give you this free version and with this you get just access to three notebooks and all the writing features but that's it so I think it's more of just like a hair try this and then it's like not as big of a purchase as what notability is offering so that's why notability is free it's a little more feature packed than good notes fives but a one-time purchase of 8.99 versus year after year 14.99 is a huge difference in price and I want to like make that very clear so I want to give you a little insight coming from a seasoned digital Note Taker because I've had both these applications for over two years now originally good notes 5 was 7.99 and notability was 8.99 both of them are one-time purchases since then goodnotes 5 has raised its price one dollar while notability has raised its price from the 8.99 to 14.99 every single year so just over the past two years goodnotes 5 has remained very consistent and I wouldn't be surprised if in the future notabilities price were to raise again I have no idea if it will I'm just saying it seems like goodnotes 5 is more stable with this pricing than notability [Music] so moving over to notabilities organizational system there's essentially three different levels of organization you can have inside of notability and those are dividers subjects and then notes so to create dividers and subjects what you're going to want to do is come up to the top left right here with the plus button and you press on that and you can either choose between one of the two options and then also to create a note that's going to be at the bottom right and it's going to make this little blue icon right here if you click on that and it's going to create a blank note for you so dividers are these little triangles you see on the left hand side right here and essentially if you were to think of like notabilities organization is like a tree a divider is like the trunk of the tree so essentially a divider you can put other dividers in other subjects into it and it just collapses or expands to show you what kind of content is inside of it so to show you how to Nest a divider into another one what you're going to do is come over here grab one of your dividers this one right here is named YouTube and you're going to drag it over and you can see blue line that shows up and it's going to show where it's going to be left into so as I move it to the left you see the Blue Line jumps from the right to the left and like it indents itself and that shows when it's going to be put into another one or nested so right there I'm going to leave it and now if I close msma fall and expand it you see it kind of goes away but also when I expand more of them you'll see I now have subjects so subjects are essentially what you put your notes and other documents into so this is usually like my last form of organization and I like to have my dividers always collapse or expand and then when it gets like a specific class that's when I have the different subjects to kind of like organize the class itself so yeah if you see Mae 355 right here you see all of my different notes inside of it so how I usually like to organize my things on notability is what I like to do is I have the semester itself so that's what msmae fall is right here you open that up and then I have my different specific classes and then depending on what the class is when you open it I have for this class Mae 635 I have study guides lectures and homework and you know if there's a lab portion I'll have a lab subject in there as well so I don't utilize the full five different nested layers but you get up to five with notability so a little more with subjects these are color coded and you can change the color of them and I would say that these are like the branches on the tree so essentially to color change these you're going to go to edit at the top left right here and you'll see there's like a settings Cog on each of them so become more here Mae 355 press on the Cog again right here you have I think it's about 72 different options 70 um if I'm correct color options you can choose from and you can also lock the subject if you wanted to which would then require a password so if you have like personal documents or like a journal and you don't want someone going inside of it that's where you can find that for this you can change the color of it very easily and I like to color code my classes but if this little circle is not enough and you're hoping for something more to help distinguish them between different classes if you go to the settings Cog at the bottom right here and you go down to themes and then right here colorful subjects so if you enable that you'll see all of the circles just turned into like full bars for it and it just makes it a little easier to see the differences between the two I usually live on the circles as this I don't know it's just not necessary for me I think the circles are fine it looks a little neater but if you wanted that's also another option further organization so now getting to the notes I would say that these are like the leaves on the branches and these are just anything that you could have so they're just blank notes if you want your handwritten notes you can import PDFs PowerPoints pretty much anything you want into this and these are like where you write on and you just kind of save all of your information so if you swipe down right here you can see that there's a couple other options to organize your notes them ourselves so this top left one right here this will switch between a list view or a grid view as you leave it on the grid view as you can see more of what's actually inside the note and I usually just like remember like what's you know Insider for different homeworks things like that and then over here on the right you have these two arrows you click on that and this is how you organize them so you can either have them alphabetical or you can have them by the date modified which is when the last time you worked on it and then you can also have it by the date created so I usually have on date created and that's kind of like how you organize the notes inside of notability so moving on to the organizational system inside of goodnotes five as you can see from this front page right here it's very similar to like what you'll find inside of any sort of computer and you pretty much just have folders inside of folders and from what I understand it's like an unlimited amount of different layers you can have to so to create a new folder you're going to press on this plus button right here at the left side and from here you can either pick between notebooks study sets different images you can make a quick note from here as well but let's start off with a folder and you get the option to name it so let's name it real quick and it's pretty easy to Nest these inside of each other all you're going to do is click on it hold it you can see you can drag it around now and then let's put inside of career and it's inside of there so let's open up a different folder and go into here real quick so again you can have as many different layers as you want and as many different notebooks subjects any sort of free notes inside of each layer as you want so when I open up this Masters part 2 right here you see I have my different classes and I have a notebook and then you go further inside of it more folders and then there's a document and then go back here's a different class open it up just a bunch of different documents loose around what I like to do is have my semester and then that's just kind of extra with my career click on it I have my different classes click on it and then for this one I pretty much just have all the documents inside of there so you can also organize your specific notes inside of this just like notability so you can have them organized by the date the name and then the type right there the type being like PDF loose leaf note PowerPoint and then over here on the right hand side is how you switch between a gallery and also a list view so I personally believe that notability has like a more Apple feel to it while notes 5 feels more like a Windows device but after using both of them for like an extended period of time now I do prefer goodnotes 5 system as it's just more spread out so if you go back over to notability right here it's like everything is crammed right there and then when you start like if you look here it looks kind of confusing already and I feel like I do organize it pretty well but when you start opening it up everything like it becomes a lot there's just a bunch of colors around different things are opening up and it just does feel like a lot especially just right there on that little third not even a third of the display but on goodnotes five it's just very straightforward it's just folder folder into folder and it utilizes the whole screen so I prefer goodnotes 5 organizational system so now let's move on to the page customization of notability so coming over here first to the settings at the bottom left and going down to themes there's a few different things you can change up with the look of your actual Pages itself so the first setting you'll find here is match theme to iOS appearance so if you toggle that on depending on if you have dark theme set or not so let's go over here and do that real quick you can see how the whole application turns dark and it also inverts some of your notes so if you were to have you know like black notes with a black template and you always went on black mode and then you did it the opposite right there it would invert them as well I usually just leave that off as I like to have a white background with my application and then if you don't want it to mirror your whole iPad system then you can just toggle on night mode right here and it does the same effect for you but moving on also you get four different options you can choose from for a look of like the interface and that's light mode dark mode you have dark blue and you have jet black pitch black everything which also looks really nice as well so moving on to the document setting right here you click on that and you can set up how you want your default note to look like so when you set this up every time you go down to the bottom right hand corner right here and you press a new note it will come as this default which you can change in this setting so you get many options you can play around with this you can have the date included and also the time of when you create each note then you can also choose the template that you want as your default so I'm a big fan of the grid template that's definitely my favorite but essentially you get four different basic templates you can choose from you get plain paper you get ruled you get grid and you get dotted as well and for the rule the grid and also the dot you can change the spacing on it so by pressing on these the ellipses in the bottom corner you can change the space so you can see how when you get down to one they get very thin the the different lines and we get up to 10 they get very wide and separate and the grade right here this is my favorite I like to have it on a spacing of four I think it just fits nice with my handwriting as I have smaller handwriting and allows me to get a lot on each page same with the dot as well you also have a set number of different colors you can have each page to be so I usually leave it on the white but you also get this yellow this little cream color you get black which is like Khan Academy I'm sure many of you know what that is you can have that same look with this as well and then you press over here on the right you get other different ones or you can essentially make it any color you want by coming all the way over to the right pressing on a plus button and then you can select it even the hex code if you want a very exact number or code so that's just kind of like the page setup with the basic ones but coming up to the top there's also a gallery inside of notability and these are a bunch of pre-made templates either by notability themselves or by the community and then they upload it to the gallery which you can download a bunch from so to just quickly go over the gallery if you come up here to the top here's all these right here but if you go to browse more on the right hand side it then brings you to its actual Gallery so there's so much you can choose from just from different things people make as you can see right here at the bottom left of each of them it says who made it but you can also search specifically what you want so you can get calendars you can get weekly planners to-do lists and then just a whole bunch of different pages you can download like engineering paper pretty much anything and everything you can look for or want you can search within this and you can also upload your own templates and get people to use them as well and essentially to download one or add it to your templates you're going to find one you like and you're gonna press on this blue arrow right there at the bottom and then you're going to press save and use and it's going to go to your templates but if that isn't your thing and you just want some more basic templates then notability does have that as well so scrolling down below the actual basic templates you have more to choose from so there's a hexanal grid there's different ruled Pages here's an engineering grid just a whole bunch of different things you have music papers and then you also have sports you'll have my daily planner and then just a whole bunch of different things so you can fine tune and customize how you want it to look and then you press save and then you also have an option of seamless or page view essentially so I'm going to show you what this is real quick so you can also activate this Michael Scott you can also activate this within the actual note itself so right here if you go up to the top right the ellipses and you press on view you can then change this from seamless or single page so seamless if you scroll down you can see actually like where the pages are separate from each other this right here this little line is where the page one connects with the page two but if you come up here and you press on view and you go to single page now you have to physically swipe and you swipe and you go from page to page I way way more prefer the seamless view especially if you have like a large document you can just keep Scrolls keep scroll you don't have to individually swipe one by one but if you want like a more traditional like notebook feel then the single page might be for you I just always leave it on the seamless and also with all the templates you can change the size of the actual paper so I always leave it on letter as that's like standard for America and with our printers and over on the right hand side you can change them from portrait or landscape mode so moving over to goodnotes 5 page customization when you get to the application you go to the top right at the settings Cog and then you go to notebook templates here you have the option and ability to customize both different notebooks as well as the notes themselves so starting off with the notebooks you come over here to the right and you click on the notebook and now you're offered a bunch of different options for like the notebook cover and you can have as many different ones as you want for different classes and there's actually a whole bunch to choose from there's like just basic ones and there's also themes as well so if you like one theme I really like these ones the blues and you can also import your own you can import different files and photos and then those will upload to the actual cover of the notebook itself scrolling down you can see all the different options and then all we have the bottom there's also more from goodness 5 store and if you click on that see more option that little shopping bag right there you can purchase different planner covers and a whole bunch of different things like that from their actual store but if you want you can then also just like in notability change the different page size so what I do is I leave it on letter here as well and then also on the right hand side right here you can switch between landscape and portrait so now going over to the actual note customization itself so right here at the top row you have your main basic different templates you have blank your dotted paper your squared paper which is my favorite it's like the grid you also have your rule narrow and then you're also your wide ruled and you can also import any other templates that you want with the import button and as you can see at the top right some of them have this little green keyboard a little icon I'll get more into that later into the features section of this Unfortunately they actually did get rid of this feature you used to be able to customize the size and spacing of like the grid but I think in attempt to make the keyboard like more workable more viable they're making everything more uniform so you're not able to actually further customize the spacing of these anymore for me personally the grid spacing is very nice and it just matches my handwriting perfectly so I'm not too upset about it and as long as like they're not getting rid of it for no reason they're adding this in or actually taking away something to add in a new feature which I could see very helpful for a lot of people again this keyboard I'll get into a little bit later on in the video I'm actually perfectly okay with this so unlike in notability it doesn't seem like you can change the actual color of the page unless you import your own template of course but just like with the options they give you you're stuck with white paper But continuing down there's also a whole bunch of different other ones you can choose from there's different column uh templates different Cornell rules you have accounting monthly planners weekly planners to-do lists music paper and also of course you can buy some more from goodnotes five store you always have the option to import your own templates just by swiping over to the right so if you have something you made before you can add them into here very easily so also very similar to notabilities Gallery tab good notes 5 has their Community tab so if you go here just like a notability there's different templates different planners just anything you can imagine you can search anything there's also a bunch of just different notes from classes and also goodnotes 5 does have their own free templates you can download from here just a wide range of different things so just wanted to point that out just like notabilities Gallery so another thing dealing with page customization so if you actually go to a note within goodnotes five and you come up here to this little page icon you press on that and you go to more from templates here you can actually add different types of templates to the same note so I just have regular grid for all these pages in here but you can come in you press on Chrome now you press apply and then there it is you can see just like the difference of the size of the pages and what it actually is so if you're wondering yes you can do that inside a good note 5. so contrasting that in goodnotes 5 to notability hopping back over here real quick if you go up to the ellipses right here and you go to templates then what you can do is you can change the current templates inside of notability but you can't add additional templates so right here if you go over here to what I just did and you go to the first one instead of that second one the engineering paper you press apply it gives you a warning and then it just changes the template that it's already on and whether or not it aligns with the same page size you're gonna have to deal with that just something to know that good notes 5 you can add different templates to the same notes while in notability it's going to change the template so you can't add two of the different one into the same note so finishing off page customization it's not a good notes five coming back over to this app if you go to the top right corner press on the ellipses and then you go over to document editing at the bottom here you have a few more options of how you can set up the page of your notes so the first thing I want to point out is tool positioning so you can have it either at the top or the bottom you can see how it kind of updates based on the orientation of your iPad I'll leave it on the top as I like it up there it's just away from like where my hand and my wrist rest and then also scrolling directions so very similar to notability setup you either have vertical or you have horizontal so vertical essentially what this does is just like that you can see there's a gap between the pages right there it's just quick nice and quick to get through all of your notes but going back over to document editing if you change it to horizontal again it's like a one by one swipe you know and it's just not as efficient especially when you get a document like this with I don't even know what like close to 50 pages in it of notes so I just highly recommend going on the vertical setting for both whether or not you use it or not so a few more things I want to cover in good notes 5 there's no option to either go to like dark or light essentially what it does is it just mirrors your system so going over here holding on this and turning into dark mode you can see how the whole thing turned to dark mode mirroring my system so just keep that in mind there's like no setting directly to change it to that without also mirroring so the next thing it's kind of minor but also just happens literally all the time so in goodnotes 5 to add a new note what you have to do if you're in the vertical mode is you have to swipe up hold it for a split second and then let go and it adds a new note while in notability all you have to do is write anything on the bottom page so see there's no bottom page if you write anything or let me go to a pen if you write any thing it then automatically creates a new note so I do prefer notabilities as like you never have to like just waste that one to two seconds to hold it up get one as you're writing as you're writing there's just always going to be a new one right below I do like that and that's just a small difference between the pages in the two notes so also with both applications you can import any sort of document you want whether that's PDFs or PowerPoints lecture slides from classes so for example this is the Blackboard app that's what Syracuse uses for the school so this right here is a homework assignment so I'm going to go to the ellipse to the top right press export and you can see I have notability right there and also good notes right there at the end you can import directly to them I do want to point out PDFs seem to work pretty much all the time it just Imports it perfectly but PowerPoints there always seems to be some sort of issue importing it whether like it's different diagrams not being the right place or text just missing text being different sizes PowerPoint seems to be quite tricky so what I read recommend you doing is definitely saving it maybe take the files app first and then importing there it happens with both of them I just want to put it out there so now moving on to all the features within notability let's start off with the text box right here so it's gonna be the first icon the little TUC so essentially what this is going to be is just text and you can type on your iPad or if you have like a Bluetooth keyboard it'll work with that as well so essentially with that toggled you're going to press anywhere on the screen and you're going to be presented with your keyboard and then some also some text features so you have some very basic text altering options such as the font the size the color of your text you can bold italicize underline and then also you get these three hearts right here with the ABC these are essentially pre-saved text Styles so let's say that the default right here is the helvetica right it's like let's say like this is notability and then that will be like your regular default text so then you can also pre-save so that another one B right here I already had it saved is a bigger Bolder one so you can use one for headers one for the actual text itself it's super easy switch between the two you see so it's just nice they could have like three pre-saved right there and you get some other options as well but what's really cool is if you hold on this actual bar right here then there's a whole bunch of other different tools as well and what's cool is you can fully customize this like action bar right here so you can take whatever feature you want put it down there and you can also rotate and move them wherever you want on this so it's super feature packed actually and it's just awesome I think how you can have all of this within a like little text tool and just quick access area so that's pretty much the text feature within notability so the second feature is your pen tool which is the next one over so double tapping on that will bring up a bunch of customization options for you're essentially like your writing utensil so let's start off with the pen right here I leave mine at a thickness of three but you have the option from one all the way up to 12. I just think three fits my handwriting the best and you also have four different styles of actually like writing or Strokes so the first one is my favorite it's very consistent so if I write right here the first pen so again I just have chicken scratch hand Rings doesn't look that great but I'm telling you this is definitely the most consistent as there's no variation within pressure or tilt sensitivity with this pen but moving on to the next one this one does have pressure sensitivity so as you see as all right it has that slight variation of when I press harder just in my natural handwriting and when I don't I think it adds variation it doesn't look quite as good I mean you can decide for yourself I just like to stick with the first one but you also have two other options which I'm a huge fan of and I wish good notes 5 had this because it doesn't but that's your dash and then your dotted line so right here's your dashed and then right inside of that is your dotted I use these all the time for like making graphs and plots and I love having this feature it's like really like accentuate a point on a graph and bring it down to where it meets the graph itself so now moving back to the pen settings again below that have your color selector so there's a whole bunch of colors that come pre-like saved onto this but if you swipe all the way over to the right you press the plus button you can now literally add any color that you want you can switch this you can type in the hex code and then you press add and then you can add that to your set save colors and it's literally just like an unlimited amount of colors which is one thing I love about digital note taking like you don't need all these pens and pencil to carry with you they're right there super easy to access so big fan of that in notability so also in this menu you'll find a recently added pencil tool so this essentially just like reenacts or replicates what a pencil would look like so I'm gonna do for example like the black ink again and very similar same customization you just have the one pencil option but the same color options so this is me pencil tool so you can see I think it actually does replicate a pencil very accurately but what I don't like about it is I feel like I really have to like push quite hard to like make it show up so just like me like writing how I would normally write with the pen tool you could just see how it's just not quite as like dark and you really have to like push to get it to be dark I think if they made this the pressure sensitivity a little more sensitive I think that would definitely help this out but again I just don't think it looks as neat as the pen itself so I don't really use it it could be good for like sketching or drawing or filling in graphs but it is a nice option to have if you wanted to and notability does provide that so A couple tips and tricks when writing in notability if you two finger tap on the screen it's actually the undo button so two finger tap undo and if you triple finger tap it's redo so it's super easy it's actually very accurate too and I do use this all the time instead of reaching up to the undo button it's just that little like just drag and drop flip and flop from the pencil to your fingers versus moving your whole arm really like those two features and also there's like a snap to perfect shape and perfect line feature so if you create a line let's say right here and then you know pretty ugly not a line if you ask me but if you then try it again and you hold for a split second it snaps to a perfect line you see that let me do it again hold for a split second boom it doesn't just work horizontally you can do it any sort of orientation you want now you just vertically do diagonal and it's actually just a super nice tool and it also works with shapes as well so if you were to like create like a square and hold it for a second it makes a perfect square same with a circle so just a quick little couple things about notability I really do enjoy that and it just makes the whole writing experience a lot neater and more enjoyable so now getting into my favorite feature of notability and ironically that's the favorites toolbar so to get this you're going to open up your pen tool or whatever tool and then right here at the top right whenever you have your pen or pencil dialed into the settings that you like you then pressed a little star with the Plus at the top right and then that'll add it to your favorites toolbar so if you already have a bunch of things in there in your first toolbar like what I just did essentially you can find it by going to the bottom left hand corner and then this is like the star icon this is your favorite toolbar just tap on that and it pops up right here so you can have a Max of 10 different tools any variation of pens pencils highlighters erasers whatever you use the most and what I really like about this is whenever you have a pen dialed in with the settings you want you can see how there's like just like a diagram essentially of what the pen is so let me go to this green pen right here I'm going to increase the size you can see how the actual size increases so you can see that as well and if I want to change it to a dashed line or a dotted line you can see how that also changes just the different tools the highlighters it's super neat and organized you can also rearrange the different pens by clicking on one holding on it you can move it to the front or to the back and you can also completely just move this around so if you grab the little gray bar on the left hand side you can move it anywhere on the edge of the screen so right there to the left to the bottom to the right up back to the top and if it's just in your way and you don't need it at the moment you press the little X on the other hand side and it goes back down to the star in the bottom left hand corner so I absolutely love this ferrets toolbar as in most of my notes you can see I am always using colors and I just love having it right here writing something whatever I need I like need to make a note I like making like notes of things that are important in red I can just make a quick note and then go back to the black for like my regular pen so again favorites toolbar probably my favorite feature about notability so now moving on the next tool is the highlighter tool and I use this one quite frequently as well so it essentially has the exact same settings and customization as the pen so you have between 1 and 12 for different sizes you have the four different strokes as well any color you want again I'm a big fan of the highlighter I use it to just make things stand out from one another and it works very well well it doesn't like cover up the text at all as you can see right here and also what I really like is that you can also do the same snap to a perfect line so if you're like highlighting text from like a document or a lecture slide you just want it nice and neat then all you do is create the line hold it for a second and it makes it a perfect line as well really like this and I use it all the time and one thing that I think is really just kind of cool and a nice thought is that when you go to erase a highlighter if you don't want to erase what's underneath it you don't have to and it doesn't until you erase for a second time so look see this blue right here I'm going to erase over it and it only erases the highlighter and then now if I go through again it'll erase the rest of it so I just like it it's like a nice touch it makes it really easy in case you mess up the actual highlighting itself and you don't have to mess up the text underneath it really nice and I do use this a lot so also a new feature added to notability is the tape tool so if you click on this it's in the highlighter section as well you can change the size of the tape from a one to a five and essentially what this is It's like a study tool it's going to cover up different text and you can't see it at all and then when you tap on the tape it shows what's underneath it so I think this would be great for like anyone who's trying to learn like definitions you know almost like flash cards where like you can cover it up try to practice it and then you untape it essentially and it shows up and I do like it I actually think it's a really cool feature especially for Gen EDS more so often I haven't had to use this myself yet as I don't really have to like learn terms anymore but again it just shows up you can actually like tape over a whole bunch of stuff at one time and then just tap on it and it all just disappears so I actually do really like this tape feature might not be for everyone but I can definitely see it helping some people so next up is the Eraser tool and this pretty much does exactly what you think it does so for customization you have from one up to 12. I usually leave it on kind of seven ish and you have two erasing types the first one is whole and so essentially this erases entire pencil Strokes so if you come over here and watch as I get over to the line you see how I went transparent I let go and then the whole entire thing is erased whether or not I went over the whole line so let me just do that again you can see boom boom boom and then it let go and they all erase I usually have it on this because it's super quick super easy keeps the page clean I just kind of do like what I need to do and it all erases and then the other eraser option is called partial and so essentially this is just like a normal eraser where you have to completely like go over the line to fully erase it as you can see like you know you can always like make the Eraser larger so I can make it more accurate but it just takes more time like unless like you're really trying to like pinpoint or make something super neat or you only need to like erase like a little part of it I usually pretty much always just use the hole as it's just a lot quicker a lot more efficient and doesn't leave like those little like eraser scuffs all over the place so the next tool is called the lasso tool which the one right after it and essentially what this is is a tool to edit pre-made handwritten text so when you click on it there's two different ones you can choose from there's the freehand which you can Circle exactly what you want but you have to like close up the circle so you can see there's like that Dash circling line around it or there's a rectangle which I use like when I want to just capture a whole group of text and it's just super quick you can just like you see how it like scales with it let go and there you go so as soon as you encapsulate something with this lasso tool there's three things you can do with it without doing anything else you can move it around whatever is inside of it you can scale it make it larger or smaller or you can rotate it I like how you don't have to do any extra moves it's just as soon as you lasso something you can move it I like that feature with notability so where this feature really does show off its ability is when you tap on it so now it comes up with a whole bunch of different options you can do so the first one is called style and essentially you can change up the style of the text within it so you can make The Strokes of everything larger you can change the color of anything make it all purple I know it's like kind of tough to see go over you can change it up from a dashed line to a solid line again just change the color there's so much you can do with that and again just change up how the look of it so moving on to the next one and I love this and actually good notes 5 does not have this feature but it's duplicate and it's super easy just duplicate boom another one and this is super nice like if you're making like multiple of the same graphs with slight variations to it that's usually what I do it for boom duplicate love it and then coming up after that very obvious you have cut and copy so essentially when when you cut and copy you then want to press anywhere on the page for like a second you press and hold and it'll come up with either paste or paste image these are two different options paste will just take the actual like stroke itself you see move it around it's the exact same thing if you paste image though it essentially takes a screenshot of what's ever inside of the lasso tool so as you see when I do that it now like it has the grid inside of it and as I scale it up you can see how the grid is now like encapsulated and also just doesn't line up with the rest of the Grid it's because it was a screenshot so again if I were to like take the other thing that I just copy and pasted and scale it up you see how it doesn't have the grid that follows it again it becomes like a screenshot so just another thing I usually pretty much just do the paste unless I'm taking like a screenshot of a PDF and I'm like copying pasting a piece of the text that's when I'll use the other one but for the majority of the time I just use the regular paste so now continuing on the neck next one is convert and essentially this will either convert your handwritten notes into text if you click on it again so this is where like my classic version restricts me if you had the plus version you'd be able to do this but it's going to take your handwritten notes put them into text or if you have like math equations math symbols fractions whatever it'll take that and it'll also put into text form so I'm just not going to pay the extra money to try out that feature as I pretty much have everything else but you are able to do that with the lasso tool so now moving on you have group and essentially what this does is it takes whatever is inside the lasso tool and it makes it all one stroke essentially so if I were to like group it as I just did right there and I come over like with my Eraser tool if I erase any of it instead of just like part of it all of it will erase you can see how I just did that so if I were to ungroup it now like I just did I'm gonna come over with my Eraser tool and it just erases that one boom boom and you group it it makes it all so it's just easy to like move things like that around the screen group at all move it like where you want so like nothing gets out of place or unaligned so that's pretty much what I use that for so the next option is save and essentially what this does is it takes whatever's inside of it and you'll save it as a sticker essentially a sticker you can just call it and bring it in so right here this is what I made beforehand add it there you go boom there's a sticker right there so if you were to like have something like essentially like a graph like a blank x versus y graph just make one one time and then so you don't have to keep making it just make a sticker out of it move it move it add a sticker it can be a useful feature if you use it for the right things and then the last option is delete very self-explanatory so following the lasso tool the next one is like the hand tool and essentially what this does is if you have any other tool whatever tool you're on your stylus will activate it as you touch so see it draws and then you need your finger to move the screen essentially what this does is it's like a viewing where you can't edit the document in this so my stylist now moves it as well finger does but that's essentially what that's for so the next feature is the voice recording tool and I can see this being very very useful for students out there so essentially what this does is when you start it your iPad will just start recording audio so like let's say like you're in a lecture hall and the professor's up on the board as you're taking notes you're going to record the audio of the lecture and then you can come back and replay it and just re-listen to the lecture and it's a great way to help you study in case you forgot something or didn't quite keep up with the notes at the time so what's also really cool is as you're going back through and replaying the audio whatever handwriting you did at the time of the recording will then rewrite itself so like just like you don't get confused like when certain parts of the notes in the lecture like match up together this will show you exactly when and where it happened and it's just a great way to like match up like what the professor is saying versus like what you're writing and I think it's a really cool and unique feature so there's also a few other different options if you come over here and press the arrow if you have multiple different recordings you can select through them pressing on this like little like audio bar right there you can select through them rename them whatever you want and also at the settings all the way on the right you can also then have an equalizer which you can like increase the bass or treble whatever's gone in the room and you can also increase the voice boost which will find voices in the room and increase them over other noises so just play around with it depending on like what lecture room you're in how far you are from the professor but it should be a very useful feature for a lot of students out there so moving on to the right this is the media tool the little plus button and essentially what this does is you can import a whole bunch of different types of media into your document so you can upload images from your photo library you can take a photo of something directly put it into your document you can actually scan a document here so if you have like some loose leaf paper or a handout from professors just scan it right here and it'll be put into this document this is where your stickers will be found where within the lasso tool you can create them here let's call hello world where I made earlier boom there's your sticker nice and easy quick and simple so also in this media tool you can also add gifs Web Clips or stickies which are just essentially like little like notes that stand out from the rest of it you can move them around as well so moving all the way to the right this icon is your page view and this is where you can quickly access all of your pages at a glance so you can expand it or collapse it and essentially this is just like a nice way to kind of go through all of your pages find one of them that like you're looking for you can click on it and you can easily find it what's also great is that you can actually filter these and sort them in different ways so as you're going through if you find a page to be more important or just really important you can go over to it in the top right corner you can bookmark it and that's the bookmark button going through if you think this page is an important bookmark it so essentially you can now sort this by different ways so you can go to sort by favorites or bookmarks which is that right there so there's two pages and you can also sort by just different style of pages so either like your notes Pages which your templates or if you have PDF Pages that's where also you'll find that and then you can also select specific pages from this so if you want to export just one and two it's always great to have like a page view especially when you start having huge documents that's where you'll find it and it's great to kind of scan through and get through different documents so going over to the bottom right you'll find your Zoom box tool and essentially what this does is it takes a little box and you can move it around you can increase the size decrease it and what it does is it gives you this little area where you can actually write on so if you want to add like little little tiny details inside of something this is how you'll do it so let's take this right here here are all your different tools click on it and then you can quickly add something and as you can see it shows up right there as well so this is definitely a nice feature especially if you want to like make little tiny details and some stuff like I just said this is how you'll do it click on that little top right button and it goes away so I know I just talked about the export button but going back to it this top left button right here essentially what you can do is you can put whatever document publish it to the gallery for other people to use or see and you can also share this and you can share it directly to email apps to your files folder on your iPad itself and you can also share your documents in different forms of files so you go to share2 format you can do PDF node image and I usually do PDF as it just kind of keeps the organization and the setup of it and what I usually do is just email to myself I have like an assignment and so that's pretty much the export button with notability so the last writing feature in notability is called the note switcher and I think it's hidden and not people know about it so if you come up to the left hand side of your iPad and you swipe from left to right it pulls up the note switcher and essentially this is all like your most recent documents that you've been on and it's just a nice way to kind of go through them instead of going the back arrow and trying to find it through that way this is definitely a much easier way to do it and you can also create a split screen with this so if you click on the ellipses and you can either split screen it horizontally or vertically as you do the horizontal and so this is also a great way to like study and do homework with as what I usually do is I'll have like an in-class example on the left hand side and then I'll have the right hand side where I'm working on the homework or the assignment or whatever it is and you can also adjust the different size of it by dragging on that middle bar in the middle and I really do like this feature as well again just a nice quick way to switch through different notes yeah so that pretty much wraps up all the features within nodeability all right so now moving over to the writing features within goodnotes five so I'm going to cover these slightly quicker as a lot of them are just very similar but I am going to go over the differences between the two so the first thing I want to talk about is the obvious layout difference with goodnotes 5's tab setup so essentially these are like tabs within a web browser like Safari or Google Chrome and just tapping on them switches quickly between it so this is essentially good notes 5's take on notabilities Note switcher and essentially what you can do is you can hold on one and you can drag it around move it different places and if you don't want one anymore you press the little X on the left hand side if you want to create a new window kind of have a split screen on the right hand side of a tab you click on that and you press open a new window and there you go you have two windows you can work on at the same time so start off with the first tool it's the zoom feature and essentially this is pretty much exactly the same as notability you have your same little box right here you can resize and then you can draw in this box right here and it updates to whatever it was where the box is on the inner one so again can be useful for adding little details to different things that you want within your documents so now moving over to the pen tool within goodnotes five this one's slightly different than notability and so double tapping on that you essentially have three different pen options the first one is the fountain pen and this one gives you two sliders to adjust either the tip sharpness or the pressure sensitivity so essentially there is obviously pressure sensitivity with this one so there's going to be variations in your writing as you start to write so writing the fountain so I would say this one resembles closely to the other option within notability but moving on from here you get the ball pen so this one is my preferred one as there's no variation in pressure so so I mean if you just ignore my chicken scratch handwriting I just prefer how it looks with the actual consistency of the ball pen and then the brush pen I would say is by far like my least favorite it has the largest range of sensitivity but essentially this one just has a lot of different variation within its Strokes and I would assume that this one like most resembles like actually like a paintbrush it's kind of like what I'm guessing but those are those three and then also similar to notability good notes 5 also does have the snap to perfect line so again if you create a line you hold on to it it'll snap into place again in different orientations angles and it also works for shapes as well so if you were to do that boom hold that make a square hold that so I do like that as well one difference you can actually set this and I'll kind of cover it in a second but when you create shapes you can have them autofill or not which is why you see that right there so again that's actually a setting and a different tool just a little quick thing I want to point out so while you're on the pen tool if you look over to the right right here there's a bunch of different pre-safe settings you can have so you can have three different quick pre-saved like pen thicknesses and that's what these lines are right here and if you double tap on one you can adjust it to what it is so I usually leave it on 0.3 millimeters and I think you get more customization with this as notability had like 1 through 12 I think this one has exact millimeters of thickness so as you can see writing right there a little bit thicker and this one a lot thicker this is like the biggest gripe I have with goodnotes five beforehand you could only pre-save three colors now you can add up to 12 different colors as you can see right here so essentially what you do is you come over to the right with this little plus button right here you click on that and it opens up this area with a whole bunch of different colors in it so if you click on it again down at the bottom you can now find exact colors you can either go to like a color wheel or you can type in an exact hex code and then you can add it to this list right here of pre-save colors and also you can individually change them as well by double clicking on it you can then go in change the color to how you want and I'm a huge fan of this this is like kind of their favorites toolbar their take on it in goodnotes five and it's just so much better beforehand it was only three colors and I had to keep double tapping see how like it doesn't always register it didn't right there double tap change the color come back and just from someone who has and uses so many different colors in their notes if you just scroll through you can kind of just see like all the different colors I do use whenever I'm using different diagrams and making them I like to just have different things stand out from one another so I'm very happy that good notes 5 now has this within their note-taking app so moving on to the Eraser tool which is the next one so there are three different eraser types the first one is called Precision eraser and this is essentially like the exact eraser so as you kind of go over different things exactly where like this little circle touches it will erase so you can have like you know little like marks and things like left over the next one is called standard eraser so essentially this will erase like bits and groups at a time so as you can see if I as I go along this line you see how it's like kind of jumping ahead and it's like predicting what I want to be erased that's what it does so again it can be a little bit quicker and it can definitely help you like not leave behind like little things and the one that I use the most again very similar notability is called The Stroke eraser so again as you touch anything it erases that whole entire stroke so that's what that is so another cool thing so if you come right here you can do auto deselect and I recently just started using this and I'm kind of a big fan of it already so essentially what this is and like you've already seen it working is as soon as you're done erasing one stroke of the Eraser however long it is or whatever it'll then automatically switch back the last used stylus or whatever tool you're using so ready I'm going to come over here erase this and as I Let Go it goes back to my pen it's like it's like you're writing writing writing writing whatever whatever and then you go you make a mistake erase and you can just instantly go back to writing and I actually really do like that a lot with goodnotes five so a feature I just started using and I kind of wish I was using it longer that's something you can't get within notability one last thing is that moving over to the right you have three standard sizes of erasers small medium and large you cannot further adjust these which I think is a little weird as it seems like everything else is very fine-tuned and tailored but essentially like if you need to like get finer like a races what you have to do is actually zoom in and then the circle like oh I know just deselected the circle in that stays the same size so if you want Little erases that's what you have to do and then if you come back here this small the circle is still the same size so that's how you get like more accurate erases so moving on to the highlighter tool this pretty much has the exact same customization as the pen as you can see right here three different sizes you can find two of the different sizes you can add as many colors as you want and then going with the settings there's actually a cool feature called Draw in straight line so essentially what this does is usually like when you're highlighting something it's like a straight line or a piece of text it knows that so without you even having to like hold it for a split second like you can't you can still do that even without doing that with this feature turned on if you just let go it straightens it out you see how it does that but it doesn't automatically make it horizontal like if you kind of like you see how it does it there and vertical as well it just makes it a straight line in whatever way you're going in so you just kind of have to like try to make it horizontal it does a good job at auto correcting it I do like that it does save a couple seconds if you're highlighting a lot of different things so up next is the shape tool and essentially what this does is it just automatically makes shapes and straight lines for you even if you don't mean to so if I somewhat resemble a triangle it'll straighten it out and kind of like make a triangle for me same with that make a circle make a square you see how it just automatically does it with lines it'll just automatically do it as well select curves everything like that and also in this setting what I was talking about earlier you have the option to fill color which is why you see these right here filled so if I were to change the color to Blue and make a circle it automatically fills again I kind of like how it autofills usually like when I'm making like shapes it's for diagrams I like my diagrams to be filled in so that's just an option you don't get with notability that you do get here so moving over to good notes 5 lasso tool there's only one lasso tool and that's the free hand so you don't get like that rectangular version that notability has and you also don't get as many options without touching it so when you Circle something all you are able to do is move it around you can't scale it you can't rotate it you can only move it that's one thing I do prefer about notabilities lasso tool but you get a lot of the same features when you do tap on it so again you get cut you get copy you get delete you get resized which is then where you have to go to rotate and move it if you get color which is how you change the color of whatever is inside the lasso tool you get take screenshots which I actually really don't like this about goodnotes five it's like the one biggest thing I think notability has over this because I tend to kind of copy things over quite a bit and also take screenshots of different PDFs on notability all it is is you lasso whatever you copy and then you go and you just press paste image here what you have to do is you have to do take screenshot go to x support copy and then you can go back now then you hold and you press paste it's like four more steps to do it in good notes five versus notability I really hope that they're able to like shorten that up make it quicker in the future but as of right now that's the only way to do it in goodnotes five so the next option the lasso tool is the add element and essentially what this does is it takes it and turns it into a sticker very similar how notability does and then you can go into the media or sticker tool which is coming up right next and you can just copy and paste it in and then the last one is called convert and essentially what this does is it'll convert your handwriting into text so let me go find an example real quick come over here highlight this tap on it convert and you can see it says glasses structure properties applications elastic structure properties applications got it perfectly fine right there and one thing from my testing that I have seen is that you can also convert to math but it essentially works the best with just like numbers like plus minus Edition as soon as you start getting like into fractions and more complex types of equations then it really does start to struggle but as long as like you're just converting kind of like normal one line things into text it should handle it pretty well from like what I've seen and from my own stuff that I've done so the next tool I was just talking about is the sticker tool so you click on it and there's a whole bunch you can choose from and there's also a whole bunch from goodnotes five you can buy and purchase for yourself you can make your own do ad element and this is where they'll go they'll go in the stickers section the next tool is the photo tool and just like what it sounds you can upload and import all kinds of photos what do you have inside your photo library you can see them all right here on the right they just go in and then when they're inside of there you can also crop them resize them or do whatever you want with the photos so the next feature is the typing mode which I was talking about earlier on in the page setup where in the template if there's that little green icon at the top right this is what I was referring to so right now as I'm making this video it's in the experimental phase so it may may or may not be in your version of goodnotes 5 depending on if they think it's worth keeping or not but essentially what this is is with all the pages with that typing mode enabled for with that little green icon you can come onto these pages and when you go on to here it now like Auto aligns and it knows based on the spacing and size whatever page you're on it'll align the text to so so you can see it does that but again this is definitely a much larger font than I would probably like for this so again you can see right here going to the top right and change it to caption you can change it to a whole bunch of different things and it changes the style the type and everything else but what it does is it does align very well and just again based on whatever one you're using and if it actually supports it so let me go back over here go to change template anything with this little green keyboard says that right now it's currently supporting it so I'm sure they're working on it trying to figure it out which is why they removed the spacing options for their Pages trying to keep everything uniform to get this to work I think it can be a very nice option because in notability you just place it anywhere and then you will then have to yourself align it how you want at least this way you know it's going to be aligned and fit the actual template itself so I do kind of prefer it and I do like how it is an option within good notes 5. so next is the text tool for goodnotes 5 and it doesn't have as much customization as notability so again you can touch anywhere on the screen and it'll come up and you don't have that bar with all those different text options you just have the top right here you can have one pre-saved text option which is that t with the heart on it and then you just have your standard text different kinds of styles fonts size color but besides that it's just a very standard text tool it does the job but I don't think it's quite as good as notabilities and then the final tool on this toolbar right here is the laser pointer and I think this could be great if you're trying to teach or show someone something also if you're doing like a screen share on Zoom so as soon as you have two options you have the normal like little dot which is somebody just replicates like what a actual like laser pointer would be on like a screener in real life and you also have like this line so essentially wherever you write this line pops up and as long as you keep your pen on the screen it won't disappear we lift it up in a second it disappears so again this could be a nice thing to like make markings you see how they stay as you're making more and when you stop they I'll disappear so I think as like you're trying to show someone something explain it to them without you like making a mess of the actual screen I think the highlighter can be a great option for people again especially if you're doing collaborative stuff or if you're trying to like present your notes to someone so another thing I want to point out with goodnotes 5 that I'm not a huge fan of it gets the job done but I just don't think it's as neat or as nice as notabilities but that's your undo and redo buttons so essentially you're going to have to double tap two fingers or double tap three fingers whereas notability is just one so right here two fingers is your undo double tap it does it double tap and it gets a little more tricky when you triple tap because it has to be just more accurate but triple tap or triple finger double tap will do it you see it's just not quite there it kind of doesn't know if you're trying to double tap or triple tap but yeah so that's like another difference between the two so the next thing I want to go over is right here at the top left and this is good notes five's page selector and I like this format way better than notabilities you can see a lot more with it and also this is just like a nice place to kind of go through you can select specific pages and then export them so right here select the top right select on different pages and you press export you can save it as an image a PDF or whatever and you can export it directly to either files or you can do right to email and I really do like this also you can sort through these by either favorites which are like tagged by these red little markings on it essentially like bookmarks but the bookmark button our favorite button is right here at the top right at all time so you don't have to like slide over to like the note selector like in notability and then do it it's always right there so any sort of pages that you think are important or will need a reference again do it right there and then you can sort it through by favorites so the next feature is one of my favorites in goodnotes five and that's the note Searcher so the top left right here if you click on this little magnifying glass essentially it'll search your document for any word that you want whether it's text or handwriting so if I search the word stress it'll come up and if you tap on one of them it'll bring you to it and you can see it's highlighting my handwriting right here and again I have pretty bad handwriting so it's kind of amazing how it finds it and it does it very well and also like on a computer if you do control F you could then tap through all the different examples of the word you can do that right here by the Bottom by this Arrow you can go through and it shows you four out of 23. boom boom boom and it's just a great way to find specific things that you want within documents and also the further out you go the more documents you can search for a word so if I come back here and I go all the way to my documents and then I press search at the bottom if I were to search the word stress again it'll come up with all of my documents with the word stress in it and it shows you where they are and what kinds of PDFs and it's just again a great way it works really well in the fact that it works well with handwriting again this is something that notability can't do and this is just a great feature I use it all the time so the next feature is your export button and just like in notability you can export in many different formats such as I usually do PDF and then there's also a bunch of other different things you can do so you can either export Justice page you can export all of them or if you go back to like your page selector you can select specific ones so if you were to like be mirroring this or screen sharing it with people on like Zoom for a sec you can then get rid of like the different things the toolbar everything like that and it'll just show you what you want so there's some presentation modes right there then there's also contribute to communities so again just like with the gallery you can export whatever you have to the community for everyone to and use and then download for themselves so whether you make templates or you just want to share people the notes you've taken from school or different classes you can upload to community right from here and it's just a great way to kind of add in all the different knowledge and things for everyone else to use and then also another specific feature to goodnotes five is this one was a share link to collaborate so notability doesn't have anything like this I think this can be super super useful for a lot of students out there so essentially when you go and you turn this on it's going to take it a second but it's then going to make this a live document for other people with goodnotes 5 to then come on and collaborate with so I give it a second then it's going to finish up and now if you come up here to the middle you click on that you can check to see who's currently viewing it and who's also working on it so again this makes it now a live document where different people can come on they can write their own notes and what's really cool is now if you hold on the screen anywhere on it you can then add a comment so let me just say hello world right and then you can send that and now you can have different like conversations with a comment so if someone else was on this document they could then comment back on this and when you click off of it you can see the little comment icon right there so that's how you know that there's a comment there and I just think I can see this being used by so many different students whether like you're working on like group study guides together or you're working on just like different homeworks or projects this can be a great way for all students to kind of get involved to kind of help each other and learn from each other go through different problems like even like if you're not together I do think this is a huge upgrade than what notability has to offer so the next tool is the voice recording tool and it's very very similar to what notability has to offer not quite as many options as there's no like voice boost option or anything like that like an equalizer but it also does the same thing where as you're writing it'll play through the notes as you have then taken them like to match up with the voice itself so let me do that real quick so it's currently recording let's see press on the little waveform right on the right of it you press play and see how it's translucent now give it a second when I started writing and you'll see it fill in as the recording continues to go on there you go you can see it working now so again it's just a nice thing a nice way to kind of catch up on lectures especially if professors are going really quick in college just a great way to kind of relearn the lectures re-hear them again in case you had missed something the first time so the next feature I want to talk about is the add page tab which is over here and essentially you can either add just different templates to a current document or you can also import images scan documents and also take photos of whatever and then they'll just be instantly inputted into the document you're working on so again just a nice way to get different types of media into your documents then very similar to notabilities like hand tool this is like their kind of navigation tool where you tap on this and then your stylist goes from like a pen to like a navigator so you see like I'm not drawing you turn it off and you just start drawing so that's essentially all that does again it's just a way to I guess kind of navigate your documents easier so now I'm going to go over each application specific features that I personally like better so just kind of like wrap it up in a bow so you can kind of see the differences between the two which ones I think are better where so starting off with notability the first thing that I really really like that I wish good notes 5 had is your dashed in dotted lines as an engineering student I'm always making graphs and diagrams and just having the ability to like make Dash and dotted lines like on goodnotes 5 I'm literally sitting there like do do like like hand dashing lines I really wish that they would Implement some sort of writing utensil with that notabilities had it forever that's the first thing I like about that the next thing I really appreciate is one tap duplicate so again with the lasso tool lasso whatever you tap on it duplicate and it just duplicates it whereas for goodnotes 5 you have to lasso something and then you have to copy and then you have to paste and it's just not as efficient it's not as quick I think a duplicate button would be super easy to add the next thing is I actually do really like the tape feature for no notability I can definitely see this being useful for many students especially early on in their education with Gen EDS being able just to kind of hide something and then make it reappear I think it's a great feature and I do wish that goodnotes 5 had that so the next thing is the specific eraser tool where everything turns transparent when you go over to erase it it takes no extra time because as soon as you lift your hand off it's a race but I do really like how it just kind of shows you like what you're about to erase before it does just a little thing I kind of like it so the next thing is the undo and redo unnotability I just like how it's a single tap with your two or three fingers it's just a lot more accurate and reliable so just double tap or two finger two finger three finger three finger versus good notes five it's just it seems to give me a hard time we have to like start doubling everything I just like notabilities better the next thing I like also has to do with the lasso tool so as soon as you lasso something you can immediately increase the scale decrease it rotate it and move it around while as in good notes 5 all you can do is move it and then you then have to tap on it and go to either the resize option so just a little quicker and notability another thing along with the lasso tool is that you can actually move things in the lasso tool from one page to another with their seamless view so as you see right here I have these lines lassoed let me zoom in a little bit it's I have these lines last sewed I can literally move it from page to page and I'll show you right now in goodnotes five you cannot do that so ready I'm going to lasso this text there's a page break right there disappears I really wish good notes 5 would allow that to just kind of hop over to the next page as it actually happens quite often just within like note-taking there's another little thing I prefer about notability so the next thing I really like is that when you add in a an additional note to like let's say a PDF slide what notability does is it like Auto aligns the page size to match it so ready here I am I just have a general standard like PDF I'm gonna go over here press on this press add page and you can see it instantly like it just aligned it and I really like how it does that versus let me go back over to here so here we go here's a PDF so we're going to go over here we're going to add a page we're going to just import whatever and look at the difference look at the size difference they're not Auto aligned together and I do kind of wish that goodnotes 5 had a way to align them or at least they look similar but then like when you go to print it would stay in the same correct format just in a little thing I like about notability so before you all start saying I was paid off by notability for this video here are all the things I prefer about goodnotes five I just had to start with notability to kind of keep the flow of things going so the first thing I want to talk about is the handwritten search text I think this is such a great feature again just search whatever here let's not even search that let's search friction it just pulls it up wherever you can search through and I think this is so great it could just like this is a 50 page document and it just helps me narrow down and find something and this would take me forever on notability to do the next thing is I prefer the tab View and good notes 5 I like how they're all just right there just a quick Tap Away versus a slide and a tap again I'm big into like efficiency especially when in class like scrambling to take notes and just over time it just adds up and just a nice one Tap Away super nice the next thing I prefer in good notes 5 is the page selector again you come over here you can just see so much more of like all your notes just quicker to get through and I really like how you can then just nice and quick select all of them I know that notability does have something very similar to it but it's just more Taps to get to and it doesn't fill up as much of the page as good notes 5 so again just ease of use I think notes 5 is better the next thing is the shared and collaborative documents again I've never had anyone else like really close with in my classes who's used goodnotes five most of them had used notability before so I was always alone with this but I can just see where this would be so beneficial like just working on math problems and study guides with friends like when we're away from each other just on the same point making little notes together I think it would have been so huge and especially just other engineers and just hand working through math problems and I just think goodnotes 5 has a huge leg up over notability because they don't even have anything close to this the next thing super quick is that your favorites tab is always right there just a tap away and good notes five versus and notability again you got to go to your page selector and then you got to bookmark it there so again just a one Tab versus the two so the next thing I really wish I started using this sooner but it's the auto deselect eraser so just for a quick example let's say I'm writing hi I'm mid and I mess up you just go to eraser erase and you're already hand in position to start writing again and I think this is great I wish notability could add it in I'm assuming it's a very simple feature next thing another quick one is highlight in a straight line as you don't have to hold anything so you just let go boom Auto snaps into a straight line super useful for highlighting documents and anything else in your own handwritten notes and the last thing and this is super subjective but I personally just like my handwriting in goodnotes 5 ever so slightly more than that notability I really don't know what it is I just something about it it's just ever so slightly neater to me a little more like satisfying to write with in good notes five I just there's nothing to it it's just subjective I guess just from like going back and forth between the two I feel like just good notes five it's a little neater and the notes I've been able to try to create so yeah if you see notes like this like you can see just how neat they are again I haven't quite tried to do the same sort of setup and you know really try to like make my notes neat on notability I just feel like doing this is easier or I just enjoy it more on goodnotes five so again maybe just ignore this point just subjective I think I like my handwriting more and the writing experience on goodnotes 5 a little better [Music] so my personal recommendation if I had just got an iPad and I'm just about to start using my iPad for note taking and all my school work I personally would recommend goodnotes five and there's a couple reasons why I think most of the notabilities benefits I just went in the previous section were more like quality of life while goodnotes five its benefits were like more beneficial that I could see for a student first off is like the handwritten note Searcher have the option to just quickly search my handwritten notes is actually amazing and I love that feature another thing is that collaborative setting where you can share documents with other students I think that's going to be a game changer for many students to work and collaborate on documents away from each other I think the tab view is super useful where you can just quickly switch between different notes and also just the all-around organization of goodnotes 5 where you can have unlimited nested folders inside of each other it takes up the whole screen it just looks a little neater I think it's a little easier to navigate I just think all those things together and the price we can't forget about the price goodnotes 5 is a one-time purchase of 8.99 and notability is 15 every year so let's just say bare minimum you get an iPad for college so you got four years with it you're literally paying six and a half times over the four years for notability for those what like seven or eight benefits that I said it had over goodnotes five and that's not even saying like you don't get this in high school and start even earlier like it just multiplies in scale and value I think for Value what you're getting out of it it's a solid solid note-taking application and I've been using it for pretty much the past whole year it's never let me down and of course there's some few things I miss with notability but overall good notes 5 over the past year has added some things like the more saved colors that was the biggest thing I really missed that favorites toolbar with notability but now because you could have up to 12 safe colors on goodnotes five it kind of evened out there so just with all those things I personally recommend goodnotes five in 2023 all right that's it man that was such a grind to make I'm sitting here like my cameras like batteries keep dying like my storage keeps getting full because filming in 4k takes up so much storage so I really hope you're able to learn something and I helped you make your decision with these applications please don't forget if you enjoyed it to hit the like button down below and subscribe so with that being said have a great day everyone and cheers foreign

Channel: Nathan Lemoine

Views: 70,601

Keywords: apple, ipad, ipad pro, ipad pro apps, ipad pro apps for students, students, college, school, university, notability, goodnotes 5, notability vs goodnotes 5, ultimate, comparison, which is better?, better for students, best app, nathan lemoine, 2023, apple pencil, note taking apps, best note taking app for ipad

Id: gGPxGHArzEw

Length: 75min 42sec (4542 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023