Notability vs Goodnotes - The BEST iPad Notetaking App

yeah hello everyone welcome back to another day if you're here for the first time my name is Samuel and I'm a student studying at University and recently I made a video on the iPad perm and how I use it as a student in university so a couple people have asked me questions since then one of the main ones are what do you think is the best app for taking handwritten notes on the iPad Pro and that's a good question because when I got the iPad pro for the first time I had no idea but if you've done your research you'll know that although there are a large amount of apps out there which is Microsoft OneNote or even the Apple Notes app this whole sphere of handwritten notes on the iPad pro is dominated by two apps durability and good notes and today I'm gonna go into which one I think is better and which one I use as my primary not taking up and so to explain my decision I think there are a couple key questions that we should ask and those key questions formed the structure of this video as well firstly I'm going to go into what exactly should we be expecting from these others and then I'm gonna go into what are the defining and distinguishing features and tools that they offer you thirdly I'm going to go into what that writing experience is like when you pick up your pen and write on the iPad product and finally I'll end by giving you my opinion on which one I think is the better note-taking app more importantly why I think that's the case because that's where all the interesting stuff lies for all of you you just don't want to wait til the end of the video for the answer I'll give it to you right now I use [Music] so in order to properly make a decision on these apps it's important to understand what they're trying to achieve I was thinking about how I was going to display this to you how about a flashback back to when I used real paper it's a picture this it's beginning of the in university or school and you go out to buy the stuff that you need what do you buy at school I'd go out shopping and I'd buy a notebook for every single one of my subjects and then up to that I'd probably buy some bracket because metaphysics needed graph paper and then all of a sudden I'd remember that throughout the semester I'd be receiving an endless amount of printouts handouts worksheets scans tests homework quizzes even the textbook that was printed out so I'd have a load of paper and then I realized I probably need a place to store all these files because they're not go out and buy all these folders in an ideal world because I didn't actually do this house so ideally you go out and get a whole lot of folders one folder for each subject that you have and then to help organize things further you get dividers for each folder and then so you can organize different parts of each subject within the folders and the list isn't used and there then you need to get all your actual stationery pencils and you japan's need your highlighters and if you're really one of those creative types you'd like to get all the colors of the rainbow and all the thicknesses that you can find and then your blue scissors stapler so I hope you get the point because theoretically in a perfect ideal world you want to get the best combination of these things that work together in the best possible way for you you as an individual not anyone else but you and I think that's a fairly good criteria to have when you judge these apps do they give you what you need because everyone's a little different then everyone likes to do things in a different way and so my criteria is pretty simple I just need three things number one systematic storage so I need something that does the job of those folders and those dividers for me digitally number two I need it to give me all the tools that I need to do whatever I want to do as a stupid for me that's quite a lot to ask for because as you can see I love color finally I need a writing experience that I actually find enjoyable I want to actually be looking forward to process of writing stuff down and taking notes so going into storage the first app that I ever downloaded on the iPad pro was notability and a lot of people said notability was a pretty reliable and the moment I started to use the app I felt as though the whole point of the app apart from just the note-taking I was to help people organize their messed-up lives the way the whole app was laid out forced you to be neat and tidy and I don't necessarily like that because I'm quite messy and all over the place but I have to say that after a year using it it's actually something that I've needed for the first time I've gone through three semesters of university in school I haven't lost a document a handout a set of lecture slides a file that someone gave me and that's incredible because all I used to do is lose things and it literally does the job of a filing system made up of folders and divisions really well it's very clean modern simple design that does its job when it comes to storage goodness organization system is completely different things are more a little bit more all over the place you have folders you can have folders within folders and eventually you get to your files but as you can see unless you yourself are an organized person it's gonna be a little hard trying to find the file that you want it's still clean modern simple design that looks appealing but but I'd say easily the winner in this category is nobility however I still like good notes I'm not sure what it is but there's something about good notes that that appeals to me it's probably besides the point so moving on criteria number two was the tools and the features that both these apps offer there are so many features within good notes and notability that you won't use around 40% of them to this video I've broken it down to the tools and features that I find important when using these apps firstly pens and colors so notability offers you a lot of things you can change when using your pen and notability can choose between a ballpoint pen that has a consistent thickness or you can go with a pressure-sensitive pen that they're sticking when you push harder the whole variety of colors that they've recommended to you from the start but if you want you can customize the color palette that they provides you and add your own colors in there and when it comes to thicknesses notability kept it pretty simple and they only gave you 16 different options for how think you could make your pen and also the exact same principles apply when you're using the highlighters as well I personally think that notability has set up this whole system to be a simple and narrowed down as possible so the user doesn't get overwhelmed with too many options to choose from good notes is the exact opposite as you can see from their pen selector they have an overwhelming amount of colors when it comes to thicknesses there's the ability unlike no ability to choose whatever thickness you want the additional features of this is good notes allows you to set three presets for colors and three free shots for thicknesses in your top bar so it makes life a whole lot easier a lot of people would say notability is the more sensible option because it gives you a limited range of colors and tools and both good notes is incredibly overwhelming but actually think breadth of them have that and I'll come back to that later secondly there's a huge difference between highlighters and this really annoys me when you highlight a notability your highlighter goes above your text and if you keep highlighting and gets the point we the only thing you see is your highlighter I mean this one bother a whole lot of people but but I noticed and the other reason I've noticed this is because good notes actually does highlight it correctly and when you highlight something good notes the highlighter goes behind the text I think that's a lot nicer three when it comes to the erasers I think a good notes is very cool but they allow you to specifically choose to erase highlighter only which is something very cool and something you might want to keep in mind for think drawing geometric shapes both apps give you the option to draw shapes and good notes it's very simple you just select the shapes tool you draw a quick rough sketch of your shape good notes identifies what shape that's meant to be it creates a perfect geometric version of it in notability though you need to draw a pretty accurate version of your shape and after drawing your shape you can't take your stylus of the page for about two seconds to the shape to be corrected in all honesty it's not that much of a difference but if you are doing a lot of maths and drawing a lot of geometrical shapes or straight lines of graphs the speed of good notes is a huge advantage the fifth point is moving between pages a notability it's basically like scrolling through a PDF file in your computer pages go from up to down and the bottom of your previous page connects with the top of your neck space good notes on the other hand is more like paper in real life and you swipe from left to right to bring in a new page and from experience I'd say notability is a lot faster for moving between pages though good notes does have some features that do help for example its page view function in the top left hand corner allows you to see a preview of each of the pages inside your document which is a really easy way of navigating between pages now inabilities got a thumbnail view as well in the top right hand corner it's just like a PDF thumbnail preview on the right-hand side of the page from experience after so that notability was far better with and managing enormous files with 50 plus pages like a textbook or lecture slides and that leads me to point number six how do you move through different files within these apps in goodnotes you can open multiple files at the same time have them as tabs in the top row and this kind of takes up a little bit of space in the toolbar which some people might find annoying but has never really bothered me notability goes about it a different way you just swipe in from the left and then you'll get a preview of past ten recent files that you opened and you just tap one and opens and it doesn't take up that tiny little bit of space that some people might find useful but to be honest after using both these tools for such a long time they're so good at what they do that you don't you almost forget that one is better than the other in a certain area I mean there's so many things that both of them are just as good as each other at doing you can move things around you can resize things you can rotate things you can go to Google Images one day and then drag and drop an image into your file or you can even do things as crazy as searching up your handwritten notes using their search systems which are pretty reliable when it comes to searching up text but no honesty once you start using one of these apps you know you don't really think about all these features you just use it and so I don't really see these features as game changing or anything so for the feature section I think birthdays apps are pretty even and I can't really say that there's a winner so that brings us to my final criteria and that's the writing experience how it feels when you take the upper pencil and you and you write on the screen I feel I don't mean just a feel on the screen I mean what does it look like each what is the experience of writing on the page like is it something you look forward to and so I said the first time I ever got was no nobility and I never ever gotten used to writing a notability it wasn't just the fact that my handwriting didn't look as good as I wanted it to look but but breath the pen options that notability offers the ballpoint pen and the pressure-sensitive pen didn't really give me the ink II feel that I was looking for that was probably the one thing that always bothered me and I still remember the day I've got good notes and back then it was the previous version of good notes was good notes for currently we have good nights five I still remember selecting a blank white page and then beginning to write and I was blown away I've said this before it's nothing like paper it's it's a million times better than paper and it made my handwriting look but ten times better than what it looks like in real life here's an example of what my handwriting looked like in real life it's it's sort of inconsistent it's sort of messy it's sort of all over the place but when you're writing good notes disasters they designed the whole writing experience and all the mechanics involved with that everything about good notes made me fall in love with writing I didn't want to stop part of that is the writing mechanics but the other part of its you your handwriting actually looks a lot better than I mean just look at this it's unreal to me that's a deal breaker that's huge that's the biggest difference for me between good notes and notability because a lot of the time the hardest part about you know studying or learning is actually the first step we've started being in your election actually taking the effort to write something down and for me and this cattery goodnotes was a clear winner it's probably like the one hand writing experience in my entire life that I enjoy doing so so taking a step back and looking at but these apps in their entirety notability is amazing because it does the job of the of the folder with all its dividers and it organizes files for you and good notes is amazing because it has the most incredible writing experience you can find on the iPad they're coming to answer which one is my main note-taking yeah as I said at the start I used both of them and I did this very deliberately and so I especially split every single thing that I did in university into two categories this side I had anything that would belong inside a folder with dividers and I decided I had anything that would belong inside a notebook for example if I had a PDF of a textbook that would be filed away in a folder however let's just say I wanted to draw a diagram we'll make some notes on a topic that I had just learnt or maybe a spider diaper I would classify that as something that goes inside a notebook so I split everything I did in tissues into these two categories so anything that needs to be filed away in a systematic manner inside a folder like thing I would store in notability and anything that resembles some form of note-taking or note making or drawing diagrams or drawing a picture it would be made in good notes and I and I actually found that there was an incredible amount of benefit in creating this division because the things that needed to be organized stayed organized and notability and the things that needed to be messaged stayed messy and good notes good notes was a whole lot of fun to use and it gave me all these tools that enabled me to do all these crazy things that went on inside my head a while notability forced me to become more organized more disciplined to be honest but yet both these apps offers so much value to you as a user with the tools that they give and ultimately the experiences they provide if you haven't noticed the one thing that I haven't spoken about today is price and both these apps are paid apps and when you consider how much we actually spend on things like notebooks and pens you realize that these apps are well and truly worth their price these apps are such incredible investments because they help you organize your life of the student more importantly they enable you to enjoy the process of learning which is actually what you're meant to be doing when you're at school University I hope this video has helped you understand how I'm able to use both these apps every single day as a student so yeah I hope it was enjoyable and thank you for watching you

Channel: Samuel Suresh

Views: 2,068,117

Keywords: notabilty vs goodnotes, notability, goodnotes, ipad, ipad pro, ipad notes, best notetaking app ipad

Id: fIPE08nCur4

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019