Notability vs Goodnotes: Which Is Better in 2020?

what's up guys this is paul with paperlike and when it comes to note-taking apps on the ipad there are just two that stand above the rest and they're always talked about as being the best note-taking apps for the ipad and those are of course good notes and notability i've used notability for over two years now for all of my notes with my college classes and just last month i downloaded goodnotes and i've been using that for the past few weeks just to see what it's all about and today i'll be comparing both to see which one will work best for you and the way you like to take notes now when it comes to the user interface notability keeps it super simple you just open the app you're immediately greeted by your organization system on the left hand side with a preview of your notes on the right hand side notability basically breaks everything down into subjects and in this case i've created subjects for all my different classes and within each subject i have all of my notes i like to have one note for every chapter or every section we go through in class and then you also have dividers that can organize subjects and i've been using those to divide up my notes from different semesters with good notes when you open the app you're immediately greeted by this documents page that contains all of your folders notebooks your scans and your photos and this brings me to one of the biggest fundamental differences between good notes and notability because in notability everything is contained within a note itself if you want to add a picture you can do that but you have to either add it to a new note or into an existing note with good notes you can still add an image into a note but you also have the option of storing the picture itself in a standalone document which just makes more sense in my opinion especially when it comes to things like pdfs that you want to import goodnotes also has the option of sorting by date name and file type and you can choose from a list and an icon view and this entire layout just reminds me of the finder app on mac os which is really nice if you're someone who's familiar with a mac although i do feel that the organizational setup on notability is a bit more intuitive because with goodnotes you have to go into a folder to see your documents while in notability the preview just allows you to see everything at a quick glance and it just makes moving things around a little bit easier as well now as far as search functionality goes both apps allow you to search through handwritten notes which is a really cool feature but goodnotes does it a little bit better by showing you each instance of that word if there are multiple within the same document [Music] with notability creating a note is as simple as just tapping on the new note icon in the upper right hand corner and you're immediately in a new note that you can rename and customize to your liking now goodnote's default way of creating a new note is the notebook when you make a notebook it asks you to choose a cover which is cool if you like the aesthetic of having a cover but a bit unnecessary for digital notes in my opinion so i normally select the no cover option and while i feel like the idea of having a digital notebook sounds appealing it's just not as practical in everyday use because it's easier from an organizational perspective to just create separate files and notes for each chapter in a class so for this reason i personally like to just use the quick note feature that just creates a new note similar to how notability makes a new note now as far as document templates go goodnotes has so many different options to choose from it has the standard lined grid and dotted paper but you also have options like cornell if you like to take notes with the cornell system you have legal paper you have a monthly planner and even music paper meanwhile notability has the basics of lined grid and dotted paper but nothing else although you do have 15 different paper options to choose from while goodnotes just has the standard white yellow and black now another thing i like about goodnotes is that you can mix paper styles and templates within a single document so for example you can have a lined page then a grid page if you need to draw a graph or something while in notability you have to have the entire document be the same template both apps allow for vertical and horizontal scrolling but one thing i really like about notability is that it will automatically add an extra page at the end of the document which saves a bit of time and mental energy if you're just in the zone taking notes now i'm a big fan of both apps page view features which allows you to just quickly see all of your pages in your document with a zoomed out perspective and you can see your bookmarks as well and you can find what you're looking for at a glance notability does this off to the side of your document while goodnotes has a dedicated layout for this one thing i really like about goodnotes is their tab system setup where you can just quickly change between different notes that are open at the same time it's kind of like switching between pages on a web browser and this is just really useful for multitasking speaking of multitasking it's great on both apps now to multitask on goodnotes you basically open ipad os's integrated multitasker so that means you'll open another window of goodnotes side by side or you can click the open in a new window button within the app this basically creates a new instance of that app that you can resize side by side however you want but because notability has its own multitasking system you can actually have two notes open side by side and another app open on your ipad which is definitely a little overkill on some of the smaller ipads but if you have the 12.9 inch ipad pro i could see this being really useful [Music] now when it comes to what these two apps were designed to do take notes it's no surprise that they both excel in this category for simple handwritten notes you really can't go wrong with either although there are plenty of minor details that do vary between the two apps and notability has one major feature that just takes it above and beyond in terms of note taking in my opinion but first let's take a look at the basic pen options for each so in notability you can select between 12 sizes of stroke a normal and pressure sensitive brush two dotted line options and a variety of different color boards including a custom color option goodnotes allows for a little bit more customizability with three different pen options a similar color board and a line thickness slider essentially giving you about 40 sizes of pen thickness to choose from the highlighter tools are very similar but i do like how goodnotes has the draw and a straight line toggle which is perfect for highlighting text documents there's also a laser pointer feature which allows you to use the apple pencil like a laser pointer on your documents which i could see being really useful for teachers who are screen sharing a zoom class but i don't think the average user would use this one too much so i wish there was a way to remove it from the toolbar i really like notability's favorite writing tool toolbar which you can move around the screen and use it to quickly switch between up to eight favorited tools now when it comes to erasing i have a strong preference for notability's eraser both allow you to erase the entire stroke or just partially erase a stroke but notability gives you 12 sizes of eraser options to choose from while goodnotes just has three because of this even the smallest one is still too big for fine details so i find myself having to zoom in when i need to erase something really small i also like how notability's shape creation tool works you just draw a shape and hold it at the end for about a second and the shape will just snap into place this is super easy and works well for circles triangles squares lines curves and arrows goodnotes recently added the hold to snap feature just like notability but it also has its own dedicated shape creation tool which also works well except for squares i feel like i have to draw my squares perfectly or it will snap to a trapezoid shape goodnotes also doesn't have arrows as a built-in shape unlike notability so you have to draw a curve and then another line to get an arrow one nice thing about goodnote shapes is that you can easily resize both the length and the width of your shapes after the shape is drawn while in notability you can only change the scale and the selection tool is practically the same between both apps it allows you to select a part of your notes and resize or recolor and even convert handwritten notes to text which works really well on both apps and if you're interested in extra goodies that you can add to your notes notability allows you to insert things like gifs and stickers and even digital sticky notes which is pretty cool they also even have their own in-app store where you can purchase more stickers and they have some free packs available as well this is a nice little bonus if you're someone who likes to kind of decorate and give some life to your notes i'm not that type of note taker but if you are you might really like that feature one nice feature goodnotes offers is the ability to collaborate on the same note over icloud so both apps obviously allow you to export to a pdf and then send that note to a friend or a classmate but goodnotes is the only one that allows this feature where both can contribute to the same note so for this to work both users have to have good notes and they have to have sharing turned on and i don't think you can collaborate at the same time but it's still pretty cool that you can work on the same document together and so i think we've covered most exclusive features for both apps but there's still one feature remaining and this is my favorite digital note-taking feature i've ever used and that's the note replay feature on notability this allows you to record your class using the ipad's microphone and it will sync up the recording to the notes you were taking at that time and with notability's latest update you can go in and modify your recordings so you can delete or crop out the parts you don't need and even change the volume as necessary note replay makes going back and reviewing your notes really nice and enjoyable and it's just a super valuable learning tool for me [Music] and finally the last thing i wanted to talk about with both apps are the storage and backup options available for each this is super important because if you somehow lose or break your ipad you definitely don't want to lose all your notes with it and it's also nice just to be able to access your notes on other devices so both have cloud support for the biggest services including dropbox google drive and onedrive i personally back up all of my notes to google drive and i've tried this on both apps and it works perfectly now if you want to back up to icloud good notes and notability will automatically sync to your iphone and mac os devices that also have good notes and notability installed although one thing to keep in mind is that goodnotes is a universal purchase on the app store so that means if you get it on your ipad you'll also get it for free on your laptop but at least for now with notability you still have to make a separate purchase on your laptop and your ipad so that pretty much covers all of the major differences between good notes and notability i'm sure there are definitely a few things that i missed but i think you pretty much get the gist of what these two apps are all about now in my eyes notability is great for someone looking for just the basics you know just nice clean handwritten notes maybe throw some stickers on there if you're into that and if you want to really advance your note-taking note replay is an amazing feature goodnotes on the other hand has a few more features that appeal towards a slightly more hardcore notetaker it's easier to work with photos and pdfs because you can just store them in standalone files you can have several notes open in different tabs at the same time and i really like the preset paper templates it just feels like there's a few more options to customize than notability but for me i will still be sticking with notability partly because it's just what i'm used to but i also just love that note replay feature but like i said earlier you really can't go wrong with either app thank you all so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Paperlike

Views: 303,009

Keywords: notetaking, ipad, apple pencil, paperlike, goodnotes, notability, goodnotes vs notability, app review, iOS

Id: IFri0N2gsH0

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020