Best note-taking apps for iPad and Apple Pencil

Microsoft OneNote

Price: Free | Download

Not only is Microsoft's OneNote completely free, but it covers all the basics most people need from a notes app, with the added bonus of cloud syncing between your devices through OneDrive.

OneNote also supports collaborative work, by allowing for shared notepads. To-do lists such as daily errands, memos and anything else you may need to write can be well organized in pages, sections and notebooks.

The available pen colors and pen settings can help add variety to your notes, while a "Convert to Shapes" mode automatically converts hand drawn shapes such as circles into perfectly regular ones. Support for images and image manipulation, an important feature to many, is also here, and works great.

Notability

Price: $8.99| Download

Notability enjoys great popularity and for good reason, as it's arguably the most feature-packed notes app for iPad.

It supports a large variety of multimedia, not just static images, but GIFs, web pages, scanned textbooks and even audio, and allows for looking up handwritten text, written with precision thanks to the app's fine-tuned digital ink. It's also cloud-syncing your notes via iCloud, all that easily making it the best iPad app for students.

Conveniently, Notablity was also made with multi-tasking in mind, allowing for working with two notes side-by-side, in addition to it having a dedicated Note Switcher for quickly moving between notes, on top of supporting Drag & Drop.

GoodNotes 5

Price: $7.99| Download

GoodNotes 5 is a combination of digital notepad and PDF markup tool, as noted by the App Store editors. It delivers a precise and natural writing experience thanks to its signature vector ink engine.

As the previous apps on this list, it too supports pen colors, thickness and style, as well as easily switching to a highlighter or eraser. Like Notability, GoodNotes 5 too can read your handwriting and allow for searching through it when needed, as well as converting it to text for easy sharing into other apps or even web pages.

This app also supports for two pages to be open side-by-side, and for quick switching between documents using tabs. A tool for easily drawing perfect shapes such as circles and lines is available. As mentioned earlier, GoodNotes supports importing, searching and navigation through PDF files, but it also works with PowerPoint, Word, image files and more.


Honorable mentions go to the popular and free Evernote app, which is better suited for iPad keyboard users, and the free Notes app that comes with iPad and iPhone. The latter is vastly less advanced than previously mentioned apps, but could easily be good enough for many.

For those looking into more complex apps, I would recommend first trying the free OneNote before buying anything else.