iPads are incredibly convenient for taking notes on the go. Whether you’re in class, at a work meeting, or on your own when a great idea pops up, you can use an iPad for note taking and recording your thoughts. Note taking apps can be used to plan projects, make weekly checklists, sketch ideas, or record anything else you want to jot down.
Unsurprisingly, various companies have created their own note taking app that takes advantage of the iPad’s versatility. Which of these apps you should pick can be a difficult decision. To help with that, we have curated a list of the five best note taking apps for iPad. These apps include both free and paid apps so you can take notes no matter your budget. Learn how to take notes on iPad with each of the below apps.
Best Note Taking Apps for iPad
Evernote: The Best Note Taking App for Teams
Evernote is one of the best note taking apps for iPad, desktop, and mobile. It lets you organize your notes how you want with notebooks, searchable tags, and hundreds of templates. You can also attach images, audio, and clippings of web pages and PDFs to your notes. You can even scan documents and save them in your notes! Evernote’s web clipper tool also lets you annotate your clippings and PDFs. When searching for your notes, you can look them up by tag, title, date, content type, and words in the note (including words in a picture or handwriting).
Additionally, teams can use Evernote to share notes and work on notes together. Team leaders can create shared team spaces that include a virtual bulletin board with important announcements and shared projects. Furthermore, anyone can make their personal board searchable to others in their business, thus inviting comments and recommendations.
You can use Evernote for free across 2 devices with a 25MB maximum note size and 60MB monthly upload limit. For more features including PDF annotation, offline access, custom templates, and unlimited device syncing, you can purchase a premium account for $7.99/mo. Premium also comes with a 200MB maximum note size and 10GBB monthly upload limit. Finally, businesses can spend $14.99/user/mo for the above features along with shared spaces and more monthly uploads.
Apple Notes: The Best Notes App for iPad You Can Get for Free
Apple Notes is the best note taking app that you can get for free on iPad and other Apple products. You can divide your notes into folders for easy organization and pin your most important notes to the top of the app. While creating your notes, you can add checklists, images, videos, and file attachments. These file attachments can also be documents that you can scan from the app. You can also draw on your notes with your finger or Apple Pencil.
When searching for notes, you can search by word content, images, or attachments. The Notes app can recognize any images found in your notes, even if they’re not labeled. And if you need to share your notes with others, you can add them to your note or note folder if they’re uploaded on iCloud. Notes can be shared over iMessage, email, or via short link.
Notability: The Best Notes App for iPad Sharing
Notability is a note taking app made especially for iPad, iPhone, and Mac. You can create notes with typing, handwriting, drawings, audio, and images. You can even upload PDFs to your notes and annotate them! To further edit your notes, you can scale, rotate, and recolor your sketches or zoom in on specific details. To organize notes, you can divide them by customizable subjects and dividers.
Notability also makes it easy to share notes. You can upload notes to iCloud for quick and easy sharing. You can also backup your notes to Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, WebDAV, and OneDrive. Others can leave written and audio comments on your notes which you can review in the app.
Notability offers a free app with limited note edits and basic paper templates. For unlimited note edits, more templates, handwriting recognition, and auto-backup, you can purchase a premium plan for $14.99/yr.
Good Notes: The Best App for Handwritten Notes
Good Notes is well-known as a best note taking app for iPad. The app is optimized for handwritten notes and sketches. Because Good Notes uses handwriting recognition and OCR technology, you can search for any word you’ve written. For organization, you can sort your notes into folders and subfolders. You can also personalize your notebooks with different covers and paper templates. When you need to store or share your notes, you can upload them to Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or iCloud.
You can purchase Good Notes for a flat fee of $7.99.
Nebo: The Best Note Taking App for Apple Pencil
Nebo is the best note taking app for iPad with Apple Pencil. Furthermore, Nebo is unique in that it can convert all handwriting to typed notes. You can also edit your handwritten notes just like you would typed ones. Additionally, you can add rich content to your notes like diagrams, math equations, images, and sketches. For all content, you can move it around the page, resize it, or copy it onto another note. You can also import PDFs and annotate them on your notes. Once you’re ready to share your notes, you can export them as Word documents, PDF files, or HTML pages or publish them on the web, where you can share them with a unique link.
Nebo can be downloaded for free from the app store. However, Nebo includes in-app purchases for features like unlimited notebooks, cloud sync, multi-page export, and PDF import and annotation. You can also purchase all of the above features altogether at a discounted price.
Check Out More Note Taking Apps
Want to look over more note taking options? You can check out our article on How to Pick Out a Good Notes App for further recommendations.