Leave a Review Notability
Best note-taking app
I’ve waited a long time to write this because I want to know an app fully before judging it. I’ve used Notability for the past 3+ years along with GoodNotes. I can confidently say that Notability is the superior app. Yes, there are many more features that I wish were present in both apps but, as a whole, this is the best note taking app. In its basic form, handwriting in the app is perfect. Whatever software that GoodNotes uses to try to improve your handwriting is incredibly annoying and causes it to look worse. Its not that way with Notability. What you write is what it shows. The file management style is much easier to follow than the endless folders in GoodNotes. Also, when major updates come, you don’t have to pay for it. Paper templates and being able to set your 3 most used colors and pen sizes right on the task bar will HOPEFULLY be coming to Notability soon. That is the biggest drawback I think. Having to do multiple touches every time I want to switch pen size can be annoying and when taking notes in lecture, can take up valuable time. Having those right on the top bar would be INVALUABLE. Other than that, this app is superior to GoodNotes in general.Show lessMillbean
Great for school
I’ve been using this for med school, and it has been fantastic. I’m able to download all professor’s powerpoint presentations to notability and sort them in a pretty simple way. I’m able to search all my notes pretty easily, even for things that I write on the iPad which can come in handy. No real complaints about the app, but I can always ask for recommendations. 1. I wish I could search in one division. For instance, if I am searching a drug that works in a combination like phenytoin, one subject it can be found in is cardiovascular and also neuro. I can search all notes or I can search one ‘subject’, but not a division (one tier higher than subject, a division holds subjects). I do think that the phone app and computer app can be improved to be more on par with the features of the iPad, and I think the sidecar ability can definitely be improved to work a lot better with the computer version of notability. Also, I wish it was possible to be able to organize with 1-2 more tiers. That being said, this app has worked way better than I expected it to for school. I’ve never used goodnotes or onenote, but notability is worth a shot for sure.Show lessBradZ2023
Not as great as I thought it would be
Many issues that I don’t like. The microphone function has a lot of potential but ultimately the only thing I can hear after recording in large lecture rooms are staticky background noises and the tapping of my pencil when I’m writing.
The left handed mode doesn’t make much sense to me. I’m used to functions being on the top and now functions are on the bottom and don’t actually help with being left handed.
There’s also A LOT of skipping that occurs which is incredibly annoying and there are times when I will be writing a letter but it is automatically changed to a shape. When I try press the back function to erase the shape, letters written before the shape are erased so I have to use the actual eraser. In instances like that, it would be nice to have a forward function because somethings are accidentally erased but now I have to completely rewrite it.
The font size for pencil and higher are completely out of wack. I tend to write pretty hard so the writing gets very thick even though I have it on a thin setting and the examples of the thickness aren’t very representative. I also wish we had more control over the colors we prefer. All default colors are first which I only use black and it comes with a bunch of colors I don’t like but can’t delete them or change them to colors I’d prefer. I came from GoodNotes and I’m very use to their functions which might be the issue but since I paid for notability I actually want to use it.Show lessangrmtz
A great note taking app for school but the Bugs are becoming annoying
This app could probably be the best note taking app for students just because of the recording feature. The tools up top are fine but they are missing so much compared to GoodNotes. Most of the size for the Pen are useless. After the 4th or 5th size the strokes become way too big for any practical purpose. Same thing with the highlighter except it the opposite. The varying sizes for the erasers is great though because I can basically erase pixels or entire sentences if needed. The cut and paste tool will not select small strokes or words for whatever reason, so sometimes I’m forced to erase and redraw or write. Other than that its works great. Seriously the only tool carrying this app is the Recording feature, GoodNotes has them beat in every other department. (I never mentioned the lack of templates). If GoodNotes has that feature I would go back to GoodNotes immediately, but they don’t so I stay with Notability. Now the bugs are getting annoying. I cant go a 1 minute without my lines not drawing or the app freezing or the zoom in feature freezing the app. Also the random shapes I get when writing sometimes that I cant delete with the back button and for some reason can only be removed by the eraser. Idk maybe these bugs will eventually send me back to GoodNotes and lectures will have to be recorded the hard way.Show lessRico_927
I’ve never had this issue before
I’ve been using Notability for about 7 years now. As a student, it is important to make sure you don’t miss any information and sometimes that can be difficult if the professor goes too fast. One tool that I started using about 3 years ago was the microphone to record lectures. I loved it because I could follow along with what the professor was saying and what I wrote as well. Right now I’m really upset with Notability because of a bug. Recently I’ve been having problems when I completely close out of the app. Not only are my recordings getting deleted, but so are my notes!!! That’s a major problem that needs to be fixed immediately. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find an app quite like notability, so I will have to stick with good old fashioned pen and paper until this problem is resolved.
I’ve also been having problems with the other tools. I usually have no problem with changing colors, font sizes, or anything related to that nature but I can’t even do that anymore! This isn’t a huge issue as I can still select the right tool, but it’s hard to organize my notes. I also can’t create subjects or dividers anymore which is driving me insane! It’s the beginning of the semester which means I need to be able to organize myself from the start to work efficiently throughout the rest of the semester. I’ve never had any issues with this app before, but these are some major problems that need to be fixed before I continue using it.Show lessHorse girl 710
Developer Response
Thanks for the review and sorry to hear about the issues you're encountering. When you have a moment could you reach out to support@gingerlabs.com and mention this review so we can better assist you? Thanks in advance!Great app but could be improved for teaching
I gladly bought this app as I use it to teach University classes. It allows me to write with my ApplePencil while projecting my notes from the iPad, so after every lecture I have an editable version of the notes and I can produce a PDF. Also, I can include multimedia contents, and images from the web.
However I found difficult importing external PDF in an open note as a page, and if this is the first page I cannot remove it anymore. Also, the app could be improved with a couple of very helpful additions: 1) to re-use the notes the following academic year, I would like to be able to “hide” part of the notes, to “unhide” one line at a time as I explain the notes; 2) an even better option would be to be able to create a greyed-out version of the notes in order to re-write on them during the class, i.e. as if I was writing for the first time. A found a workaround using semi-transparent boxes to overlay to the notes, but now this feature seemed gone with the latest updates, which is disappointing since updates shoul “add” and not remove features. I hope someone from the developing team is reading these reviews .Show lessmrzplll
Fix iCloud syncing issues
I love noteability and would give 5 stars if it weren’t for the iCloud issues. I have the app on my phone, MacBook, and iPad. I mainly use noteability on my iPad and enjoyed being able to create a note, and seamlessly read or edit it on my laptop or phone. However every once in awhile noteability would freeze all of my notes on my iPad and I wouldn’t be able to read or edit until it was done syncing which would take at least 30 minutes, sometimes hours. What’s even more frustrating is that sometimes I’ll be editing a note and the app would be syncing that same note to the cloud in the background. So when I exit the note I have 2 sometimes 5 copies of the same note, and I have no idea which one is up to date. This especially happens if I have noteability open on more than one device at a time.
I got so sick of it that I’ve disabled iCloud syncing and only use it on my iPad, which is a shame because I paid 10 extra dollars for the app on my MacBook (which is absolutely not worth it on its own by the way). The only device that gives all of the features that noteability has to offer is the iPad.
With that being said, I absolutely love the app on my iPad and I hope that the dev team will fix this issue soon.Show lessChris 123abc
The Best App You Will Ever Purchase!
I know for starters this app may seem like a lot, especially with the cost for both the iPhone/iPad and the cost of the Mac apps, BUT ITS WORTH IT! Being a college student I use this app every single day in all my classes. The app is so easy to use, and so intuitive. The iPad app is amazing for use with Apple Pencil or other styluses, and the fun pen colors and paper choices make notes less boring. This app also works with TONS of file types which you can import and annotate. I have nor used the voice feature yet, but I am thrilled to as I am sure it is as good as everything else this app offers. Finally my favorite feature is that notability automatically saves all my files and updates them constant across all my devices, so I never have to wait for my files to load. The useful feature of backing up the notes to google drive or Dropbox is amazingly helpful and lets me have my notes accessible even when I am not on my own laptop with the app. Overall MUST BUY for college students especially, or anyone who is a frequent note taker or writer. Absolutely, 100%, hands down, the most amazing app on the App Store!!Show lessThomas419
I can see why this is #1
Honestly, I was really debating on whether on not I should use Notability to take my notes or if I should use GoodNotes 5. In the end, I ended up getting both just to try them out, and what I found was that the UI for Notability was almost flawless for me. Being able to record audio on here is great, but I think the biggest factor for me was how it felt like writing notes in this app. It’s literally feels like I am just writing on paper. My handwriting on Goodnotes 5 just seemed messier and I noticed that they would try to alter my handwriting a bit. If I could make some suggestions, it would be nice if the highlighter could go under the words rather than over it. I would also love the option to just automatically switch back to pen mode after using the eraser (Useful tool in goodnotes). There would be times where I’m writing and the app doesn’t register it and would momentarily freeze a bit. But these are minor inconveniences. Overall, this is a great app to take notes on and annotate PDFs (what I mainly do). The partial eraser is amazing and the automatic backup is a extremely convenient. Definitely recommend it for college!Show lessBowlayo
Great university study tool with a couple issues
I was using OneNote on a Surface tablet until the digitizer stopped working. I decided to try using an iPad Pro instead, since they’re lighter. Notability was the only app to offer most of the same functionality as OneNote on a Windows tablet. There are many things that I prefer about Notability, but there are a few issues that prevent me from giving it more stars: first, I would like the ability to create a group of commonly used highlighters/pens for marking up documents. I have a system of using certain colors to represent certain things, and I would like to be able to organize all those highlighters and pens into a group where I determine the order and placement. If that is possible in Notability, I haven’t been able to figure it out. Secondly, I use Notability in a setting where I’m regularly working with several languages (including RTL - Right to Left languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic). Notability does not have good support for combining multiple languages in one document at this time, especially not mixed English-Hebrew or English-Aramaic. Please give Notability the ability to recognize and format RTL languages. I can do that natively on most Apple apps, and many 3rd party apps, so the inability to do that on Notability really sticks out. Please improve these issues, and I will gladly give it a 5 star rating. In fact, if those two issues are fixed, I won’t even miss using OneNote for most of my coursework.Show lessj micah
