Penbook vs Birthing Planner
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Penbook
Create custom digital notebooks with a vast library of stationery or import your own PDFs for annotation. Write naturally with a stylus and organize your notes with dynamic features like live planners and searchable handwriting.
- Live Paper dynamic stationery
- Over 400 stationery types
- Import and annotate PDFs
- Natural handwriting with stylus
- Searchable handwritten notes
- Shape recognition
- Customizable notebook covers
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Write naturally with your Apple Pencil on Live Paper with Penbook. Build your perfect notebook from more than four hundred types of stationery. Then, use the best digital inking technology to pour your ideas, notes, plans, and dreams into it. Penbook's Live Paper is way smarter than ordinary stationery. Schedule your life on a monthly planner that shows a real calendar, organize your day with a day planner that shows you what time it is, and record your nutrition on a food diary that knows what day it is. Or, bring your own stationery! Import your PDFs into Penbook for quick annotation and editing. Give your notebooks colorful covers with fun art, and share them so your notes are always where you need them. FEATURES • Live Paper, the dynamic stationery that uses the smarts of your iPad and iPhone • Over 400 of academic, scientific, and planning stationeries • Import PDFs and use them as notebooks • Write naturally with your Apple Pencil, stylus, or finger • Unlimited unique cover combinations for your notes • Search your handwritten notes for words or phrases • Snap your strokes to perfect shapes with shape recognition INCLUDED STATIONERIES Penbook has a huge selection of customizable stationery. Each page of your notebook can be different, turning your iPad or iPhone into a magic notebook: • Blank stationery, with an optional date and configurable margin • Ruled paper with variable density • Graph paper with four options for square sizes • Dot stationery, either squared or isometric (offset) • Cross stationery with configurable margins and density • To Do pages with four layout options • Monthly habit paper for tracking streaks, habits, and goals • Day planner paper with a live updating timeline and calendar, and three layouts • Weekly planner paper that highlights the current time and date • Monthly planner paper that keeps track of the current day and shows you what's coming next • Yearly stationery for getting a complete overview of your next 365 days • Cornell paper for taking perfect study notes • French ruled (Séyès) paper • Penmanship practice paper • Table stationery for hand-written spreadsheets • Polar graph paper for plotting radial data • Semi-log and loglog paper for data with exponential growth or decay • Isometric stationery with equilateral (60-60-60) or isosceles (75-75-30) triangles • Perspective paper, configurable with one, two, or three vanishing points • Developer stationery with device stencils and configurable note-taking areas • Storyboard paper with 3 frame aspect ratios • Engineering paper with variable density • Chemistry paper for easily sketching molecules • Staff and tablature (music) paper with optional linked staves GET THE MOST OUT OF PENBOOK Use all of Penbook's stationery and writing features in a single notebook for free for as long as you like. Upgrade to Penbook Premium to create and export unlimited notebooks, receive access to new stationery and covers as they're designed, and get regular app updates. Penbook Premium is available by purchasing a yearly subscription or a one-time (lifetime) in-app purchase. When you choose to upgrade with the yearly subscription, you can start using Penbook Premium for free with a 7-day free trial. During the trial, cancel any time until 24 hours before the trial expires, and you will not be charged. If you do not cancel, you will be automatically billed for the yearly subscription when your free trial ends. Payment will be charged to your Apple ID account at the confirmation of purchase. Subscription automatically renews unless it is canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Your account will be charged for renewal within 24 hours prior to the end of the current period. You can manage and cancel your subscriptions by going to your account settings on the App Store after purchase. Our customer-first privacy policy: https://penbook.app/privacy-policy Penbook's terms of use: https://penbook.app/terms-of-use
Birthing Planner
Track breeding, due dates, and birthing results for any animal species. Record offspring details and access historical data. View overall statistics filtered by your preferences.
- Track breeding and due dates
- Record birthing results and offspring
- Support for multiple animal species
- Archive and reactivate past data
- View filtered overall statistics
- Detailed record keeping
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Birthing Planner is an app that was designed in consultation with an active shepherd who was looking for an inexpensive yet convenient way to keep track of breeding dates, due dates, and birthing results from his flock of sheep. Thinking there are many people out there that could use this sort of app it was designed to be used with any species the user desires, whether it's rabbits, dogs, sheep, goats, horses, llamas, etc. By taking a little time to set things up in the app (like species, breeds within a species, expected gestation length, and current adults) the user will quickly be able to enter and keep track of breeding/due dates. The app also gives the user a way to keep as detailed a record of birthing activities as the user desires. User can enter offspring of each delivery and keep this data for years to come, where it's all ready to be recalled at a moments notice and filtered according to user's preference. Another nice feature of the app is that it will store all the information you enter for as long as you want, yet gives you the ability to archive past data that is no longer relevant on a daily basis. At any time the user can reactivate the archived data if they are wanting to review past results or past animals. One last feature users will find informative is the ability to see overall stats. Like total number of adults, total number of offspring recorded, average gestation length, and average birthing rate. All of these stats can be filtered multiple times to allow the user to extract the results they are seeking.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Penbook at Free against Birthing Planner's $4.99. Penbook also leads on update cadence (every 5 days vs every 13 months) and ratings volume (46K vs 2). Birthing Planner's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 22) and rating (5.0 vs 4.5). On ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Penbook is free to download; Birthing Planner costs $4.99 up front. Penbook sells 11 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month. Birthing Planner asks for nothing beyond the download.
Birthing Planner holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.5. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Penbook has 46K ratings behind it against 2, so its average is the more settled of the two.
Penbook ships an update every 5 days, Birthing Planner every 13 months. The most recent releases landed on October 25, 2026 and October 8, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Penbook | Birthing Planner |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — better | $4.99 |
| Rating | 4.5 (46K ratings) | 5.0 (2 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 57.8% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 46K — better | 2 |
| Update frequency | Every 5 days — better | Every 13 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases — better | Paid |
| Best chart rank | #87 — better | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 18.1 | 11.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 142 MB | 28 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Pencil Research | Mark Briggs |
Customer experience
Penbook
Birthing Planner
Bugs and requests
Penbook
Reported bugs
5 issues- Sticker resizing issues causing app freezes
- Ruler placement and alignment problems
- Inconsistent behavior when switching between pages
- Calendar sync not working as expected
- PDF import and annotation functionality not reliable
Requested features
5 requests- Allow custom notebook covers or images
- Add text box and typing capabilities
- Improve organization with folders or tags
- Provide more customization options for templates
- Implement a more intuitive undo/redo system
Birthing Planner
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Penbook
- Penbook Premium5 variants$4.991 Month
- Penbook Premium$7.991 Month
- Penbook Premium7 Days trial3 variants$14.991 Year
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- Penbook Premium7 Days trial2 variants$19.991 Year
- Penbook Premium7 Days trial2 variants$29.991 Year
- Penbook Premium$29.991 Year
- Penbook Premium7 Days trial3 variants$39.991 Year
- Premium Lifetime (Loyalty)$29.99
- Penbook Premium Lifetime2 variants$49.99
- Penbook Premium Lifetime$59.99
Show 1 moreShow fewer
- Penbook Premium Lifetime$69.99
Birthing Planner
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Penbook free?
Is Birthing Planner free?
Which has better reviews, Penbook or Birthing Planner?
Do Penbook or Birthing Planner have ads?
Which is updated more often, Penbook or Birthing Planner?
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