Comparison

Awesome Points vs Papyrus

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Awesome Points

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Stay motivated each day with Awesome Points. Perfect for students, athletes and anyone looking to level up their productivity, improve their focus or start building better habits. Key Features: • Set yourself a reward for reaching your points goal target • Customise your points goal target from 1000 to 1 Million points • Win trophies for every points goal target reached. Your points score resets the following day • Include up to 30 daily goals to achieve and allocate up to 100 points for each goal • Set 15+ goals and achieve all of them for an 'Awesome Day' • Intuitive calendar includes history and the ability to set goals in the future • 2 unique scoring systems. Positive and negative (default). Negative is harder, subtracting points for daily goals not completed • Habits feature enables you to set recurring daily goals • Reset Score button enables you to set your progress back to zero • Midnight Reset. Add '*' to the end of any goal, if it is not completed by midnight your total score resets to zero • Goals can still be marked as completed the following day (exc. Midnight Reset) • 10 background themes • Sound FX can be turned on or off • Animations to celebrate your wins

About

Papyrus

Organize, annotate, and cite research papers within a native Apple ecosystem. This workspace allows you to import PDFs and citation records, take notes, and manage your reading collections as structured projects. It offers local-first storage with optional cloud sync and various export formats.

Highlights
  • Read and annotate PDFs
  • Organize citation records
  • Take Markdown notes
  • Search entire library
  • Create structured projects
  • Local-first storage
  • Optional iCloud/WebDAV sync
Features
Read full description

Papyrus is a native research workspace for reading, annotating, organizing, and citing PDFs — built for iPad, iPhone, and Mac. READ AND ANNOTATE Open a paper in a fast built-in reader. Highlight, underline, and mark up pages, and every highlight stays searchable and linked back to its source. Bookmark a page as you go, and pick the paper up later from a Reading card that remembers where you stopped. On iPad, a References tab looks up the open paper's reference list and related work, so you can follow a citation trail and add what matters to your library without leaving the page. WRITE ON THE PAGE WITH APPLE PENCIL Mark up a PDF directly on iPad — annotate a proof, sketch beside a figure, work a derivation out in the margin. Your ink belongs to the paper and travels with it, encrypted, to your other devices. NOTES BESIDE THE SOURCE Keep Markdown notes next to each paper: headings, tables, code blocks, LaTeX math, and [[note]] cross-references. Notes stay with the paper and export as PDF when you need to share them. NOTEBOOKS Gather notes from across your library onto themed shelves — a topic, a chapter you're drafting, a reading group. Filing a note copies nothing and moves nothing: it still belongs to its paper, still says which paper that is, and one tap takes you there and back. A note can sit on several shelves at once. Fill a new shelf from what you've already written, search it by a note's text or by the paper behind it, order it four ways — including oldest paper first, which reads your own notes forward through the literature — and export a whole shelf as one Markdown document. All Notes lists everything you've written in one place, filed or not. ORGANIZE THE WAY YOU THINK Folders — a paper can live in several — plus tags, star ratings, and seven colored flags you can name yourself, each with its own shape so they stay tellable apart at a glance. Smart Collections keep themselves current from rules you set, including flag rules. Review Duplicates finds look-alike papers and merges each set after you confirm, combining tags, folders, projects, notes, and highlights. FIND ANYTHING Search titles, authors, notes, and highlights — or the full text inside your PDFs. TURN READING INTO WRITING Projects are where a reading pile becomes a manuscript. Group the papers behind a chapter or article, give each one a role, and capture evidence — claims, quotes, and your own interpretation — tied back to the source paper and page. Write the project note from a template (related work, method comparison, experiment plan, thesis chapter, reviewer response), keep its revision history, and run a preflight that catches missing citation keys and metadata gaps before you export. Export a bundle with Markdown, a BibTeX bibliography, and the PDFs. IMPORT AND CITE Bring in PDFs, whole folders, or BibTeX and RIS files — including libraries exported from Mendeley and Zotero. Papyrus looks up metadata by DOI or arXiv ID and fills in the details. Save papers straight from Safari with the included extension. Copy citations in the style you write in, and export BibTeX or RIS whenever you need them. READ ANYWHERE Paste an arXiv link, a DOI, or a PDF URL and Papyrus imports it, looks up the details, and fetches the PDF. Add a paper to Read Later and its PDF downloads ahead of time, so a flight or a commute doesn't need a signal. Ask Siri, or search from the Home Screen, to pick up the paper you were last reading on the page you left it. YOUR LIBRARY, YOUR DEVICES Your library syncs over iCloud across iPad, iPhone, and Mac. No account to create, no tracking, no ads. Free to download and use — every feature included, no in-app purchases, no subscription.

Screenshots

Awesome Points4 screens
Papyrus4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is iOS requirement: Awesome Points at 15.0 against Papyrus's 17.0. On price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases 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

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Awesome Points sells 1 one-off in-app purchase and Papyrus sells 2 one-off in-app purchases. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Awesome Points ships an update every 10 days, Papyrus weekly. The most recent releases landed on September 25, 2026 and September 26, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard1 real difference · 8 level
Awesome Points versus Papyrus: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterAwesome PointsPapyrus
PriceFreeFree
Rating—5.0 (1 ratings) — better
Number of ratings—1 — better
Update frequencyEvery 10 daysWeekly — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesYes
Monetization—Free with in-app purchases
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac — betteriPhone, iPad, Mac
Requires iOS15.0 — better17.0
Further details — not scored
Size103 MB25 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperAwesome PointsZhenda Fu

In-app purchases

1 purchases

Awesome Points

One-time1
  • Unlock Extra Goals$1.99
2 purchases

Papyrus

One-time2
  • Papyrus Lifetime Unlock$3.99
  • Papyrus Lifetime Unlock$5.99

Questions

Is Awesome Points free?
Awesome Points is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Papyrus free?
Papyrus is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do Awesome Points or Papyrus have ads?
Neither Awesome Points nor Papyrus shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Awesome Points or Papyrus?
Awesome Points ships an update every 10 days, and Papyrus weekly. Most recently, Awesome Points was updated on September 25, 2026 and Papyrus on September 26, 2026.

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