StarNote vs Better Notes

StarNote is a clean and powerful note-taking app for handwriting, PDF annotation, study, work, and everyday planning. Write naturally with your stylus, organize notebooks, mark up PDFs, and keep all your ideas in one simple workspace. Built for students, professionals, and tablet users, StarNote helps you take class notes, review lecture slides, annotate documents, plan your day, and build a paperless study or work system. With smooth handwriting, flexible notebooks, PDF markup, and digital planning tools, StarNote makes it easy to capture ideas and stay organized. No monthly subscription. Choose a one-time purchase and enjoy a long-term note-taking tool without ongoing fees. Download StarNote and start building your digital notebook today.

Better Notes is a focused idea studio for handwriting, sketching, typed notes and PDF annotation. It combines the freedom of paper with the organisation and editing tools of a modern native app. WRITE NATURALLY Capture smooth, pressure-aware ink with fountain pen, ballpoint, fineliner, pencil, calligraphy, brush, reed pen, marker and highlighter tools. Adjust colour, width and stabilisation, then erase by stroke or precisely through ink. BUILD PAGES YOUR WAY Choose blank, ruled, dotted, grid, Cornell and margin paper. Mix A4, A5, Letter and Legal pages in portrait or landscape—even inside the same notebook. Add, duplicate, bookmark and reorder your thinking page by page. MORE THAN HANDWRITING Add editable styled text, shapes and images. Move, rotate, recolour and organise content across independent layers with visibility, locking and opacity controls. ANNOTATE PDFs Import a PDF, write directly over it and keep its links intact. Export finished work as PDF, PNG, JPEG, Markdown or plain text whenever you need to share or continue elsewhere. RECORD THE MOMENT Attach audio to a page during a lecture, meeting or brainstorming session. Rename recordings and jump back to the page where each recording began. FIND AND ORGANISE IDEAS Create spaces and nested folders, add tags, mark favourites, revisit recent notes and recover items from Trash. Search notebook titles, tags and typed page content from one fast local library. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Better Notes works locally and offline. Your notebooks and recordings stay on your device unless you choose to export or share them. There is no required account, advertising or behavioural tracking. BUILT FOR APPLE DEVICES Enjoy a responsive light interface designed for touch, Apple Pencil, pointer and keyboard. Better Notes supports keyboard shortcuts, accessibility labels and Reduce Motion. Make space for your next thought—and keep every stroke editable.