Comparison

Lectra Notes vs Pencora

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

Head to head
About

Lectra Notes

This app provides a private workspace for reading, annotating, and organizing PDF documents. It helps users understand dense texts faster with on-device intelligence for summaries and suggested tags. Designed for a calmer document workflow, it ensures your files remain private.

Highlights
  • Read and mark up PDFs
  • Highlight key passages and add notes
  • Organize documents with folders and tags
  • Generate summaries and suggested tags
  • Private by design with on-device intelligence
  • Backup and sync library
Features
Read full description

Lectra is a professional workspace for the documents you think on. RECORD THE LECTURE, NOT JUST THE NOTES Start recording from a control that floats above the whole app, then keep writing. Tap a handwritten stroke to hear what was being said as the pen moved. Drag the playhead and watch the page fill back in, stroke by stroke. Transcription runs on device, and an hour of lecture compacts to about 15 MB. BUILT FOR STUDENTS AND ANYONE WHO READS CLOSELY Lecture slides, problem sets, papers, and textbooks. Annotate your readings, write notes beside them by hand, scan whatever you got on paper, and keep the whole semester in one library that works without a signal. READ AND MARK UP Open any PDF and work it over with Apple Pencil, pressure-responsive pen, highlighter, and eraser in a dark, distraction-free editor that keeps your ink sharp at any zoom. Select the document's own text with a finger. Apple Pencil Pro squeeze switches tools. ASK YOUR DOCUMENTS Ask a question about what you're reading and get an answer that cites the page it came from, computed by Apple's on-device model. Summarize documents and get to the point faster. Your documents are processed privately, on your iPad. NOTEBOOKS AND WHITEBOARDS Start from blank paper when the thinking hasn't found a document yet. Notebooks, paper styles, and room to sketch, then export your pages as PDFs. SCAN ANYTHING Bring paper into the record. Scan documents with the camera and mark them up like any other PDF. WHEN READING TURNS INTO WORK Run Python where you're already working, notebooks with charts, a real shell, Git, and a code editor, all on the iPad and all offline. The document and the work on it stay in the same place. A LIBRARY THAT KEEPS UP Everything in one place, available offline, and backed up when you sign in. Your documents are yours: export them anytime, in formats that open anywhere. YOUR MAC, TOO Lectra for Mac is a free download at canvascope.org/mac, the whole app on your desktop, plus your Mac on your iPad as a remote desktop, documents sent straight from iPad to Mac, and a shared clipboard. Now in Spanish and French. Lectra is free to use.

About

Pencora

Features
Read full description

Pencora is paper that thinks: a fast, private notebook for serious study that keeps up with your hand and helps you find, build, and protect what you learn. Everything is free. No subscription. No ads. No account. FIND ANYTHING YOU WROTE Your handwriting becomes searchable as you write—on your iPad, without uploading your notes. Search across every notebook, jump straight to the highlighted word, and find text inside added photos too. Pencora supports English, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese, and handles messy handwriting, close matches, and typos. WRITE WITHOUT THE LAG A custom Metal engine draws each stroke immediately with pressure, tilt, hover, and Apple Pencil Pro squeeze. Even large notebooks stay smooth. Prefer a finger? You can write with that too. MOVE IN WITHOUT STARTING OVER Export your notebooks from Goodnotes, Notability, or any other note app as PDF. Pencora detects the paper ruling, keeps pages in order, and converts handwriting stored as vector ink into editable strokes instead of locking it inside a picture. Large documents open quickly and keep converting in the background. TYPE IT. GET YOUR HANDWRITING. Write a set of sample words once—or pick a ready-made hand—then type or paste Markdown, lists, and LaTeX formulas. The on-device handwriting model places them on the page as real, erasable strokes in your style, following the ruling of the paper. Available in English and Russian. Nothing is uploaded for generation. MATH THAT STAYS LIVE Add interactive graph planes directly to a page. Plot functions, implicit curves, points, and tables; import CSV; or draw a table by hand and let Pencora read it. Ink written on the plane stays attached to its coordinates. Build exact geometry beside your proof: points, segments, lines, circles, polygons, curves, midpoints, perpendicular and angle bisectors, parallels, tangents, intersections, reflections, and triangle centers. Drag a point and every dependent construction moves with it. Measure in real millimeters and label points in your own handwriting. THE TOOLS A REAL NOTEBOOK NEEDS • Lined, grid, dotted, or PDF paper • Shape snapping for lines, circles, and polygons • Highlighter, study tape, and scribble-to-erase • A lasso that moves, scales, rotates, and changes stroke width • A zoom-write strip for small, neat writing • Calligraphy nibs and an eyedropper • Markdown text boxes and live formulas • True-vector PDF export that stays crisp at any zoom • Folders, tags, and tabs • An infinite board with a minimap for every notebook NEVER LOSE A PAGE Connect Google Drive for automatic daily backups to your own account. Pencora keeps the five newest copies and can restore your library on a new iPad. It uses Google's limited-access permission, so it sees only its own backup files—not the rest of your Drive. You can also export your entire library into one backup file whenever you want. YOUR NOTEBOOKS ON IPHONE Connect the same Google Drive on your iPhone to read the notebooks from your iPad's latest backup, with folders and names intact. You can also open any .handynotes notebook someone sends you. Editing stays on iPad; on iPhone, notebooks are read-only. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Recognition, search, and handwriting generation run on your device. Pencora has no accounts, ads, or tracking, and never sells your data. Anonymous usage statistics can be turned off in Profile, and sharing handwriting samples for research is strictly opt-in. Your notes are not the product. Built by one developer who uses handwritten notes every day. Your feedback helps decide what gets built next.

Screenshots

Lectra Notes4 screens
Pencora4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: Lectra Notes at weekly against Pencora's every 6 weeks. On price, ads, in-app purchases 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

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Lectra Notes ships an update weekly, Pencora every 6 weeks. The most recent releases landed on October 10, 2026 and October 3, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard1 real difference · 8 level
Lectra Notes versus Pencora: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterLectra NotesPencora
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (7 ratings) — better—
Number of ratings7 — better—
Update frequencyWeekly — betterEvery 6 weeks
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationFree—
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad
Requires iOS18.017.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size52 MB144 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperNoel SasonAnastasia Naumkina

In-app purchases

None

Lectra Notes

No in-app purchases

None

Pencora

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Lectra Notes free?
Lectra Notes is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Pencora free?
Pencora is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Lectra Notes or Pencora have ads?
Neither Lectra Notes nor Pencora shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Lectra Notes or Pencora?
Lectra Notes ships an update weekly, and Pencora every 6 weeks. Most recently, Lectra Notes was updated on October 10, 2026 and Pencora on October 3, 2026.

Other comparisons