Lectra Notes vs Lotus
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
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.
- 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
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Lectra is a workspace for the documents you think on: lecture slides, problem sets, papers, and textbooks, marked up by hand and kept in one library that works without a signal. READ AND MARK UP Open any PDF and work it over with Apple Pencil. A pressure-responsive pen, highlighter, and eraser in a calm, distraction-free editor keep your ink sharp at any zoom. Select the document's own text with a finger. On Apple Pencil Pro, squeeze to switch tools. MADE FOR IPHONE DUO Folded, Lectra fits the outer screen. Open it, and your page spreads across the full display, with every control kept clear of the camera and status bar. On iPad, keep two documents side by side. RECORD THE LECTURE BESIDE YOUR 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 your iPad, and an hour of lecture takes about 15 MB. NOTEBOOKS AND PAPER Start from a blank page when the thinking hasn't found a document yet. Choose blank, lined, grid, dotted, or Cornell paper for each new page, then export your pages as PDFs. SCAN ANYTHING Bring paper into the record. Scan pages with the camera and mark them up like any other PDF. ASK YOUR DOCUMENTS Ask a question about what you're reading and get an answer that cites the page it came from. Summarize a document to get to the point faster. These features run on your iPad, are off until you turn them on, and never use your notes or documents to train a model. WHEN READING TURNS INTO WORK Run Python where you already work: notebooks with charts, a real shell, Git, and a code editor, all on your iPad and all offline. The document and the work on it stay in the same place. YOUR MAC, TOO Lectra for Mac is a free download at canvascope.org/mac. It brings the whole app to your desktop, puts your Mac on your iPad as a remote desktop, sends documents straight between iPad and Mac, and shares one clipboard. The Remote Desktop assistant can open a website, search, or launch an app on your Mac in one step, and asks before it acts unless you turn on Auto-run. 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. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No ads and no tracking. Lectra is free to use.
Lotus
This app uses spaced repetition to help you study smarter by scheduling flashcards just before you forget them. It offers unlimited decks, image support, and iCloud sync across devices. It also integrates with Mimosa for seamless flashcard creation from PDF highlights.
- Spaced repetition learning
- Unlimited decks and cards
- Image support
- iCloud sync
- Deck sharing
- Mimosa integration
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Your flashcard app, completely free. Lotus helps you build your own study cards and return to them with spaced repetition. MAKE THE CARDS YOU NEED Create cards with text, images or questions. Keep a simple note on one side, add an answer on the other, or use a two-way card to practise both directions. RECALL BEFORE YOU REVEAL Think through the answer before checking it. On iPad, use Apple Pencil to work in the scratch area as you study. REVIEW AT THE RIGHT TIME Rate how each card went. FSRS spaced repetition schedules the next review. See what is due today, start a short round, or practise an entire deck. Mixed up two cards? Pair them, and next time you see both. KEEP YOUR STUDY SIMPLE Organise decks by name, colour and icon, and arrange them as you like. Add your own images and questions, and search your cards. WORKS WITH MIMOSA AND TRELLIS Make cards from your mimosa highlights, and link a deck to a Trellis project to study it from Today. Your core flashcards work without an account. Optional iCloud sync keeps your study data, pictures included, across your Apple devices. Designed for iPad and iPhone. Available in ten languages. Flashcard creation and review are free. The optional connection to highlights in mimosa requires mimosa Pro.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is ratings volume: Lectra Notes at 9 against Lotus's 1. On price, rating, update cadence and ads 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
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Lectra Notes against 5.0 for Lotus. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Lectra Notes has 9 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
Lectra Notes ships an update weekly, Lotus every 2 weeks. The most recent releases landed on October 24, 2026 and October 18, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Lectra Notes | Lotus |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (9 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) |
| Number of ratings | 9 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Weekly — better | Every 2 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 51 MB | 11 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Noel Sason | Yusuf Melih Bozgeyik |
Customer experience
Lectra Notes
Lotus
In-app purchases
Lectra Notes
No in-app purchases
Lotus
No in-app purchases









