Comparison

Handwritten Digital Notes vs Recto MD

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

Head to head
About

Handwritten Digital Notes

Capture thoughts, journal memories, and organize study notes with a variety of writing and creative tools. Personalize pages with stationery, stickers, and photos. Sync across devices and secure individual notebooks.

Highlights
  • Handwriting and typing tools
  • Customizable page stationery
  • Photo and sticker integration
  • Keepsake jar for saving pages
  • Folder and tag organization
  • iCloud syncing
  • PDF annotation
  • Notebook locking
Features
Read full description

A little space for your thoughts. A beautiful home for your memories. Digital Notes brings writing, journaling, and creative note-taking together on your iPhone and iPad. Capture a quick idea, decorate a diary page, organize study notes, or keep a moment you want to remember. Make every page yours with cozy stationery, lined paper, grids, and more. Write with Apple Pencil or your finger, or type with a choice of fonts, sizes, and colors. Add photos and cute stickers, then move, resize, and rotate them to create a page that feels like you. Save meaningful pages in your keepsake jar. Watch your paper fold and tuck itself inside, then open it whenever you want to revisit that memory. Choose a sage, rose, or lavender jar to match your mood. Keep your notebooks together on one simple Home screen. Use folders, tags, favorites, and search to find what you need. Archive older notebooks and restore notes from Trash when you change your mind. Keep your notes close with iCloud syncing. Sync notebooks, photos, stickers, and audio recordings across your iPhone and iPad using the same iCloud account. Syncing is on by default, and you can manage it anytime in Settings. Your notes stay available locally for offline writing. With Digital Notes, you can: - Draw and highlight with handwriting tools. - Turn typed text into pages with handwritten fonts in Studio. - Import PDFs and annotate them. - Scan paper documents on supported devices. - Attach audio recordings to your notebooks. - Share notebooks as PDFs or individual pages as images. - Export and restore notebook backups. - Lock individual notebooks with Face ID, Touch ID, or your device passcode. Locked contents require authentication to open; titles remain visible. From everyday lists to letters to yourself, Digital Notes gives your thoughts a place to belong. Privacy Policy: https://digitalhole.github.io/DHPrivacy.html Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

About

Recto MD

Read full description

Recto MD opens a Markdown file and gets out of the way. Open one from Files, Mail or Safari with Open in Recto MD, or share it in from any app. On iPadOS and iOS 26, Files > Get Info > Always Open With makes it the default. Reading comes first: pick a file and it is on screen, typeset and ready, nothing to configure. When you want to change something, Edit mode puts the source next to the live preview - side by side on iPad, a Source/Preview switch on iPhone - and Save is explicit, so nothing is written until you ask for it. TYPOGRAPHY FIRST The reading column, the leading and the vertical rhythm are the product. Pinch to zoom the whole page from 50% to 300% - text, measure and margins scale together, the way a browser's page zoom does - the column measure also has three widths, and the page is laid out so a long document stays comfortable rather than merely legible. RENDERS WHAT YOUR DOCUMENTS ACTUALLY CONTAIN - CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown: tables, task lists, strikethrough, autolinks, footnotes - GitHub-style alerts: NOTE, TIP, IMPORTANT, WARNING, CAUTION - Mermaid diagrams, loaded only when a document has one - Mathematics and chemistry, typeset by KaTeX: inline and display LaTeX, and mhchem chemical equations. The delimiters are narrow on purpose, so a price written as $5 stays a price - Syntax-highlighted fenced code blocks, with a copy button - Wide tables scroll inside the reading column, so the page itself never scrolls sideways EDITING, WHEN YOU WANT IT Edit mode puts a source pane beside the live preview - side by side on iPad, a Source/Preview switch on iPhone. Save is explicit, and nothing autosaves in the background. Export the document as a PDF whenever you want a copy to share. FIND YOUR WAY AROUND An outline is generated from the document's headings: a sheet on iPhone, a sidebar on iPad that also holds your recent documents. Search inside a document with a live match count and step through the matches. Recents remembers where you stopped reading and puts you back there. IT UPDATES WHILE YOU READ Change the file somewhere else and the document updates in place - same scroll position, no flash, no reload button to hunt for. If you have unsaved edits, the app stops and asks instead of choosing for you. Turn auto-reload off and you get a "File changed" tap target instead. A THEME EDITOR, NOT A THEME PICKER Duplicate a built-in theme or start from nothing, and tune it in six groups: text (font, scale, line height, spacing, indent, justification); headings (font, weight, an accent color, rules, and a size for each of the six levels); layout (column width by characters, points or percent, a max width, custom margins, a page-card look); sidebar (font size and step per level, row height, indent, background and accent mix); blocks (code font and size, table density and zebra striping, blockquote style, the code syntax palette); and color, down to the selection highlight. Import or export any theme as JSON. OFFLINE, AND PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION The app makes no network requests at all. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no tracking, nothing collected. Your documents are files on your device or in your iCloud Drive, and that is where they stay. BUILT FOR THE PLATFORM Dynamic Type through to the accessibility sizes, VoiceOver reading real document structure, Increase Contrast, Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency are all honoured. With a hardware keyboard, every navigation shortcut is independently rebindable - pick the key, choose Command, Option or Shift, and the app flags a conflict before you save one - and Open, Find, Find Next, Reload, the zoom commands and Settings are all one keystroke away, listed in the Command-hold sheet. The interface is available in twelve languages, with a System option and a picker for the one you want.

Screenshots

Handwritten Digital Notes4 screens
Recto MD4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Recto MD at none against Handwritten Digital Notes's 1. Recto MD also leads on ads (none vs shown) and update cadence (every 3 days vs every 8 days). On price, device support and iOS requirement there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price ยท Rating ยท Positive reviews ยท Number of ratings ยท Update frequency ยท Ads ยท In-app purchases ยท Monetization ยท Best chart rank ยท Devices ยท Requires iOS

CostPrice ยท In-app purchases ยท Ads ยท Monetization

Both are free to download. Handwritten Digital Notes sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Recto MD asks for nothing beyond the download.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Handwritten Digital Notes ships an update every 8 days, Recto MD every 3 days. Both last shipped on October 31, 2026.

Scorecard3 real differences ยท 5 level
Handwritten Digital Notes versus Recto MD: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterHandwritten Digital NotesRecto MD
PriceFreeFree
Positive reviews100.0% of reviewsโ€”
Update frequencyEvery 8 daysEvery 3 days โ€” better
AdsYesNo โ€” better
In-app purchasesYesNo โ€” better
MonetizationFree with in-app purchasesโ€”
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad, Mac โ€” better
Requires iOS17.0 โ€” better18.0
Further details โ€” not scored
Size32 MB13 MB
Age rating+44+
DeveloperArima JainITSUCARA, K.K.

In-app purchases

1 purchases

Handwritten Digital Notes

One-time1
  • Unlock All Features$4.99
None

Recto MD

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Handwritten Digital Notes free?
Handwritten Digital Notes is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Recto MD free?
Recto MD is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Handwritten Digital Notes or Recto MD have ads?
Handwritten Digital Notes shows ads; Recto MD does not.
Which is updated more often, Handwritten Digital Notes or Recto MD?
Handwritten Digital Notes ships an update every 8 days, and Recto MD every 3 days. Most recently, Handwritten Digital Notes was updated on October 31, 2026 and Recto MD on October 31, 2026.

Other comparisons