Comparison

Note Taking App vs Recto MD

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

Head to head
About

Note Taking App

Features
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Turn every thought into a page worth keeping. Digital Notes is a private, beautifully designed notebook for handwriting, typing, planning, studying, and annotating documents. Write naturally with Apple Pencil or your finger, or add typed text that flows across multiple pages. CREATE YOUR WAY β€’ Draw with pen, pencil, marker, eraser, and lasso β€’ Choose ruled, dotted, grid, or plain paper β€’ Customize notebook covers, folders, tags, and favorites β€’ Turn typed text into handwritten-style pages WORK WITH DOCUMENTS β€’ Import PDFs and annotate every page β€’ Scan documents or add photos β€’ Export notebooks as PDFs or pages as images β€’ Extract searchable text using on-device recognition KEEP IDEAS ORGANIZED β€’ Search titles, text, tags, and transcripts β€’ Archive, duplicate, restore, and manage notebooks β€’ Turn your notes into study cards β€’ Attach audio recordings to notebooks β€’ Fold meaningful pages into your keepsake jar PRIVATE BY DESIGN Your notebooks, drawings, scans, and recordings stay on your device. Digital Notes requires no account and includes local backup and restore tools for keeping an additional copy. Whether you’re capturing a quick idea, taking lecture notes, planning your week, journaling, or annotating a PDF, Digital Notes gives every thought a calm place to grow. 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

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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

Note Taking App4 screens
Recto MD4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is ads: Recto MD at none against Note Taking App's shown. On price, update cadence, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.

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

CostPrice Β· In-app purchases Β· Ads Β· Monetization

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

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Both ship on a similar rhythm, roughly every 2 days. The most recent releases landed on October 1, 2026 and October 2, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard1 real difference Β· 5 level
Note Taking App versus Recto MD: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterNote Taking AppRecto MD
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyEvery 2 daysEvery 2 days
AdsYesNo β€” better
In-app purchasesNoNo
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad, Mac β€” better
Requires iOS17.0 β€” better18.0
Further details β€” not scored
Size15 MB12 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperArima JainITSUCARA, K.K.

In-app purchases

None

Note Taking App

No in-app purchases

None

Recto MD

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Note Taking App free?
Note Taking App is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Recto MD free?
Recto MD is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Note Taking App or Recto MD have ads?
Note Taking App shows ads; Recto MD does not.
Which is updated more often, Note Taking App or Recto MD?
Note Taking App ships an update every 2 days, and Recto MD every 2 days. Most recently, Note Taking App was updated on October 1, 2026 and Recto MD on October 2, 2026.

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