Comparison

Lemon Notes vs Garnest

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

Head to head
About

Lemon Notes

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Lemon Notes: Note Taking & PDF Annotation Turn your iPhone and iPad into a digital notebook for handwritten notes, PDF annotation, digital planning, and drawing. Capture lecture notes, organize study materials, keep a journal, or plan your week. Write with touch on iPhone or Apple Pencil on iPad, and bring your notebooks across both devices with iCloud sync. HANDWRITING, DRAWING & STICKY NOTES โ€ข Write and sketch with pen, pencil, highlighter, fountain pen, watercolor, crayon, monoline, and more. โ€ข Customize colors, stroke widths, and smoothing for your writing style. โ€ข Use stroke and pixel erasers, lasso selection, copy, duplicate, resize, and move tools. โ€ข Turn rough sketches into clean geometric shapes with Smart Shape Recognition. Smart lines snap precisely to nearby endpoints to keep diagrams connected. โ€ข Organize drawings with editable layers. โ€ข Add customizable sticky notes for reminders, study tips, and ideas, with improved canvas touch controls. PDF ANNOTATION & DOCUMENTS โ€ข Import PDFs from Files to write, draw, highlight, underline, and annotate lecture slides, textbooks, worksheets, and documents. โ€ข Expand PDF margins for extra handwritten notes and bookmark important pages. โ€ข Import PowerPoint presentations and convert them into PDF notes. โ€ข Add photos, scanned documents, images, and emoji stickers. โ€ข Export full notebooks or selected pages as shareable PDFs. DIGITAL NOTEBOOKS, PLANNERS & TEMPLATES โ€ข Create multi-page notebooks for school, university, work, and personal projects. โ€ข Choose blank, lined, grid, dotted, Cornell notes, checklist, daily, weekly, monthly, habit tracker, mind map, table, music, guitar tab, storyboard, and other templates. โ€ข Personalize paper colors, spacing, line width, backgrounds, orientation, and covers. โ€ข Choose A3, A4, A5, A6, B5, Letter, Legal, and Tabloid paper sizes. โ€ข Explore 80 creative notebook covers, organized into three categories. โ€ข Keep class notes, meeting notes, and journals organized with folders and nested folders. โ€ข Protect notebooks or folders with a password and recover notebooks from Recently Deleted. STUDY TOOLS & EVERYDAY PRODUCTIVITY โ€ข Find handwritten notes with handwriting recognition and search. โ€ข Record audio with optional live speech transcription for lectures and meetings. โ€ข Solve handwritten arithmetic with Automatic Math. โ€ข Stay focused with a stopwatch, countdown timer, and built-in calculator. โ€ข Open two notes together with split-screen editing. โ€ข Preview pages, use Reader Mode, and let pages adapt to dark mode. โ€ข Watch YouTube videos or browse the web alongside your notes. HOME SCREEN WIDGETS โ€ข Quickly create a note, reopen your last note, and access recent notes and search with sleek widgets for iPhone and iPad. ICLOUD SYNC & LEMON STORE โ€ข Enable iCloud sync to continue your notebooks on iPhone and iPad. โ€ข Back up PDF notes to iCloud Drive. โ€ข Discover more notebook templates, covers, digital planners, study sheets, engineering templates, calendars, and digital stationery in the Lemon Store. MORE LANGUAGES โ€ข Now supports Arabic, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese, with context-aware translations, a right-to-left Arabic layout, and localized plural forms. START YOUR NEXT NOTEBOOK No separate Lemon Notes account is required. Create up to three notebooks for free. One optional annual subscription unlocks unlimited notebook creation on both iPhone and iPad. Use the same Apple Account to access your purchases on both devices, and enable iCloud sync to keep your notes in sync. Purchases can be restored at any time. Privacy Policy: https://lemonnotes.site/privacy/ Terms of Service: https://lemonnotes.site/terms/

About

Garnest

Features
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Your pattern and your row stay with you: no account, no ads, and the count survives the update. Garnest counts the rows, holds the pattern and remembers where you stopped. IN-APP PURCHASE: Garnest is free to download, and using it requires Garnest Pro โ€” offered as an auto-renewing subscription or a one-time lifetime purchase. The price, the plan length and the renewal terms are shown on the purchase screen before you confirm. Subscriptions renew until you cancel them in your App Store account settings, and an earlier purchase can be restored from that same screen. KNITTING AND CROCHET, IN THEIR OWN WORDS Say which one you work and Garnest counts rows or rounds, asks for a needle or a hook, and names the materials accordingly. Doing both at once is the normal case, so the craft is set per project, not once for the whole app. COUNT WITHOUT PUTTING THE WORK DOWN Say a word and the row goes up โ€” recognised on your device, with nothing sent anywhere. Or press the widget on the Home Screen without unlocking the phone. Or ask Siri. THE PATTERN AND THE NUMBER ON ONE SCREEN Your own PDF, or a photo of the page, sits above the counter with a marker on the row you are on โ€” and the marker moves as you count. The screen stays lit while a project is open, so the chart does not go dark between rows. COUNTERS THAT CANNOT DRIFT APART A repeat counter is worked out from the row count every single time it changes, never added up alongside it. That is why undo costs nothing and why the widget and the app can never disagree about where you are. WHAT THE PIECE COST YOU Every sitting is timed. Finish a piece and it is archived with its hours, its yarn and its photo โ€” the two numbers you need if you ever price one. IT IS STILL THERE TOMORROW Projects live on your device and sync through your own iCloud. There is no account to make and nothing of yours on our servers. LEGAL Privacy Policy: https://beratmehmetoglu.com/privacy/ Terms of Use: https://beratmehmetoglu.com/terms/

Screenshots

Lemon Notes4 screens
Garnest4 screens

Verdict

The call

Lemon Notes and Garnest are too close to call on the numbers: across 6 compared parameters โ€” price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases among them โ€” neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.

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. Lemon Notes sells 1 in-app purchase, starting at $3.99 per year and Garnest sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Lemon Notes ships an update every 10 days, Garnest weekly. Both last shipped on October 29, 2026.

ScorecardNo meaningful differences
Lemon Notes versus Garnest: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterLemon NotesGarnest
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyEvery 10 daysWeekly โ€” better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesYes
DevicesiPhone, iPad โ€” betteriPhone
Requires iOS17.017.0
Further details โ€” not scored
Size152 MB16 MB
Age rating17+4+
DeveloperNEFISE ZELIHA BAYARBerat Mehmetoglu

In-app purchases

1 purchases

Lemon Notes

Subscriptions1
  • Lemon Notes Unlimited Notes7 Days trial$3.991 Year
3 purchases

Garnest

Subscriptions2
  • Garnest Pro โ€” Monthly$2.991 Month
  • Garnest Pro โ€” Yearly$10.991 Year
One-time1
  • Garnest Pro โ€” Lifetime$15.99

Questions

Is Lemon Notes free?
Lemon Notes is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Garnest free?
Garnest is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do Lemon Notes or Garnest have ads?
Neither Lemon Notes nor Garnest shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Lemon Notes or Garnest?
Lemon Notes ships an update every 10 days, and Garnest weekly. Most recently, Lemon Notes was updated on October 29, 2026 and Garnest on October 29, 2026.

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