Notability vs Goodnotes 5 | What is the best apps for takinging notes

So I’ve got an iPad Pro 2018 we’re talking using for basically everything University related for my second year on medical school and I absolutely love it it’s completely changed the way that I take my notes that I organized everything to do with my university life and I couldn’t say more positive things about it now this whole time for my note-taking app I’ve been using notability and I found it to be a really good app for taking notes for organizing all my different lectures tutorials case based discussions etc it’s just been an overall great user experience however I know that there’s another app called good notes 5 that a lot of people use and there’s sort of this matchup between notability and good notes 5 so what I decided to do was for a whole week of lectures tutorials and case based discussions I was going to solely use good notes 5 in order to test out the good notes experience and then make this video comparing the two I guess this is the equivalent of tech youtubers putting their sim card in the brand-new foam that they’re reviewing so without further ado these are the good and bad things about good notes 5 and how they compare to notes ability just so you guys have an idea of what my notes look like generally on note ability and this is one of my immune system lectures and basically what I try and do is write things in three different columns as you can see with the words in blue being the headings of different slides and then underneath that all the different information what I want to point out is I tend to include a lot of different images and screenshots of lecture slides in my notes and that’s something that’s really really important to me because I can copy them over I can annotate them using different colors I can manipulate the image and that saves me a lot of time from having to redraw out all these different things all right so let’s switch over to good notes and take a look at that app so starting off with the good things about good notes 5 and trust me there were a lot of things that I actually really enjoyed I will love any feature that saves me time for example the first thing that you’ll notice is over here in the top right you have three different colors that are permanently set over there in the top bar and of course you can change these to whatever you want let’s say I want to put red here I can put green here this is very very useful because when I’m writing a note usually I’ll make my titles in blue right so let’s say title of slide and then I want to switch to gray if gray was one of my set colors up here then in just one click I can switch to my grey pen and continue writing notability I spend so much time for example if I’m writing and then I want to switch colors have to go to our then if I wanna switch colors back I need to go here and go to blue from my headings it takes time you might think that these small clicks aren’t important but if you’re doing hundreds and hundreds of those clicks per day per lecture that you’re writing then it really adds up so I really like the fact that there are some permanent colors at the top of good notes five I personally think that’s a fantastic idea the second amazing time-saving tool on good notes five is their rubber function which as you can see here it has an auto deselect function so what that means is that when you click the rubber and you decide to rub out something for example I just rub down that line as soon as I’m done rubbing it out it switches back to the pen which is again such a good efficiency and time-saving thing let’s say I’m writing hello and I accidentally misspelled Ian’s right hello you click once on the rubber once on the a and it’s already back to the pen and I can write hello properly why is it notability let’s say I was writing hello and I misspelled it oh god that’s disgusting let’s try that again let’s say I was writing hello and I misspelled it I’d have to go up to the rubber erase the a go back to the pen and then continue my spelling again you might think that these things don’t take up time but really I’m doing this action over here maybe hundreds and hundreds of times a day and I do want to point out that I know about the double tapping of the Apple pencil to switch between the pen and the eraser but personally for me this feature just does not work well it’s actually such a slow thing to be writing then stop reorient your pen to find that little flat part double tap erase and then double tap again switch back I find it very slow I don’t think it’s a good feature and it just doesn’t work for me okay so the next thing that I want to talk about in good notes is image manipulation image importing and stuff like that I find there image manipulation software way way way better than notability so for example let’s say I’m here and I want to import a screenshot that I just took for the sake of this video that screenshot some of my notes in notability i screenshot them here let’s say I go back to good notes where is it perfect so now of course I can’t drive and drop like this but sometimes that little thing in the corner disappears after a little bit of time I don’t quite dead there so it’s just a meets it for now see I was writing I want to import a picture so you go up to this image tab over here and already right here in the top right corner you can see all of my most recent images and so it’s very easy for me to quickly identify this one over here as the screenshot that I just took I tap it once and it’s already imported into my good notes file and also notice how quick that import was because I’m gonna compare it to notability later look at how instant that import is super super fast I can easily manipulate it from the corner I can make it bigger smaller I can rotate it and if I want to crop it as well I can just tap on the picture click crop here and automatically make it bigger or smaller as I wish click done and that’s done really quickly so the image manipulation in goodnotes is so much better also pay attention to the fact that here is this image there’s no white borders as you will see there is in notability if I put the picture here there’s no white borders over here around the image there’s nothing there which is really really great in comparison to all of this let me show you how notability works so notability let’s say I want to import that exact same screenshot that I just took let’s find some white space here so in order to import an image here you need to go to the plus and then you need to go to photo then you need to go to recently added then you need to click your image and look at how long it takes to import again not an objectively long period of time but when you’re doing this hundreds of times a day it all really adds up look at this white space that it leaves behind it next to the writing you see this over here I dislike this a lot it leaves this white border around the image when you import it into notability now if I want to and manipulate this image first of all you have to switch to this T tab up here so from the pen to the T and then you can click on the image and manipulate it and in order to manipulate it as you can see every time I move it there’s this lagging period whereas in goodnotes 5 there’s absolutely none of this it just immediately moves around on top of that if I want to crop this image which I always want to crop the screenshot so that I take look at the process I have to do so I’ve imported the image after hit edit go up here to the cropping tool crop as I wish then hit done again it’s such a slow process and once I move it you’ll see that there are these white borders still all around the image so yeah image manipulation and notability I think is probably one of its worst features I wish that they would improve it and I’m sure they will in the future update but it’s definitely something to keep in mind all right now let’s talk about the highlighting tool and good notes just for comparison let me show you guys the highlighting tool in notability first so here’s my highlighter I’ve selected this light blue color if I want to highlight this sentence down here I can do so and it basically just gives you a free range transparent color that you can draw over your notes so it doesn’t really stick to the words that you’ve written it doesn’t really make a straight line it’s sort of just like the pen but it’s translucent or transparent now if I move over to good notes five you’ll see how much better the highlighting feature is there when you highlight a sentence it automatically straightens it out as you can see it makes a nice straight line that just to the height of your notes and your writing and I find this so much better look if I don’t draw the straightest of lines it’ll automatically straighten it and I find that so useful it just looks so much more neat and it looks better and it’s easier to go through the notes ability so if you’re someone who highlights a ton then yeah I would definitely go with good notes five and then let’s talk about something that’s actually really important if you take a look at my notes ability you’ll see that I have something like 300 different files in here let me see at the very top 337 different files so there’s a lot of different notes that I’ve taken here over the last couple of months and there’s a lot of information to search through so for example if I wanted to search for a lecture on kidney diseases and glomerular Mel Euler nephritis okay let’s say I wanted to search search glomerular all right and let’s see what comes up no results found okay fine let’s search kidney okay so it gives me searches of the titles of lectures so anything that’s written in text the amazing thing about good notes find is that it searches within the handwritten notes that you’ve made which I just think it’s absolutely incredible so for example here you can see that my handwriting is pretty horrible it’s definitely not neat by any means but let’s say that I want to search for this word here attention all right let’s see if it’ll find it honestly how incredible is that if you ask me this word does not look like tension yeah good notes still manages to find those words I’m honestly quite happy that I found some of the words previously when I had been searching through my notes I could never find what I wanted so it’s actually good to see so I guess the searching of the handwritten notes does work but not as good as a good notes 5 all right so those are some of the things that I really enjoyed while using good notes 5 now let me talk about some of the things that I don’t like as much so first things first as you’ll see while I’m scrolling through this page here there’s just like a noticeable lag you can see that some pictures and images take a while to load it’s not smooth when you’re scrolling when you’re moving around and manipulating this software different parts of the page load at different times I’m gonna be staring at this app and using it all day I want to make sure that it’s fluid that it’s moving nicely and that I don’t feel like there’s any interruptions when I’m using the app so that’s the first not so great thing about good notes fine now the second thing and this probably isn’t too major for a lot of people is that it just kind of looks outdated to me I don’t know about you but all these icons at the top here it feels like this was an app that was made a couple of years ago and they haven’t updated it and made it for the modern era but yeah just to me it kind of looks out of date now something important that I noticed while using goodnotes 5 for about a week is that my handwriting was a lot more messy on goodnotes 5 I don’t know why so let’s see if I can demonstrate this what is that sentence that includes every letter of the alphabet the quick brown fox jumps over something anyway there’s the quick brown fox I mean I don’t think it looks particularly good in fact I’m sure you guys will let me know how bad my daddy is in the comments but let’s see if I can rewrite this here the quick fox I mean you guys probably won’t be able to tell too much of a difference the thing that I noticed in good notes is that it sort of takes your lines that you draw and it sort of changes them it either straightens them or makes them a little bit less squiggly or something like that and I found a notability does the same but they do them to a different extent when I’m writing on good notes it feels like I’m using my pen to write on a very slippery surface of glass which is obviously what the iPad is but it makes it seem a lot more slippery as if I don’t have enough traction and control with the pen wise when I’m writing notability it feels a little bit more like my handwriting is on a piece of paper not in the tactile feel between the pen and the iPad obviously because it’s the same in both cases but in good notes while my handwriting looks like is that it’s like sliding across the page a lot more so I was grippy almost if that makes sense I’m not sure how they managed to simulate that with software but that is the end result that I end up feeling so yeah I’d say that my handwriting looks a little bit better on notability and it doesn’t feel like my pen is slipping around on the page as much the next thing that I want to mention in good notes is sort of their hierarchical structure or organization of the notes so in good notes how it works is that you have these sort of you have these folders over here and then you have these files within them and then within the files you have all these different pages or these are notebooks I guess I personally don’t like this as much as the notability equivalent so notability you have these bigger sections called dividers which is what these little drop-down menus are then within dividers you have subjects so responses one response is two and then within those subjects you have all these different notes so for example I have important stuff one of my case based discussions some lectures over here and I find this level of organization a lot more neat a lot more simple and intuitive to understand and work through and so it works better for me I personally really like notabilities organizational structure and done good notes and then the last thing that I want to say about good notes 5 is that it’s lacking a sister or brother app on Mac iOS or on PC where you can look on your notes online on the computer which is kind of frustrating for me actually with notability what I’ll often do is have some of my previous notes that I want to look at open on my computer and then some other notes that I’m currently writing open on my iPad and that way I can have both at the same time if I’m somewhere without my iPad and I want to look at my notes on my laptop then I can’t really do that all right and I think that concludes everything that I wanted to say about good notes 5 in comparison to note ability in conclusion is good notes 5 good enough to get me to switch over and use it as my primary note-taking app and I think for me the answer is going to be no although good notes has a lot of good features sort of separate to each other it doesn’t package them into one finished product that combines all those good features and makes an app that I would want to on a daily basis when I wish would happen is that notability would adopt to those two features of the eraser that just gets used once and switches back to the pen and then also having your favorite colors stacked at the top of the toolbar I hope you guys have found this video useful I hope it’s giving you a little bit more of an insight into comparing good notes and notes abilities that you guys can hopefully make a better informed decision about which one you want to purchase and use as your note- taking app if you guys have enjoyed this video please do leave a like on it and subscribe to my channel to more content from me in .