Is Goodnotes better than Notion?

For handwriting, yes. Goodnotes keeps your ink, searches it and converts it to text when you ask, while Notion's only pen route is Scribble, which types what you write. For typed lists, tables and pages you share, Notion is better.

Yes, with limits. The Free plan never expires, but it holds three files in total and 20 minutes of audio, and exports carry a watermark. Essential lifts those limits for US$11.99 a year.

Can you handwrite in Notion?

Only through Apple's Scribble on an iPad, which turns your writing into typed text as you go. No ink stays on the page, so sketches and margin notes need Goodnotes or a PDF import.

Can I use Notion and Goodnotes together?

Yes. Write in Goodnotes, convert the lines you'll act on into text and copy them into Notion. Keep anything with a due date in Notion and the ink in Goodnotes, so there's one place to check.

Does Goodnotes work on Windows and Android?

Yes. Goodnotes runs on Apple devices, Android, Windows and the web. One library kept in step across Apple and non-Apple devices needs Pro, at US$35.99 a year.

Notion vs Goodnotes in 2026: which to use and what it costs

Q: Can Goodnotes convert handwriting to text?

Yes. Circle the writing with the Lasso tool, tap Resize, open the (...) menu and choose Convert, then Text. It works on iPad, iPhone, Mac, Android and the web, but not on Windows.

The short answer

Notion vs Goodnotes comes down to how your notes begin. If you reach for a pen, pick Goodnotes: it's a notebook you write in by hand, and its search reads your handwriting. If your notes are typed lists you sort, filter or share with someone, pick Notion. It costs nothing while you use it on your own.

They're barely the same kind of app. Goodnotes copies a paper notebook, with pages, pens and PDFs you write on. Notion is a typed workspace where a page holds text, checklists and databases, and a database is a table whose rows each open as a page. You can write in Notion with an Apple Pencil, but Apple's Scribble turns the writing into typed text as you go, so no ink stays on the page.

Find your row:

If you	Pick	Why
Take lecture or meeting notes with a stylus	Goodnotes	Ink stays ink, and search reads it
Write on PDFs, such as forms or past papers	Goodnotes	Import the PDF and mark it up
Keep a reading list or a budget as a table	Notion	Databases you sort and filter
Plan a trip or a move with other people	Notion	Invite them to one page
Use an iPad as your main notebook	Goodnotes	Built around Apple Pencil
Want a free app with no file cap	Notion	No block limit when you work alone

How we compared them

Everything below comes from Goodnotes' and Notion's own pricing pages and help articles, plus Apple's guide to Scribble, all read on 30 October 2026. We didn't run a hands-on trial of either app, and there are no star ratings here. Prices are US dollar list prices before tax, as of October 2026.

Six questions decided the picks:

What does one person pay in a year, and what does the free plan stop you doing?
Can you write with a pen and keep it as handwriting?
Will a word turn up later, whether you typed it or wrote it?
Which devices does it run on, and does it work with no signal?
Can someone else open a page and edit it with you?
If you want both apps, how do notes get from one to the other?

Goodnotes: best for writing by hand

Goodnotes gives you notebooks on paper templates you pick, with pens in different styles and colours and a lasso for moving what you wrote. Photos and PDFs come in and you write straight on top of them. You can also type, record audio and sketch on a whiteboard. Search covers your handwriting along with typed words, PDF text and document titles, so a scrawled note still turns up a month later.

Goodnotes' pricing page lists a Free plan that never runs out. It holds three files in total across notebooks, whiteboards and text documents, records 20 minutes of audio and puts a watermark on exports. Essential, at US$11.99 a year, lifts all three limits. Pro costs US$35.99 a year and adds private link sharing, hosting a live editing session, Goodnotes' more advanced AI and one library kept in step across Apple and non-Apple devices. Both paid plans start with a 7-day free trial.

Apple users have one more choice. Special Edition is a one-time purchase with unlimited notes and no subscription, sold in some regions. It's Apple only, it leaves out Goodnotes Cloud, and the pricing page doesn't print its price.

Pick it if you take notes with a stylus or mark up PDFs, and you want the page to look the way you wrote it. Skip it if you want to sort notes by a date or a status. Goodnotes organises by folders and notebooks, not by fields you filter.

Notion: best for typed pages and tables

A Notion page is typed, made of blocks such as a heading, a paragraph or a to-do. Any page can hold a database: a table with properties like a date, a status or a tag. You filter and sort it, and every row opens as its own page. A reading list turns into a table of books with a status column, and one filter shows only the ones you haven't started.

Notion's pricing page puts Free at US$0, aimed at one person organising personal projects. Alone, you won't hit a block limit. Add a second member to a free workspace and a limit kicks in. Free caps each upload at 5 MB and keeps 7 days of page history. Plus is US$10 a seat a month, with uploads up to 5 GB and 30 days of history. Business, at US$20 a seat, is the plan with Notion's full AI. Notion says paying yearly saves up to 20%, and students and teachers get Plus free with a one-member limit.

Notion's own download pages list apps for Mac and Windows, and for iOS and Android.

Pick it if your notes are really lists you want to slice different ways, or you plan things with other people. Skip it if you write by hand. Notion has no ink: its pen route types your writing for you.

Side by side

	Goodnotes	Notion
Made for	Handwriting and PDFs	Typed pages and databases
Free	3 files, 20 minutes of audio	One person, no block limit
Paid	US$11.99 or US$35.99 a year	US$10 or US$20 a seat a month
Pen	Ink stays on the page	Scribble turns it into type
Search	Handwriting, typed text, PDF text	Typed text
Layout	Folders and notebooks	Pages and databases
Devices	Apple, Android, Windows, web	Mac, Windows, iOS, Android
Offline	Notebooks live on the device	Pages you mark, per device
Sharing	A link on Free, live editing on paid plans	Invite people to any page
AI	Basic on Essential, more on Pro	A trial on Free and Plus, full on Business
Export	PDF, image, Goodnotes file	PDF, HTML, Markdown, CSV

Own a stylus? Then the pen row matters more than the price row. A year of Goodnotes Essential costs less than two months of Notion Plus.

What a year costs

List prices for one person over 12 months:

Setup	A year	What you get
Goodnotes Free	US$0	3 files
Goodnotes Essential	US$11.99	Unlimited files and audio
Goodnotes Pro	US$35.99	Sync across every device
AI Pass on top of Goodnotes Pro	US$155.87	12 times the AI credits
Notion Free	US$0	Uploads up to 5 MB
Notion Plus	US$120	Uploads up to 5 GB
Notion Business	US$240	Notion Agent and AI meeting notes
Goodnotes Essential and Notion Free	US$11.99	Unlimited Goodnotes files, Notion alone

Three files go fast. Two subjects and one imported PDF fill the free plan. Goodnotes' pricing page sells AI Pass as an add-on at US$9.99 a month on top of a plan, for 12 times more AI credits. That's the line that turns an app costing less than a lunch into one costing more than Notion Plus.

Notion's free plan goes much further for one person, because the limits are per file and per member rather than per note. The paid money buys room for big files, longer history and, on Business, AI. Notion's terms on its pricing page give a full refund if you downgrade within three days of a monthly sign-up or 30 days of a yearly one.

Writing with a pen

Goodnotes is the one built for a pen. Its pricing page pitches the paid plans at people taking handwritten notes on an iPad with an Apple Pencil. Your ink stays ink, and you can still turn a line of it into type. Goodnotes' help on converting handwriting gives the steps: tap the Lasso tool, circle the writing, tap Resize, open the (...) menu and choose Convert, then Text. It works on iPad, iPhone, Mac, Android and the web, not on Windows, and only in the languages Goodnotes recognises. On an iPhone or iPad you can also drag handwriting into another app, and it arrives as typed text if that app accepts it.

Search is the other half. Goodnotes' search help says it indexes handwriting, typed text, PDF text, scanned documents, titles and outlines. One catch: an imported PDF is searchable only if it already carries a text layer. Goodnotes doesn't add one, so a photo of a printout stays a picture.

Notion has no pen tool of its own. Its release note of 29 September 2020 says Apple's Scribble works in Notion on iPadOS 14 and calls it "more of an Apple feature than a Notion feature". Apple's Scribble guide explains what that means: you write in any text field and your handwriting turns into typed text. Arrows, sketches and margin notes don't survive the trip.

A handwritten page goes into Notion as a PDF. Notion's import help says a PDF becomes a Notion page, up to 5 MB per PDF on Free and 20 MB on paid plans, and that scanned or image-only PDFs won't be reliably searchable unless they've been through text recognition first.

On an iPad, Goodnotes is the first pick in our productivity apps for the iPad. On an Android tablet it has rivals made for Android first, and our Android stylus guide puts them side by side.

Notes on paper you want to search? In ActivityTracker, Scan text from photo puts the words from a picture of your page into a note, and the notes import reads the Markdown export Notion gives you.

See how notes work

Devices, sync and no signal

Goodnotes runs on Apple devices, Android, Windows and the web, and its pricing FAQ says the core note-taking and PDF markup work on all of them. Between Apple devices you can start a note on an iPad, carry on on an iPhone and finish on a Mac. Keeping one library in step across Apple and non-Apple devices takes Pro, which includes Goodnotes Cloud. So a student with an iPad and a Windows laptop pays US$35.99 a year to see the same notebooks on both.

No signal is no problem. Goodnotes says your notebooks live on your device, so you write, mark up and file with no connection, and everything syncs when you're back online.

Notion makes you plan for it. Notion's offline guide says you turn on Available offline page by page, on each device, and mark each sub-page you need. A database brings down its first 50 rows on its own, and you download any further rows one at a time. Embeds, forms and buttons don't work offline, and you can't share a page or change who has access until you reconnect. On Free you pick every page yourself; on paid plans your recent and favourite pages download for you.

Sharing is where Notion pulls ahead. Notion's sharing help has you click Share on any page, type a name or an email, and choose an access level: full access, can edit, can comment or can view. Someone outside your workspace joins as a guest and needs their own Notion account. A page can also be published to the web.

Goodnotes splits sharing across its plans. On Free you can share a document by link, and you can view, comment on and edit documents others share with you. Essential lets you join a live editing session someone else started. Hosting one, and sharing with a private link, takes Pro. For an office there's Goodnotes Teams at US$120 per seat a year.

For a holiday plan that four people edit, Notion's page sharing is the better fit. Lecture notes you hand a classmate once only need a Goodnotes link.

AI in each

Goodnotes' AI is tiered by plan. Free gets a little, plus on-device math help. Essential adds basic AI, help with math problems and a basic summary of recorded audio. Pro adds Create Mode, image generation and AI for meetings, which transcribes and summarises as you talk, all on limited monthly credits. Goodnotes says it doesn't use your data to train its AI.

Notion's AI is a trial on Free and Plus. Business includes Notion Agent, which chats, writes pages and fills in databases, plus AI meeting notes, with 1,500 Standard and 500 Select credits per seat each month. Notion's pricing page says it won't use your data to train its models unless you opt in.

Using both together

Plenty of people keep both apps: Goodnotes for the pen, Notion for the plan. It works if the hand-off is a habit:

Write in Goodnotes as you always would.
When a page holds something you'll act on, a date, a name or a job, circle it with the Lasso and convert it to text.
Copy it into a Notion page or a database row.
When you want the whole page as it looks, export it from Goodnotes as a PDF or an image and add it to the Notion page. Mind the 5 MB file cap on Notion Free.
Agree one rule with yourself: anything with a due date lives in Notion, and the ink stays in Goodnotes.

That last rule saves the most time. Keep jobs with dates on one list you trust, so you never search two apps for the thing that's due.

One snag with step 4: Goodnotes' export help says it saves pictures inside PDFs in a format some PDF viewers can't show. If a photo goes missing, open the PDF in Preview on a Mac and save it again as a PDF, or print it to a new PDF from Chrome.

Made-up example: Ana is studying for an accounting exam in March and moving flat in January. She writes every study session on her iPad with an Apple Pencil.

Her study notes go in Goodnotes. She imports each past paper as a PDF and works the answers on top of it in ink. Within a week she has four files, one over the free cap, so she pays US$11.99 for Essential.

The move goes in Notion. She builds a table of jobs with a column for the date, another for who's doing it and a checkbox for done. Then she invites her flatmate to that one page with can edit access.

On Sunday she finds three to-dos in the margin of her tax notes. She lassoes them, converts them to text and pastes them into the move table.

Her year costs US$11.99. Goodnotes holds the ink, Notion's free plan holds the plan, and nothing with a date lives in two places.