GoodNotes Reviews

I’ve been using GoodNotes to record lectures while taking notes, and it’s been really helpful. The audio playback syncing with my notes works well and makes reviewing later so much easier. I do wish the audio controls were a little easier to find sometimes, but overall I’d definitely recommend it if you like recording lectures alongside your notes.

The sync backup works really well, it just gives me peace of mind. I feel a lot better knowing my stuff is being backed up properly, and it makes the whole setup feel secure and dependable.

I actually like using this app, but it’s seriously killing my battery way too fast. At first I thought it was just my phone, but it keeps happening whenever I use it. It’s frustrating enough now that I’m going to have to reach out to support if it doesn’t get fixed soon...

I do like using Goodnotes for taking handwritten notes, but the search feature is frustrating. It misses words that I know I wrote, and the handwriting recognition feels hit or miss sometimes. If I’m writing fast or my handwriting gets a little messy, it just won’t find things later, which is kind of the main reason I use a notes app in the first place. It’s not terrible, but for the price, I pretty much expected it to work better.

I use this pen every day and it feels so smooth, almost like writing on paper

Using Collab has been frustrating for us. It keeps glitching at the worst possible moments, and the sync is always running late like it’s making some grand dramatic entrance. It’s kind of annoying when we’re just trying to get work done together.

The app bugs out and crashes way too often. I’ve mentioned it before, but it kind of feels like nobody actually read the message or cared enough to fix it

I moved over to the new version it wasn’t much trouble. A few settings were different after the update, but all my notes were still there, so that was a relief

I’ve been liking Goodnotes mostly because there are so many templates to choose from. I found planners, class notes, to-do lists, and even some simple paper styles quickly. My sister actually pointed out a few planner templates she uses too, which helped. Some of them do feel a little similar, and I wish it was easier to sort through everything, but overall it gives me enough options for school and everyday stuff.

I wanted to like the study tools, but they lag a bit and the flashcards feel basic. They’re fine if you just need a quick review, I guess, but I wouldn’t rely on them for serious studying.

I actually like the app overall, but the customer support left me disappointed. I had a syncing issue and sent them a message, then waited days to hear back. When they finally replied, it felt like a generic copy-paste answer and didn’t really solve anything. I’ll admit, stuff like that makes me worry I’m being strung along or fooled into thinking help is coming when it’s not. In the end, I had to figure most of it out myself. Not the worst experience ever, but definitely not great

I’ll be honest, I was hesitant about paying yearly for a notes app because I didn’t want to feel like I got tricked into another subscription I barely use. But GoodNotes has actually been worth it for me. I use it almost every day for class, planning, and random notes, so the cost makes sense compared to constantly buying notebooks and planners. So far, I don’t feel fooled at all, it’s been reliable and genuinely useful. No major complaints, just good value overall

I mostly use the Goodnotes marketplace for planners and study templates, there’s a lot of useful stuff on there. Some of the pages are really well made and make organizing my notes a lot easier. That said, a few things I bought felt a little too basic for the price, so now I make sure to look through the previews carefully first. I don’t mind paying for someone’s work at all, but it feels fair to expect the quality to match the cost. Overall though, I’ve found plenty of solid templates that are actually helpful.

I genuinely like using Goodnotes for taking notes, and when everything works, it’s really convenient. But the cloud sync has been inconsistent for me. Sometimes my iPad and Mac take forever to match up, and other times I have to close and reopen the app just to get things moving. It’s not a total dealbreaker, but it is frustrating, especially for an app people rely on for school, work, and important notes. I’d really like to see Goodnotes take more responsibility for making sync faster and more reliable...

I really like what this app is trying to do, and I don’t mind being charged for it if it works well. But lately it’s been irritating to use. Pages take a while to load, typing can lag, and it sometimes freezes when I switch between notebooks. I’m not really worried about constant updates or anything like that, I just expected a paid app to feel smoother day to day. It’s not unusable, but it definitely gets annoying.

I mostly use Goodnotes for taking class notes, and for that it does the job well. Writing and keeping notebooks for each subject is easy enough. The part that depends on how much you use it, though, is the organization. If you only have a few notebooks, folders are probably fine, but once I built up a bunch of notes over the semester, everything started to feel kind of crowded. I still end up digging around for older notebooks sometimes. Search helps here and there, but it doesn’t always find exactly what I need. I wish tags or sorting options were a little easier to manage. Overall, it’s not bad, just not quite as smooth as I thought it would be for keeping everything organized.

I don’t know, the whole thing just clicked for me right away. Swiping between days feels natural, and adding notes is so easy that I actually keep up with it now.

I wanted to like the AI help, and the idea is definitely useful, but it just didn’t do much for me. The writing suggestions felt basic, and the math help sometimes messed up the steps, which made it hard to trust. It’s a nice concept, I just expected it to be a lot more helpful.

I bought it mostly to annotate PDFs, and that’s where it keeps letting me down. The writing has this slight lag that doesn’t sound like a big deal until you’re trying to take notes, and selecting text feels way more annoying than it should. The worst part is that my notes sometimes shift around in weird ways, which makes me not trust it. Maybe it works fine for other stuff, but for PDF markup, the frustrating parts stood out way more than anything good. I wouldn’t bother again.

I mostly use GoodNotes for working with PDFs, and it’s been solid. Importing files from Drive is easy, and exporting them back as PDFs usually works without a problem. It can be a little slow with bigger notebooks, which is annoying, well, not a huge deal, but still something I notice. Overall though, I haven’t had any major issues.