The zoom tool in Notability is very basic.
Can you access notability online trial#
GoodNotes should look into offering a trial of the app before purchasing. It’s good that Notability now has a trial version that lets you try the handwriting experience before committing to the yearly subscription. Both apps have good handwriting experience, excellent palm rejection and accurate representation of handwriting. That really comes down to your preference. Our team can’t decide which app has a better handwriting experience. Though the two apps have different approaches for customising their pen tools, they both give you a good user experience. You can also customise your pen tip sharpness and pressure sensitivity for some of your pens in GoodNotes. The toolbar, however, can only display three pen sizes and colours at a time. It has a millimetre-pen sizing system (0.1-2mm) for picking the exact thickness you want for your pens. GoodNotes has three pen tools: ballpoint, fountain and brush pens. It is also very easy to hide it when you don’t need it. It can only hold a maximum of 12 favourite tools but you can move it around to different locations on your screen. You can save your favourite pens, highlighters and eraser to a mobile favourites toolbar. It has 12 fixed pen sizes and 32 default colours, to which you can add 32 more custom colours to the app’s colour palette. Notability has four pen tools: ballpoint, fountain, dashed and dotted pens. Notability and GoodNotes are primarily handwriting note-taking apps, meaning you mostly handwrite your notes with an active stylus. Use different page templates in one notebook Page customisationĪdding custom paper templates to the app’s library That doesn’t even matter because you can save custom page templates to the app’s template library. You can also have different paper templates in one notebook different colours, sizes, templates or colours. GoodNotes supports fewer colours for your paper templates though ( yellow, white and dark). In case you change your mind about their orientation a bit later, you can rotate (in Notability you can’t) them. Your pages can either be in portrait or landscape mode. You don’t get any line-spacing options with any paper templates in GoodNotes. It has paper templates for essentials, writing, planning and music (22 templates in total). GoodNotes also supports many page sizes: A7-A3, GoodNotes Standard, Letter and Tabloid. Notability+ comes with planners, digital notebooks and stickers that add to the digital stationery you can use in the app. However, the improved paper template options will probably mean you won’t be relying on custom page templates that much.
Adding custom paper templates in Notability also still is difficult. You still can’t have different page templates in a single notebook in Notability. All the pages in one notebook still use the same paper template (down to the colour). Notability still supports the 15 paper colours but now you can create custom page colours. They now have 10 line-spacing options and can either be portrait or landscape mode and you still can’t rotate them, though. Your basic paper templates still remain plain, squared, lined and dotted. It now has basic, educational, creative and planning paper templates.
The app now supports several paper sizes: A7-A3, Legal, Tabloid and Letter (optimized). Notability 11.0 dramatically improved page customisation in the app. You can also take more time to create new notebooks in both apps, customising your cover (only in GoodNotes) and page templates. Notability can create a new notebook with a single tap, whereas GoodNotes does that with a double-tap. As of November 2021, Notability is much more expensive than GoodNotes for new users. For both apps, these are universal purchases, meaning you can use the app on iOS/ iPadOS and macOS. Notability costs $14.99/year and it comes with a trial version that you test out for free, more about that here. Notability is now a yearly subscription, whereas GoodNotes is a one-time purchase costing $7.99.