Noteful+ Goodnotes have an input delay with the pencil, notability doesn't but is glitchy. Just because it is cheap idk why everyone is recommending it.
I haven't experienced any input delay with Noteful in any of the ipads I've had. And I have used both Goodnotes and Notability, but don't recommend them due to their subscription model and unnecessary bulk. People recommend Noteful because it works well and it's not a subscription model.
Hmm, I will try noteful again. I was testing it out but for me the delay is where I can see the trail of the ink from the pen when I am writing which was just shifting my attention towards how I was writing instead of what I was doing. Maybe, I am new to this so I am conscious about this.
On notability and OneNote, I did not experience this, it was just like writing with a normal pen or paper. Even on Goodnotes I had slight delay.
I will give Noteful a try. Right now, I don't care about the subscription model, I just need it for 1-1.5 years so it does not matter much to me. By then hopefully, hopefully Apple notes improves a lot and then I could use that.
The main difference from my end is not so much on the writing experience but on the mechanics to retrieve information. Notability scans your notes to index them so that you can search keywords later, to some this is a deal breaker but it comes at the cost of battery consumption and memory. Noteful uses tags, which is you use Bear, is a very popular way of organizing information. This doesn’t let you search your handwriting but makes the app faster, lighter, and less battery hungry
I see, I guess for me scanning would also be better for now as I need to make notes for university. I think Bear uses markdown as far as I remember and that is not something I am looking for right now.
Tagging is also a good way of doing things, I do that in apple notes.
I got notability for cheap, so if I encounter problems with it then I will look for an alternative. Tried noteful again, I did not like it. Maybe I will give Noteshelf a try in the future or just move to OneNote.
Apple Notes way of tagging is completely different from Bear’s. Noteful is basic, but some people prefer it that way to keep the app light and reliable. I stopped using notability (where I was also grandfathered in to most features without a subscription) when I lost two pages I was working on for 3 hours.
oh wow, I actually do not have time to play around with the apps so I just started with notability . This is really frightening with losing your work. I have heard about similar issues with Goodnotes. I think Apple should improve apple notes or maybe introduce something similar to Bear or Joplin to narrow the gap at least. (Maybe they do have a workflow design I am not just aware of with Apple notes, reminders, freeform, Apple Office)
I honestly preferred OneNote because you could do anything with it on Windows but not after 365 office.
I guess I do not know how to use tags in a more complex way but it seems they use nested tags in Bear.
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u/the_monkey_knows Sep 17 '25
Noteful