Notability: Smarter AI Notes App Reviews

Best handwriting app

It keeps crashing on my iPad and MacBook Pro after I updated both devices and the apps on both. Please fix this!

I love the goose

I literally use it for everything. Notes, reminders, drafts of anything I’m writing. The convert to text feature is super convenient.

Bought the app a while back, now it just nags to unlock or subscribe almost daily. It’s a good app, I bought it, it shouldn’t interrupt my work to nag.

I never write App Store reviews, think I’ve only written 2 others in my life, but I decided to write this because I tell people about it all the time anyway. I seriously use Notability every day. The gallery has so many great templates so I can find anything I need. It’s easy to create my own, too, so I love that. The subjects and dividers feature keeps me organized. I’ve tried a ton of other note-taking apps and organization apps; this is the only one I actually use. Highly recommend

Super buggy, notes either end up displayed in the ring folder or disappear entirely Takes several refreshes to attempt to return the notes you’ve already made If it aint broke, don’t fix it. Need an update for the update.

Notability deletes your old notes apparently without permission. When people was talking about it, I didn’t believe it until it happened to me. It deleted my last year worth my notes when I need to study for my certification.

The app has been glitching and makes it hard to take notes

Love it! Notability helps me keep my life organized. Is there any type of interactive calendar through Notability that I just don’t know about? That would be amazing! 😃

This application frequently experiences crashes. I created a 50-page document over the course of 20 days, and it crashed unexpectedly, resulting in the loss of my backup data.

I cannot express how many times I take a note and then wished I could go back and add something to it. Not only does this me to do that it gives me the retention that physically writing something down does. I started out using this just for school - because why not it’s a tax write off- but now I am using it for all my planning and taking needs.

Bring the goose back please. It was fun, cool, and unique! Just make it not mess with the tools though

After finishing note taking on a two hour lecture, the entire background disappeared and I was left with only my notes (lecture slides disappeared). This is a major glitch that has cost me countless hours and much frustration. After researching the problem, other people have also been experiencing the exact same glitch for years. Notability needs to be more receptive to fixing major issues like this. Until then save yourself some time and avoid Notability.

Only gives you 3 “pages” for free. If you want to write more you have to pay

It’s a good notes app minus when you are drawing Simple shapes it will sometimes not pick it up to make clean lines. I.e. rectangles. And sometimes it will pick up different shapes when I don’t want any

Please bring goose mode back! It was a great tool to make studying and note taking more adaptive, I even found myself to be more focused, I was devastated opening the app today to see it was gone

I have been so disappointed in Notability for the past year. I bought notability in 2020 and now it’s telling me I have a notes limit and I can’t edit my notes anymore. I tried deleting and downloading the app and now all of my notes are gone. I tried clicking restore purchases and it doesn’t recognize my past purchase despite being on the same Apple ID I used to purchase Notability in 2020. I have a final in 2 days, now I will have to print out all of my slides and retake my notes the old fashioned way. I would not recommend this app to anybody.

제 용량들은 여유로운데 자꾸 여유롭지 않다며 제 노트를 로딩해대서 화나요ㅜ

Notability is a useful app for drawing on and annotating PDF’s, and I guess you could type in it, Google Docs is better for that, though, but when it comes to combining both text and drawing, the controls could be a lot better. My main issue is the app’s apparent indecisiveness when it comes to whether to use text boxes or to just type from the beginning of the document. This is mainly an issue when I am typing in one text box and try to switch to another. When I do this, instead of just switching me to the other text box, like Google Slides or Canvas would, the app assumes, because I am using the text tool, that I would like to start typing at the start of the page and moves my camera there. This wouldn’t be as much of an issue, although it would still be annoying, if I could see the whole page at once. However, when working on small details, I am often zoomed in in and at the middle of the page, causing me to be forced to navigate back and find where I was working, disrupting my workflow. My other issue with the app is its shape detection. Sometimes, when I try to draw a circle, it gives me a random polygon with a ton of little bad looking sides. I understand that this is difficult to balance, but I wish there was some sort of menu that I could insert shapes from (If there is, I wish it made itself easier to find). Overall, this is an okay app with some nice features such as being able to upload easily through Apple’s built in systems, but it could use a bit of improvement. Edit: The scan feature is good sometimes but can be very frustrating and will refuse to focus, kept my review at 2stars because of the goose tho.

Love this app for assignments and note taking. More recently I’ve been enjoying the Goose Mode, I only wish drawing around him would affect him or if there were several tablets with this app and the mode turned on that he ran between tablets crazing chaos lol.

Thank you for the goose if you ever take him away from me I will move to good notes and never look back

Notability 很好用， 记笔记很方便~ 我用起来很舒服～ 我给五星好评～

please keep goose mode

The App is great for taking notes but has an update roughly about every 4 days. I am a college student that utilizes this app for taking notes during class. Often times I get to class and the pen has a terrible lag. I find myself rushing through note taking and missing major points the instructor shares. It’s very frustrating and there isn’t time to update the app between presentation slide during lecture. All I want is for my pen to not lag!😅

I got this app cause I needed a not e taking app on my iPad. I chose notability since the pro is just a once a year cost. The pro is so worth the cost! The AI helps study and makes notecards that are exactly like how my professor asks questions on tests. My new favorite feature is the little goose that runs around your notes. Usually I get distracted during long lectures but instead of day dreaming I can just watch the little goose and look at my notes at the same time.

You now have to pay to write any notes once you hit edit limit?? So stupid. I’m not paying for your subscription. Off to good notes!

GOOSE MODE JUST MADE MY DAY! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE KEEP IT! Also, I’m loving the app for my notes. It is such a great app. i know it’s April 1. PLEASE KEEP GOOSE MODE PLEASEEEEEE

App has little to no use in the free tier which is insane. If you want to paywall the app that’s fine, but limiting even the most basic utility of it is not the move. Paywall the AI features (that nobody really wants anyways) and premium tools, not limit how many lines or pages a person can take notes on because they’re not paying. Unreal. Would give 0 stars if it allowed it.

Very hard to relogin if you get as new device and very hard to get notability pro back

I love the app for note taking but it really anger me sometimes why it has some kind of weird syncing error and decides to either delete all the images on a note or just delete the note itself. This time it crossed a line and deleted a note not only from the app but my backup and iCloud as well. I was proud of that note and it’s making me question whether I want to continue my subscription or find something more reliable.

I am doing my work and I get a notification that I am not able to edit my work. What do you mea; I have to pay 20 dollars to use this app. I only typed in 3 words and I have to pay to use and edit my work. Outrageous! Please let me edit my work this is not kind!

The notes view being a small little bar is an awful design choice and makes it hard to see all my notes at a glance. who thought this was a good idea and gave it the ok? fix this please.

I have LITE version ($15) and it is awesome if only it was free.

The app works great for taking handwritten notes, and I really like the organizational features like folders and subjects. However, the typing mode feels limited. It would be helpful to have features like the ability to insert tables, more list formatting options beyond just bullets and numbers, and better control over list formatting—such as customizing indentation or changing list styles (like A., i., etc.). Sometimes even manually typing a list format causes inconsistent spacing or alignment, and there’s no way to adjust it.

Overall love the app and now I’m in love with the study options where it make your study guide and questions. Instead of me using ChatGPT to make study questions I can easily let notability do it and it’s easy and they makes good questions. However they been going up recently almost every year on price to pay for this app

I have been using Notability for about 4 years and have loved the app and have even recommended it to my friends. I am changing my once 5 star review to a 1 star because notability just randomly deleted one of my notebooks. It had a whole year worth of notes and they just vanished. I had all of my notes backed up but couldn’t recover anything. Not sure why this is an issue but I am very upset. I also had a premium subscription and I still was unable to recover the note book. I am griefed to say it is no longer a reliable note taking app and I will be switching to goodnotes.

I’ve literally only used Notability for 2 days, and I can’t anymore because I ran out of space. Even though my iPad has PLENTY of storage and space. So, 2 stars

No stroke smoothing, and only 1 template for ALL pages. You can’t use different templates per page. I’ve tried several other similar apps that all have these two very basic features.

The interface for this app is not designed very well. The Home Screen has a bunch of useless things I do not need or want there.

I have had notability for several years. I originally downloaded it to keep knitting patterns. It’s changed to keeping a lot of things I need a place for like school schedules, union info, application etc. my only complaint is that 1. It’s WAY more than I need. It would be great for someone in college, but I really just need the basics to follow a pattern. 2. It’s gotten expensive and if I don’t redownload it I lose all my paid for patterns.

I love this app I used it all throughout school. But I wish the ability to have more questions was available.10 is just not nearly enough considering the AI can’t regenerate 10 new questions.

A week ago before the update the summary was good, complete, but now the summary it’s too short, incomplete, and useless, it looks like a downgrade sadly

This app is more expensive than Goodnotes, and has caused me so many more problems. I used to paste images into notability all the time when practicing problems in chemistry, but the paste option stopped popping up and you can only past through the text menu now. The icloud sync function always has problems and chooses to offload all my notes at the worst times, and syncing between the mac app and the ipad app takes forever.

I have used this app for about 7 years. I got sick of my notes vanishing and switched to Apple Notes. Came back here to read recent critical reviews, and it appears that Notability is still neglecting to correct this issue. Notes need to stay ON THE DEVICE in addition to cloud sync. When people's critical notes go missing, REAL customer support is CRUCIAL for assisting with recovering them. I have noted that customer support has gone downhill, too, and no one EVER COMMENTS on reviews left by PAYING CUSTOMERS regarding missing notes. You owe customers an explanation.

The daily planner and ability to write different kinds of notes in different forms as well as recording Audio really helps with my bible study and various other studies and helps me really improve and organize my mind! Thank you!

The audacity of this company to start charging for just writing notes… like nty I’ll switch to good notes or even my notes app. I’m honestly so disappointed that the corporate greed got to this company.

Now you need a subscription to the app in order to edit your notes past a time limit. I’ve been a user of notability for probably the last decade! Purely because I bought it and like it. I don’t care about most features they have but enjoyed it any ways. I HATE SUBSCRIPTIONS for things that don’t need subscriptions. Let me pay to unlock new features with a one time purchase. I don’t care if the subscription fee feels cheap or reasonable, any subscription for a note taking app is stupid. I loved this app, but this limitation is going to IMMEDIATELY have me switch to other app. At the very least the subscription should not affect the ability to edit your notes and lock you out of your work. So incredibly dumb and not user focused. Even out of principle I’m not paying that subscription that they’re clearly trying to force on us users. I’m leaving unless they revert that.

I’ve used notability for over 6 years and in the past year it has deleted all of my notes randomly twice. Both times have caused extreme emotional distress and complete crash out episodes. I keep my app synced to both google drive and iCloud, but unfortunately neither of those are useful as my notes have disappeared from my supposed back up as well. After a while some notes randomly re appear but for the most part i would say if you’re able to go to Goodnotes instead because this has happened to me multiple times and support is NOT helpful.

I wish there was a way to save apple emojis as stickers. Also would love to see a feature to extend page margins because it often turns into a jig-saw puzzle trying to squeeze everything into one page.