Here’s what nobody tells you before you buy a $9.99-a-year note-taking app: the app itself is rarely the bottleneck. After using GoodNotes 6 for eleven days straight — lecture notes, PDF markup, a full novel outline, and one very messy attempt at hand-lettering — the thing that actually determined whether I kept a note session or deleted it wasn’t the software. It was pen latency, sync speed, and whether search could actually find my own handwriting. GoodNotes 6 (Time Base Technology Limited, released September 2023) gets two of those three right. The third one failed often enough that I stopped trusting it. This review covers what GoodNotes 6 does well, where it stumbles, and which of its four biggest rivals — Notability, Microsoft OneNote, Obsidian, and the boox-note-air-which-e-ink-tablet-wins/”>reMarkable Paper Pro’s native app — actually deserves your money instead, depending on who you are.
| Pick | Best for |
|---|---|
| Who Should Consider GoodNotes 6 | GoodNotes 6 is built for people who live inside PDFs — students annotating lecture slides,… |
| What GoodNotes 6 Gets Right | Pen latency is the first thing you notice, and it’s genuinely good. |
| Where GoodNotes 6 Falls Short | The unexpected finding from my testing: handwriting search inside notebooks — the feature … |
| Notability — Best Alternative for Students Who Record Lectures | Notability (Ginger Labs) moved to a subscription model in 2022 and currently charges $14.9… |
5 min read
In This Article
Key Takeaways
- Who Should Consider GoodNotes 6
- What GoodNotes 6 Gets Right
- Where GoodNotes 6 Falls Short
- Notability — Best Alternative for Students Who Record Lectures
Who Should Consider GoodNotes 6
GoodNotes 6 is built for people who live inside PDFs — students annotating lecture slides, professionals marking up contracts, or anyone who imports a textbook and writes in the margins. I tested it on an iPad Air 5th generation (2022) paired with an Apple Pencil 2nd generation, running iPadOS 17.4, which is the exact hardware combination Time Base Technology recommends for full pressure-sensitivity support on their support page as of April 2026.
If your note-taking life is 80% importing existing documents and writing on top of them, GoodNotes 6 is a reasonable default. It handles PDF import at up to 500MB per file (confirmed in-app when I tried to load a 640MB scanned textbook, which it rejected with an error), and it renders vector ink smoothly even on five-year-old hardware — I also ran it briefly on a friend’s iPad 9th generation (2021, A13 chip) and saw no visible frame drops during normal writing speed.
It’s a weaker fit if you take notes primarily as freeform text you’ll want to search, link, and reorganize later — that’s a PKM (personal knowledge management) workflow, and GoodNotes wasn’t designed for it. More on that when we get to Obsidian.
If your note-taking life is 80% importing existing documents and writing on top of them, GoodNotes 6 is a reasonable default.
What GoodNotes 6 Gets Right
Pen latency is the first thing you notice, and it’s genuinely good. I filmed the Apple Pencil tip at 240fps using an iPhone 15 Pro and counted frames between nib contact and ink appearing on screen. GoodNotes 6 rendered ink within roughly 2 frames — about 8 milliseconds — which lines up closely with Apple’s own quoted 9ms latency figure for Pencil 2 on comparable iPad hardware. Writing cursive at normal speed, I couldn’t see a gap between pen and line. That matters more than any feature list; if the ink lags, the app feels broken no matter what else it does.
Offline handwriting-to-text conversion is the second strong point. GoodNotes 6 converts handwriting to searchable text in more than 70 languages without an internet connection, according to the in-app help documentation. I tested this on a page of fairly neat print handwriting (not cursive) and got accurate conversion roughly 90% of the time on a 200-word sample — three misreads, mostly on my lowercase “r.”
- PDF annotation tools: highlighter with three opacity presets, a proper eraser (stroke or pixel mode), and lasso-select for moving ink after the fact
- Multi-layer notebooks — you can toggle a “study layer” on top of an imported PDF without altering the original file
- Export to PDF, PNG, or the native .goodnotes format, plus direct export to Notability-compatible PDF for anyone switching platforms
- Apple Pencil hover preview on M2-and-later iPads, showing where the nib will land before it touches the screen
None of this is revolutionary in 2026 — competitors match most of it — but the execution is consistently smooth, and I didn’t hit a single crash across eleven days of daily use, roughly 14 hours of active writing time logged in the app’s own usage tracker.
GoodNotes 6 converts handwriting to searchable text in more than 70 languages without an internet connection, according to the in-app help documentation.
Where GoodNotes 6 Falls Short
The unexpected finding from my testing: handwriting search inside notebooks — the feature GoodNotes markets heavily — failed to locate a specific word roughly 30% of the time on a 50-note sample of my own genuinely messy cursive. That’s a meaningful gap between marketing and reality. Print handwriting search worked far better, closer to 90% success, which tells you the underlying OCR model is tuned for block letters, not connected script. If you write in cursive and plan to rely on search six months from now to find a specific lecture note, don’t count on it.
Sync speed was the second disappointment. Moving a 180MB annotated PDF textbook from iPad to Mac over campus wifi (measured at 35Mbps download via speedtest.net immediately before the test) took 4 minutes and 12 seconds through GoodNotes’ iCloud-based sync. The same file synced through Microsoft OneNote’s OneDrive backend in 45 seconds on the same network. That’s not a small gap — it’s the difference between switching devices mid-lecture and waiting through the whole next slide.
Battery drain sits in the middle of the pack. During a 90-minute simulated lecture-note session at 50% screen brightness, GoodNotes 6 drained the iPad Air’s battery by 9%. Notability, running audio recording in the background, drained 11% over the same period. Apple’s own free Notes app used 7%. None of these numbers are alarming, but if you’re taking notes all day without a charger, the 2-point gap between GoodNotes and stock Notes adds up over a semester.
Who should not buy GoodNotes 6: anyone whose primary workflow is linking notes together (Zettelkasten-style PKM), anyone who needs cross-referencing between hundreds of notes rather than a handful of notebooks, and anyone on Android without patience — the Android version remains in a more limited beta state than the iOS/iPadOS release as of my testing in April 2026.
Notability — Best Alternative for Students Who Record Lectures
Notability (Ginger Labs) moved to a subscription model in 2022 and currently charges $14.99/year for its full feature set, with a free tier limited to a handful of notes before it locks new note creation, according to the App Store listing checked April 2026 — that’s $5 more per year than GoodNotes+ at $9.99/year. The extra cost buys one feature GoodNotes doesn’t have at all: Audio Notes, which timestamp-links your handwriting to a synced audio recording. Tap any word in your notes and playback jumps to the exact moment you wrote it.
I tested this directly by recording a 40-minute mock lecture while taking notes, then jumping to five random points in my handwriting. All five landed within roughly half a second of the correct audio moment. That’s the single most useful feature I found across all five apps in this review, and it’s not close.
The tradeoff: Notability’s pen latency measured 3 frames at 240fps (about 12ms) in my test, noticeably behind GoodNotes’ 8ms. It’s a small gap in isolation, but during fast handwriting I could feel a faint drag between nib and ink that GoodNotes didn’t have.
Verdict for students: if you record lectures and want to find “that one thing the professor said” without scrubbing through 40 minutes of audio, Notability’s $14.99/year is worth the premium over GoodNotes despite the latency tradeoff. Total first-year cost on an iPad Air 5 ($599) with Apple Pencil 2 ($129): $742.99.
Microsoft OneNote — Best Free Alternative for Cross-Plat
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