Two things happened in this category that most comparison articles have not caught up with. Notability brought back a one-time purchase on 14 July 2026, reversing years of movement toward subscriptions — and existing pre-subscription owners get it free. And Obsidian dropped its mandatory commercial licence in February 2025, making it free for work as well as personal use. If you are reading advice written in 2024, both of those facts are wrong in it.
What each actually costs in 2026
| App | Free tier | Paid | One-time option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Notes | Free, built in | — (iCloud storage only) | n/a |
| Goodnotes | 3 files, watermarked exports | Essential $11.99/yr · Pro $35.99/yr | “Special Edition”, App Store only |
| Notability | 5 notes | Lite $14.99/yr · Plus $19.99/yr · Pro $99.99/yr | Classic, $49.99 |
| Obsidian | Free, unlimited, no sign-up | Sync $4–$8/mo | Catalyst $25 |
A warning on those figures: both Goodnotes and Notability run near-permanent sales, and the discounted number is what you see first. The prices above are list prices. Notability’s current back-to-school sale shows $11.99 against a $14.99 list, and Classic at $39.99 against $49.99. Check which one you are actually being charged.
Apple Notes is better than its reputation
It is free, already installed, syncs without configuration, handles Apple Pencil, scans documents, and searches your handwriting. In iOS and iPadOS 26 it also gained Markdown import and export — which matters more than it sounds, because it is the first time Apple Notes has offered a clean way out of itself.
For a lot of people the right answer is to stop reading here and use it for three months. Paid apps should have to earn the switch.
Where it runs out: there is no notebook or page-management model, no control over how PDFs export, no sync outside Apple’s ecosystem, and your storage comes out of the same iCloud quota as your photos.
The handwriting-search trap nobody mentions
This is the most useful thing in this article if you annotate lecture slides or scanned readings.
Goodnotes does not run OCR on PDFs you import. Its own documentation is explicit: only PDFs that already contain an OCR text layer are searchable. A PDF exported from Word or PowerPoint is searchable. A PDF someone scanned from paper is not, unless their scanner OCR’d it. Documents you scan inside Goodnotes using its own scanner are searchable.
So if your workflow is “scan the reading, annotate it, search it later”, test that with one file before you commit a semester to it.
Goodnotes recognises handwriting in 14 languages on Apple devices, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Russian — broader than most. On Notability, handwriting search sits in Plus and above, and in Classic — it is not in Lite, which is easy to miss when Lite is the cheapest paid tier.
Goodnotes versus Notability
These two get compared endlessly, and one feature usually decides it: do you need audio recorded in sync with your handwriting? Tap a word you wrote, hear what was being said at that moment. Notability’s version is genuinely excellent and it is the reason people who sit in lectures or interviews choose it. It sits in Plus and above, with real-time transcription; Pro adds unlimited transcription and AI summaries, which implies Plus meters it.
Worth knowing before you rely on it: Notability does not publish any limits on recording length, audio storage, or whether audio can be exported on its own. We looked; the documentation is silent. For contrast, Goodnotes states its numbers plainly — 20 minutes on Free, unlimited on Essential and above.
If you do not need synced audio, Goodnotes is the stronger general handwriting app, with better notebook organisation and much better documented PDF handling.
Exporting: you have to pick one or the other
Goodnotes offers two PDF exports and you cannot have both benefits at once:
- Editable keeps your handwriting as vector objects that can be selected and moved in other PDF viewers, and preserves outlines and hyperlinks — but the handwriting is not searchable, and files are larger.
- Flattened rasterises the handwriting but makes it searchable if recognition is on, and lets the recognised text be copied — at the cost of outlines and hyperlinks.
If you are handing annotated PDFs to someone else, that choice matters, and Goodnotes is the only one of the four that documents it properly. We could not verify whether Notability exports handwriting as vector or raster, so we are not going to claim either.
One more thing about leaving: if you stop paying for Goodnotes you drop to 3 files and watermarked exports. Special Edition owners fall back to Special Edition rather than Free — but if you were on a subscription only, get your files out before it lapses.
Sync is the quiet dividing line
Goodnotes puts cross-platform cloud sync behind Pro at $35.99 — Essential at $11.99 does not include it. If you want your notes on a Windows machine too, that is the tier you need, not the cheap one.
Notability moved onto its own Notability Cloud, replacing its previous sync entirely. It is live on iPad, iPhone and a web app; Android and Windows are still listed as “coming soon”. Do not buy it today on the assumption of Windows support. Version history runs 7 days on Lite, 30 on Classic and Plus, 90 on Pro.
Obsidian is not competing with these three
Putting Obsidian in a handwriting roundup is a category error these articles make constantly. Obsidian is a typed-notes tool built on plain Markdown files you own, with links between them. It has no native handwriting at all. Community plugins exist — Excalidraw, Pencil, obsidian_ink, tldraw — but they are community-maintained, not vendor-supported, and Apple Pencil handwriting in Excalidraw is still an open feature request.
What Obsidian is unmatched at is durability. Your notes are text files in a folder. No subscription can lock them away and no company shutting down can take them. Since February 2025 it is free for commercial use too, with the $50-a-year licence now entirely optional.
If you pay for Obsidian Sync, note the caps: Standard at $4 a month gives you 1GB total and a 5MB maximum file size, which a PDF-heavy vault will exhaust immediately. Plus at $8 gives 10GB and 200MB files. Or sync it yourself through iCloud or Git for nothing.
What we would actually do
- Start with Apple Notes. Free, zero setup, and it now exports Markdown. Switch only when you hit a wall you can name.
- Lectures or interviews: Notability Plus, for the synced audio. Nothing else matches it.
- Heavy handwriting and PDF markup: Goodnotes — Essential at $11.99 if you stay on Apple devices, Pro at $35.99 if you need Windows.
- You hate subscriptions: Notability Classic at $49.99 one-time is now the clearest answer in this category, and it includes handwriting search and cloud sync.
- A permanent, searchable knowledge base: Obsidian — alongside a handwriting app, not instead of one.
Running two apps sounds like a failure. It is not. Writing fast by hand in a meeting and organising typed knowledge afterwards are separate activities, and no single app on the iPad does both well.
Prices verified against vendor pricing pages in September 2026, using list prices rather than the sale prices both Goodnotes and Notability display by default.
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