Goodnotes

Goodnotes began as the iPad notebook people bought an Apple Pencil for, and has grown into a document workspace: handwritten notebooks, annotated PDFs, an infinite whiteboard canvas and rich text documents, all in one library and all searchable — including the handwriting.

Where the AI actually sits. Not as a chat panel bolted to the side. Goodnotes AI Audio & Meetings records a conversation, transcribes and summarises it live, then merges the transcript with whatever you wrote by hand during the meeting, so the finished document is your notes and the record of what was said in one artefact. Text documents get AI summarisation and note generation. The whiteboard uses AI to pull the takeaways out of a mind-map after a session rather than leaving you to reread it. There is spellcheck and maths support for handwriting too, available even on the free tier.

Collaboration. Real-time editing on the whiteboard and in documents, private link sharing, and cross-platform sync — which matters because Goodnotes runs on iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows, Android and the web, not just on Apple hardware.

Pricing. The free plan is genuinely usable but capped: three notebooks, documents and whiteboards combined, 100MB of storage, 20 minutes of audio, limited sharing, and exports carry a watermark. Essential is $11.99 a year for unlimited documents, 5GB and unlimited audio with transcription. Pro at $35.99 a year adds real-time collaboration, cross-platform sync, Meeting AI and Create Mode. Both offer an optional AI Pass at $9.99 a month for the advanced AI features. Teams is $120 per seat per year with an admin console, SAML SSO and domain control; Enterprise adds Intune integration and AI permissions.

Existing Goodnotes 5 users keep that version indefinitely — the upgrade is optional, and notes are not stranded either way. 4.7 average across roughly 450,000 US ratings.