Best Note Taking App For iPad With Apple Pencil

The Apple Pencil that fits the cheapest iPad does not sense pressure. Apple's own comparison table says so, with a plain cross in the pressure sensitivity row for the Apple Pencil (USB-C).

Which means half the marketing for the best note taking app for iPad with Apple Pencil describes something your setup cannot do. Every brush that thickens when you press, every pen that shades with force, every stroke that tapers, all of that needs a signal the USB-C Pencil doesn't send. Tilt it sends. Hover it sends. Pressure, no.

Straight answer. If you have the Apple Pencil Pro, Notability and CollaNote are the two apps whose own listings claim they use the newer inputs, and Notability is the better all-round buy. If you have the USB-C Pencil, pick on handwriting recognition and PDF markup instead of ink feel, which points at MyScript Notes or Notability again. If you have no Pencil at all, most of this category is not worth buying. Sources are apple.com/apple-pencil and the US App Store listings, all loaded 29 July 2026.

What Each Pencil Actually Senses

Apple publishes this and almost nobody reproduces it, probably because it's a table on a marketing page rather than a spec sheet.

Both get described with the same sentence about feeling "as natural and responsive as using a pencil on paper", which is a claim about latency dressed as a claim about feel, and it appears identically under two pens with very different capabilities.

The compatibility lists differ too. Apple Pencil Pro works with iPad Pro 13 inch and 11 inch on M4 and M5, iPad Air 13 inch and 11 inch on M2, M3 and M4, and iPad mini on A17 Pro. The USB-C Pencil covers all of those plus the regular iPad, which is the model most people buy.

Apple doesn't publish either pen's price on the pages I could load, and the shop URL I tried returned a 404. So I can tell you exactly what each one senses and not what it costs, which is a frustrating place to leave a hardware article and better than making a number up.

The Pressure Row Is The Whole Argument

Four of those seven signals belong only to the Pro pen, and one of them changes what handwriting looks like.

Think about what an app can do with each. Tilt gives you shading when you lean the pen over, which every app that draws has used for years. Hover shows a preview of where the tip will land, useful and cosmetic. Double tap swaps tools. Squeeze opens a menu. Barrel roll rotates a chisel nib as you turn the pen, which matters to about four hundred people, all of them calligraphers.

Pressure is different because it's continuous. It's the difference between a stroke that has weight in it and a stroke that's the same width from end to end. On a USB-C Pencil, every note you write is a uniform line, and no app can fix that in software because the data isn't arriving.

I want to be careful here. Uniform lines are completely fine for taking lecture notes, and plenty of people prefer them because handwriting stays legible when it isn't varying in weight. The point isn't that the cheaper pen is bad. It's that if you were choosing between apps on the strength of their brush engines, and you own the USB-C Pencil, you're choosing on a criterion that doesn't apply to you and you'd be better off deciding on search and PDF handling.

Which Apps Have Actually Adopted The New Inputs

Apple shipped squeeze, barrel roll and haptics with the Pencil Pro. Adoption is patchy, and the only honest way to check is to read what each developer claims on their own store listing.

Two apps out of nine name the Pencil Pro's distinctive inputs, and one of them is a small studio selling a $13.90 lifetime unlock.

The Goodnotes row is the one I'd flag. It's the biggest handwriting app in the category by a wide margin, 437,456 ratings, and its store description doesn't advertise squeeze or barrel roll support anywhere I could see. That doesn't prove the features are absent, since a store description isn't a feature manifest and plenty of apps pick these up through the system frameworks without saying so. It does mean that if adopting the Pro pen's inputs is your buying criterion, one company is telling you and another isn't.

MyScript's line is the opposite kind of interesting. Any active or passive pen, including a cheap stylus. If your budget is going on the iPad and not the Pencil, that's the app whose own documentation says it'll still work.

Nobody Publishes A Latency Number

I went looking for milliseconds and came back with adjectives.

Apple's Pencil page says both models feel "as natural and responsive as using a pencil on paper". Freenotes promises "low-latency writing that feels like real paper". Noteful describes an ink engine called InfiniteStroke. Not one of them attaches a figure to any of it, and neither does Paperlike's guide, which is the strongest non-forum page ranking for this search and doesn't discuss latency at all.

So the honest state of play is that latency is the most-discussed property of writing on an iPad and the least documented. Every claim you'll read about it is either a feeling somebody had, or a number from a hardware review that measured a specific iPad and Pencil combination rather than an app.

If it matters to you, and it reasonably might, the only test is your own hand on your own device. Install two free tiers, write the same sentence in each, and see whether one of them lags behind your wrist. That takes ten minutes and it's worth more than every review of this you'll read, mine included.

Palm Rejection Is Undocumented Too

Same story, shorter section.

Palm rejection is the feature people ask about most in the forum threads ranking for this query, and I could not find a single vendor page or store listing among the ones I loaded that describes how their app handles it, or offers a setting, or claims it works better than a competitor's.

My assumption, flagged clearly as an assumption, is that most of these apps inherit it from Apple's own pencil frameworks rather than implementing their own, which would explain the silence. I can't confirm that, so I'm not going to state it.

What Falls Apart Without A Pencil

Worth knowing before you buy an app and then discover the pen is the actual purchase.

Two of those nine are genuinely fine without a stylus, and both are free. If you're not sure you'll actually handwrite, and a lot of people who buy these apps don't, start with a free one and let the habit prove itself before you spend anything on either half of the setup.

The Other Half Is PDFs

Handwriting on blank pages is the smaller job. Marking up documents is the one that decides whether people keep using these apps past November.

Notability's listing says you can "mark up anything: PDFs, textbooks, lecture slides, images, and more". Goodnotes describes a PDF markup tool and exporting notes as PDFs. Apple Notes will let you sketch inside an inline PDF, which is genuinely more than most people expect from the free option. MarginNote 4 goes furthest and turns each excerpt into a highlight, a mind map node and a flashcard at the same time.

The gap between marking up a PDF and organising forty of them is where the paid apps earn money. Apple Notes handles the first and doesn't really attempt the second, and I'd say that's the honest line at which paying starts making sense for a student.

No Receipt From Me On How A Pen Feels

I don't take handwritten notes on a tablet. My notes are plain files sitting next to the projects they belong to, so I've got nothing to offer on whether a Pencil Pro feels better under the hand than the cheaper one, and I'd distrust anyone who claims an article can settle that for you.

What I do have is a habit of checking whether the expensive part of a setup is the part I actually keep. I've shipped seven digital products between $29 and $49, and every one of them was made with tools I already owned, mostly because I kept noticing that the equipment upgrade I wanted was standing in for the work I was avoiding. Buying the better pen feels like progress in exactly the same way that reorganising a notebook does.

So my honest judgment, and it's judgment rather than a finding, is that the Pencil Pro's four extra signals matter enormously to illustrators and hardly at all to somebody writing lecture notes. If you're in the second group, the money is better spent on nothing, or on the twelve-dollar app tier that turns handwriting search on.

Questions People Ask

Which app works best with the Apple Pencil Pro? Notability, on published information, because it's the only major app whose listing names hover, haptics and squeeze. CollaNote is the interesting cheap alternative and it uses squeeze for a gesture rather than a menu.

Does the app change the writing feel? Somewhat, since ink engines differ, and less than the pen and the screen do. Nobody publishes numbers for any of it, so treat every claim including mine as untested.

Do I need the Pro pen? Only if you want pressure, squeeze, barrel roll or haptics. For plain handwriting, the USB-C Pencil sends tilt and hover and that's enough.

Is Apple Notes good enough with a Pencil? For sketching and inline PDF markup, yes. It stops being enough when you need to organise many marked-up documents, which is the point covered in the best note taking program for iPad piece.

What about a screen protector? That's the other half of writing feel and it's a hardware question rather than an app one. There's a device-level cost breakdown in the take notes on tablet rundown.

Goodnotes or Notability for a stylus specifically? Notability, on the Pencil Pro evidence above. On everything else the split is different, and it's worked through properly in the Notability versus Goodnotes comparison.

What I'd Buy

Whichever Pencil your iPad takes, then nothing else for a month, then one app.

Write in Apple Notes for that month with the pen you have. If your handwriting comes out uniform and that bothers you, you've learned that you want the Pro pen, and you learned it for free. If it doesn't bother you, you've just saved the difference and you can spend twelve dollars on an app instead.

Then pick from the shortlist by what you'll do with the notes rather than by how the ink looks. The full survey of what else is in this category, sorted by job rather than ranked, is in the note taking applications for iPad piece, and the wider cost picture across a whole stack of these subscriptions sits in the productivity apps breakdown.