Agenda for the iPad (2023)

Rating: 9/10

Pricing and supported OS

Agenda is a date-based, styled-text note-taking application by Momenta BV. It combines note-taking and planning in a single app. Agenda is free and is available on iOS, iPadOS and macOS. You can permanently unlock premium features for a one-time payment, and receive updates for up to a year. Once your subscription expires, you won’t get any more updates, to keep receiving some you’ll need to unlock another year of updates. This is the best subscription model we have seen on App Store. You’re not paying to use the app, you pay for the updates, so if you stop paying the app continues working. The app costs:

• $14.99/year for your iPad and iPhone.
• $34.99/year for your iPad, iPhone and Mac.

Orientation

The app has a left sidebar for navigation, a right one with all your scheduled to-dos and events and a middle section where you take your notes. You can toggle both sidebars for a minimalist look.

Creating notes

Creating a new note is very simple, with a single tap. You can then name your title and start taking notes. If you’re lazy to type your notes, you can scan them into Agenda. This is probably our new favourite iPadOS feature.

You can structure your notes with headings, or format them to make them bold, italic, underlined and strike out. You can highlight your text with some preset colours or use custom ones. For a highlighter, the present colours are quite decent. You can also change the colour of your text. For a text note-taking app, Agenda should have options for changing our fonts and their size, especially for headings. They are difficult to differentiate from the rest of the text. Most of us are used to massive headings. Preformatted text doesn’t count as a font option.

You can add lists to your notes; numbered, unnumbered and checklists that still have one type of numbering or bullet. In 2023, that’s unacceptable for this type of app. Interactive checklists are awesome though! They have an option to strike out your completed tasks and we love them. Dimming also works, but strikeout is better.

It is funny that Agenda supports superscripts and subscripts, but it doesn’t have font options. You can add inline or block code to your notes. For block code, you can choose its language, which is awesome. The app also lets you add quotations to your notes.

Items you can add to your notes

You can quickly add a date and time stamp to your notes if you like dating your notes. This can be especially handy for journaling. Dividers can help you organise your notes and stars are decent for bookmarks considering how Agenda is set up.

Links

You can link to other notes in the app or to external sites. A search option could make finding our notes a lot easier. Your weblinks can display as the full URL, or you can package them in some notes that make sense. It’s good to have both options. Interaction with weblinks is easy and intuitive.

Tables

Tables in Agenda are fairly simple with basic formatting and alignment options that are enough for tables. Adding new rows and columns is still a bit manual.

Attachments

Attachments can be any file (audio, video, zip files, PDFs, images) of any size, but the app warns you against attaching large files. Your attachment has four display options, depending on your preferences. You can name, preview or export it out of the app. We love that Agenda can preview any file and that it can now annotate PDFs.

Photos & videos

The app compresses the videos you attach, which dramatically reduces the video quality. It defeats the purpose of adding videos in the first place. At least live text works on them, that’s something. Agenda should let us do more with images in the app. Attaching them like they do with any other attachments doesn’t make sense for a note-taking app. Images should be able to interact with our notes, so we’re still waiting for a text wrap option. For now, you can only annotate your photos.

Scans

You can scan documents into your notes using the iPadOS scanning feature and the app saves them as PDFs. We are happy that now at least we can annotate our scans in Agenda.

Tags 

Tags in Agenda are universal and colourful, which is handy when organising your work. You can choose to make them less conspicuous, but what’s the fun in that?

Handwritten notes

You can add handwritten notes using the Apple PencilKit. You have a few page template options. We look forward to wider line spacing options for our page templates. The handwriting experience in this section is impressive. When there are things you can’t type, you can easily draw or add them to your notes in the app, and we love the app for it.

Planning in Agenda

You can add reminders to your notes that sync with Apple Reminders. We love that your reminders are a small inline icon that you can add to a part of your notes. Agenda also integrates with Apple Calendar to show your upcoming events where you can add notes to them. You can also create events for already existing notes.

Quick notes/access

To work faster in Agenda you can duplicate, split or copy your notes to paste them elsewhere. You can even save them as templates if you use the same note template. It helps for meetings, especially. Once your notes are done, there are several ways you can bookmark them for easier access. You can pin them to the top, or at the footer, change their background colour to make them stand out or mark them as on the agenda.

Searching

You can search through a single project, or through all your notes in the app. Agenda can fine-tune your search to focus on marked or unmarked notes. You can also choose to search through tags or people only. The app can pin your search query to the smart folders on the sidebar, which could save you a lot of time.

Collaboration

Collaboration is a must-have in 2023, and we’re excited that Agenda now supports it. We love that our notes are encrypted when collaborating on them. However, there are a few items that still need to be ironed out to make the feature perfect. It’s convenient to share note sections, especially when you want to share many of them with the same people. So, we look forward to collaborating on our projects at least. We also would like some permissions so we have a lot more control over the notes we collaborate on. Lastly, when I stop collaborating on my notes, the app should automatically terminate the session for everyone.

iPadOS Support

• Agenda supports multiple instances, so you can open the app twice, or the same project.
• Scribble also works.
• Agenda looks beautiful in dark mode, all the colours automatically switch when toggle between light and dark mode.
• Agenda also has some useful widgets that help you access important information from the homepage.

Organisation

Every project and note section in Agenda is flexible. You can move them, copy and even share them out of the app. Agenda can export your notes in many formats, which we absolutely love. The app supports five levels of folders within folders, which is more than enough. You can organise your notes into categories and subcategories (which are folders that can contain other folders), projects (that are folders that can only contain notebooks) and sections where you eventually take your notes. You could think of sections as individual notebooks because they have titles and notes.

All these organisation levels are listed on your right sidebar, below the smart folders in the app (labelled Overviews). In Agenda, you can choose which lists from Apple Reminders and events from Apple Calendar appear in the app. Only to-dos with dates appear on the right sidebar. You can also access your recently edited and related notes. You can collapse all these if you like.

Verdict

Agenda is excellent planning and note-taking app for dated, styled-text notes. Its minimalist look is refreshing, which is one of the things we love about it. We love how it integrates with Apple Calendar and Apple Reminders which makes it ideal for individuals and small teams.