So, we’ve covered the basics of Goodnotes versus Freenotes. Now we want to see all the different items you can add to your notes in the two apps, and just how easy or difficult it is to do that.
Shapes
Drawing shapes in Freenotes is the most painful thing you’ll ever attempt. With no ability to adjust the shape after you’ve drawn it, it means any mistake you make, you have to start from scratch. Fortunately, in my case, I needed some minor adjustments. The ruler tool came in handy for that because I am trying to draw something that is to scale. Sadly, though, resizing only got me one side of this rectangle, but adjusting the width proved impossible. So my fortune quickly turned to misfortune.
With my last stroke of patience, I tried a tactic I thought could nail my first shape. To get a slightly bigger diagram, I thought to use inches instead of centimetres, and that’s not a problem in Freenotes. The developers could try to make it more accessible though. The whole point of taking digital notes is to ease things like these. Drawing accurate shapes with specific measurements is a lot of work on paper, and Freenotes has done nothing to fix that. I like that the eraser still recognised the stroke after I had broken it up, but I certainly didn’t need this right now. Clearly, I won’t be drawing much of this plan in Freenotes, which is a shame because I really wanted you guys to see what I am trying to do. The shapes tool in Freenotes is so bad that it doesn’t even support irregular shapes.
You’ll have much better luck with Goodnotes. Switching between centimetres and inches is fairly simple, and you can adjust your shapes and lines. Whatever shape you draw, you can adjust it, so you don’t have to start over. The lasso tool in the app has been buggy lately, though. That is why my line keeps moving from where we put it. I hope it won’t give us much trouble with this. Because of the bad lasso tool, I had to change my strategy.
I really wanted to show you that even if you draw a shape with individual strokes, Goodnotes still recognises it, which is amazing. Certainly something you won’t get with Freenotes. Why is Goodnotes so buggy? I’ll give the app another shot after rebooting my iPad. I still couldn’t draw my shape, but thanks to the beauty of resizing and adjustment, I had the shape I wanted. In Goodnotes, you can rotate your shapes and even autofill them; another feature you don’t get in Freenotes. The only feature missing in GoodNotes are guidelines. With support for irregular shapes, curves, and arrows, Goodnotes is clearly the better app for shapes. But the bugs in Goodnotes right now are painful. I made some progress, though, that I did in Freenotes. Definitely not what I was going for.
Text Boxes
There’s not much to work with in Freenotes, but I must make the most of what I have. The app has alignment, formatting, and colour options for your text. Rotating your text boxes and even duplicating them is also easy and intuitive. I would have wanted to add some text border, but the app does have that. You have a lot of fonts as well, but selecting items was a bit difficult and unresponsive most of the time. If I had more to label on this diagram, I think it would have been more fun because the text tool in Freenotes is more functional than its shapes tool.
Goodnotes has borders and background colour for your text box, but I knew they’d need a bit of an adjustment to make them more useful. Rotation is harder to access than it is with Freenotes. After doing this a couple of times, you’ll just want to avoid it altogether. You’ll also miss the different lists you get in Freenotes because Goodnotes does not have those for text boxes. Where Goodnotes saves a single text box style, Freenotes saves several but only your text options, not the whole text box style. I don’t even know what’s better; both features are incomplete.
Though I originally just wanted a border, the background in Goodnotes looks good, so I thought to change my labels in Freenotes. The app automatically sends the text box behind the shape, but I actually wanted it on top. Unlike in Goodnotes, there is no option to move this to the front. The text tool in Freenotes looked promising, but I like how my diagram looks in Goodnotes.
Body Text
Body text shouldn’t have different features from your text boxes because it just complicates things. It’s still text, just one that overlaps everything on the page, which you should probably not use much in a handwriting note-taking app unless it’s Apple Notes. Freenotes implements body text so well. I can’t believe all that typing gave me less than half a page to work with. The headings are a lot easier to use in Freenotes. There’s actually nothing different from the text tools you get for body text, and those for text boxes, and that makes the app awesome.
Goodnotes, on the other hand, has text features reserved for body text. Bullet points are great and have varying bullet types when you indent them, unlike the super simple ones in Freenotes. You also get headings that are mainly bigger than normal text, and they are also bold. These are great features that our text boxes could use, but no. Those are strictly for body text, which I believe we don’t even need in a handwriting note-taking app because most apps have a terrible implementation of the tool. With the exceptions of Apple Notes and Notability. But, I am curious, do you use a lot of body text in your notes? On the iPad? If so, how? Do tell.
Photos
Both apps let you add photos to your notes from photos, and you can drag and drop them into the apps if you want. Freenotes does not support dragging items out of the app, though. But Goodnotes has no trouble doing that. Rotating your images is better in Freenotes, because the app hasn’t combined it with resizing. It depends on what you prefer, though. For some, it might actually be easier to do both at once and not have to do one at time.
Cropping is available in both apps as either freehand or the rectangular crop. Where Freenotes locks your images to prevent any editing, unless you unlock them, Goodnotes lets you stretch and shrink your images. No clear winner for this one, both apps do a fantastic job. But not inadequate either.
Stickers
I am not sure what the logic was behind the placement of stickers in Freenotes. The sticker collection in the app isn’t great, and the one in Goodnotes isn’t either. The only comfort is that you can create your own stickers from different items on the page. For the first time ever, I actually had some ideas for stickers I can create in a handwriting note-taking app. In both apps, new sticker collections are easy to add and we expect nothing less.
Tape
Tape is great for active recall; cover up items you want to learn and reveal them to check how much you remember. Freenotes has a couple of cute designs if you’re into that sort of cuteness. I’ll take the boring plain ones in Goodnotes any day. I imagine I would colour code them to use green for definitions, red for the hardest questions. That sort of thing. It makes sense, doesn’t it? I even like the light highlight that the tape leaves when you reveal your answers in Goodnotes, versus the line you get with most apps (not just Freenotes). The only feature missing in Goodnotes, that you have in Freenotes, is that you can reveal or hide all the tape at once. It won’t make me choose it over Goodnotes, though. It’s definitely my favourite tape, nothing beats it. It’s plain, but customisable; refreshing.
Audio Recording
I wish I was audio-recording this whole time. I would have had a decent amount of recording by now. The first thing I had to check is whether or not Freenotes can now sync the audio to our notes. The answer for that is no. So, this won’t even be a comparison because in 2024, it’s as good as not having the feature. Goodnotes syncs your notes; both handwritten and typed. You can also transcribe the audio, which is super useful. All features you don’t get with Freenotes. So if you work with a lot of audio, Goodnotes is definitely the way to go.
Lasso Tool
I have been using the lasso tool throughout this video. It’s kind of impossible not to use it with all the items we’ve been playing around with. Both apps have selective lasso tools that let you pick up specific items on the page while ignoring others, and that makes the tool more functional. Goodnotes, however, currently has the worst bug we have seen in the app, that is making selected and deselected items appear and disappear from the page. We managed to capture it a bit earlier on, and we hope the developers can fix it soon because it is making the app quite difficult to use.
Verdict
Goodnotes outperformed Freenotes in most of the tasks we threw at the apps. I imagine it will only lag more in the next part of this comparison because Goodnotes has a lot of interesting cards up its sleeve. Can’t wait to see how Freenotes performs then, but we already have our final verdict for this comparison. It’ll have to wait a bit though, until we have covered everything in the apps.