Evernote vs. GoodNotes: Which App Fits Your Workflow?

Most teams pick note-taking apps based on input method—keyboard or stylus—but that’s just the surface. The real divide between Evernote and GoodNotes runs deeper: one treats notes as searchable reference material you’ll need to find later (critical when workers juggle 18 different apps daily), while the other treats them as visual thinking tools you create in the moment.

This guide breaks down how each app handles organization, AI features, platform availability, and collaboration. Match your team’s actual workflow, not just their preferred input device.

Evernote vs GoodNotes at a Glance

Choosing between Evernote and GoodNotes can feel like a tough decision, especially when you need the right tool for your team’s workflow. The question is whether you need a powerful digital filing cabinet or a flexible digital notebook. This choice matters because the wrong app can slow down your workflow and make notes harder to manage.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what each app does best.

Feature / Category	Evernote	GoodNotes
Primary Use Case	Digital filing cabinet for typed notes, web clips, documents, and research	Digital notebook for handwriting, sketching, and PDF annotation
Input Method	Keyboard-first with typed notes, audio recordings, and web clipping	Stylus-first with Apple Pencil support, handwriting, and drawing tools
Platform Availability	Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Web	Apple ecosystem only (iPad, iPhone, Mac, Vision Pro)
Organization	Notebooks, tags, and powerful search across all content types	Visual folders and notebooks with customizable covers and paper templates
AI Features	AI-powered search, note cleanup, and writing assistance	AI-powered handwriting recognition, math conversion, and spell check
Pricing Model	Subscription-based with limited free tier	Subscription or one-time purchase option for lifetime access
Best For	Researchers, writers, and professionals needing cross-platform typed notes	Students, creatives, and professionals who prefer handwriting on iPad

Evernote Overview

Research and ideas often end up spread across browser tabs, saved articles, and random documents. Piecing together this information for a project takes time, and valuable insights can get lost. This disorganization leads to duplicate work and difficulty finding saved information.

Evernote was built to solve this by acting as a central digital filing cabinet. Since its launch in 2008, it has been the go-to app for capturing, organizing, and finding typed information across all your devices. Think of it as a second brain for storing everything from meeting notes to web articles and scanned documents. Its standout feature, the Web Clipper, lets you save online content directly into your notebooks, simplifying research.

However, after its acquisition by Bending Spoons, the product has seen significant changes, including a very restrictive free plan.

Pros:

• Web Clipper browser extension: Saves full articles, simplified text, screenshots, or bookmarks directly to notebooks with automatic tagging
• Powerful search with OCR: Finds text inside images, PDFs, and even scanned handwritten notes, making everything in your library searchable
• Cross-platform availability: Works seamlessly across Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and web browsers with reliable sync
• Flexible note formatting: Supports rich text, tables, code blocks, checkboxes, and embedded files within a single note
• Integration ecosystem: Connects with popular apps like Google Drive, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zapier to automate parts of your workflow

Cons:

• Restrictive entry-level plan: The basic plan limits you to only 50 notes and one notebook, which may not be enough for most users
• No native handwriting support: While you can scribble on images, it lacks the fluid, stylus-optimized input needed for true digital handwriting
• Ownership uncertainty: The acquisition led to major changes and layoffs, leaving some long-time users concerned about the app’s future
• Dated interface: The user interface can feel clunky and less modern compared to newer competitors like Notion
• Sync conflicts: Some users report occasional issues with duplicate notes or sync errors when editing across multiple devices at once

GoodNotes Overview

Capturing ideas by typing during brainstorming sessions can feel slow and restrictive. You want to draw a quick diagram or mind map, but your note-taking app is built for text. Switching to another tool breaks your creative momentum. This friction can result in visual ideas being poorly translated into typed format.

GoodNotes solves this by being a digital notebook designed specifically for handwriting on an iPad with an Apple Pencil. It beautifully replicates the feeling of writing on paper while adding powerful digital features like searchable handwriting and infinite pages. ItsPDF annotation tools are a favorite among students and professionals who need to mark up documents, contracts, or lecture slides—serving a market where 650 million users open PDFs monthly.

Pros:

• Superior handwriting experience: Optimized for Apple Pencil with excellent palm rejection and pressure sensitivity, making writing feel natural and fluid
• Handwriting recognition and search: Your handwritten notes become searchable text without altering their original appearance, so you can find anything you’ve written
• PDF annotation tools: Easily import, mark up, and organize PDFs with highlighters, text boxes, shapes, and freehand drawing tools
• Customizable templates: Comes with a huge library of paper templates—lined, grid, dotted, and even digital planners—and you can import your own custom designs
• Flexible access options: GoodNotes offers both subscription and lifetime access options through GoodNotes Premium, giving users a choice in how they access the app

Cons:

• Apple ecosystem dependency: The best experience is on an iPad; the Mac and iPhone apps have fewer features, and the Windows version is still a work in progress
• No Android app: If you or your team members use Android devices, GoodNotes is not an option, creating a major barrier
• Limited typed note features: You can type text, but the formatting options are basic; the app is clearly built for handwriting first
• No web clipper: You can’t save articles or web pages directly; you have to manually import them as PDFs or use screenshots
• Basic collaboration: Real-time collaboration features are new and less developed than what you’d find in team-focused tools

Evernote vs GoodNotes Feature Comparison

Here’s a head-to-head comparison of key features. Both apps serve different purposes and excel in different areas. Compare them on the features that matter most.

Note-taking and input methods

Teams often include a mix of thinkers—some outline everything in text, while others need to sketch out workflows and ideas visually. Forcing everyone into a single input method can limit how effectively they work. Typed notes lack visual context, and handwritten diagrams are hard to share and integrate into formal documents.

Evernote is built for keyboard-first input. It offers a rich text editor with familiar formatting options, tables, code blocks, and checklists. You can also record audio directly into a note, which is great for capturing meeting discussions or voice memos.

GoodNotes is stylus-centric, designed for the Apple Pencil. It gives you a variety of pen tools (fountain, ballpoint, brush), highlighters, and a lasso tool to easily select and move your handwriting or drawings. While you can add text boxes, typing feels like an afterthought.

• Evernote excels at: Capturing structured information, clipping web articles, and storing reference materials
• GoodNotes excels at: Brainstorming, mind-mapping, annotating PDFs, and taking free-form visual notes

Organization and search capabilities

Notes can become difficult to organize over time. You either have a rigid folder system where nothing quite fits, or you have a “tag everything” approach that has become just as disorganized. Searching for information you saved takes time and interrupts your focus.

Evernote gives you two main ways to organize: notebooks (which you can group into stacks) and tags. Tags are powerful because they let you create a flexible, non-hierarchical system; a single note can have multiple tags, making it easy to find from different angles. Its killer feature is its search, which uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to find typed text inside images, PDFs, and even your messy handwriting.

GoodNotes uses a more traditional and visual system of folders and notebooks. You can customize notebook covers and paper to visually distinguish your work. It can also read your handwriting, but it’s generally limited to searching within a specific notebook or across all notebooks at once—there’s no tagging system to connect related ideas across different folders.

Platform availability and sync

Product teams often use Macs, engineering teams may be on Windows, and operations staff might use Android phones. When your note-taking app doesn’t work on every platform, information becomes fragmented across teams. Teammates on unsupported devices can’t access notes directly, and sharing requires exporting PDFs, which removes context and interactivity.

This is where the two apps differ the most.

• Evernote: is truly cross-platform. It has full-featured apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and the web. Your notes sync reliably everywhere.
• GoodNotes: is built for the Apple ecosystem. It works best on iPad, with companion apps for iPhone, Mac, and even Apple Vision Pro. While a Windows version is in preview, it’s limited, and there is no GoodNotes for Android app at all.

AI and smart features

Managing large amounts of information can be challenging. Long meeting notes require extracting key takeaways and action items without re-reading the entire document. Manually summarizing and formatting notes takes time away from other priorities.

Both apps have integrated AI to help, but they focus on different problems.

Evernote’s AI is a general-purpose assistant. It can summarize your notes, clean up formatting, and even help you with your writing. Its AI-powered search helps you find information more conversationally.

GoodNotes’ AI is specialized for handwriting. It can convert your handwritten notes to typed text, solve math equations you write out by hand, and spell-check your handwriting. It recently added an AI typing feature, but its core strength remains in enhancing the pen-and-paper experience.

Collaboration and sharing

After a brainstorming session, sharing notes with your team for feedback should be straightforward. You send a link, and the conversation spreads across Slack and email. Feedback becomes disconnected from the notes, action items get missed, and version control becomes unclear.

Evernote lets you share individual notes or entire notebooks with either view or edit permissions. With a paid plan, you can collaborate in real-time, seeing others’ cursors as they type. The Evernote Teams plan adds some administrative controls for businesses.

GoodNotes allows you to share a document via a public link for others to view or edit. Real-time collaboration is a newer feature and is less robust than Evernote’s. There are no team management features.

Should You Choose Evernote or GoodNotes?

Teams struggle when their tools don’t match their workflow. Visual thinkers need different tools than researchers whorely heavily on search functions. This mismatch reduces efficiency and makes it harder to capture and act on ideas.

• Choose Evernote if: Your team primarily types notes, does extensive online research, and needs to access information across Windows, Android, and Apple devices. Its powerful search and web clipper are built for creating a central knowledge repository
• Choose GoodNotes if: Your team works on iPads with the Apple Pencil, values a natural handwriting experience, and frequently annotates PDFs or sketches diagrams. Its paper-like feel is unmatched for visual and tactile thinkers
• Consider alternatives if: You find your team using both apps and still feeling disconnected. If your meeting notes in GoodNotes never turn into tasks, and your research in Evernote is siloed from your project plans, you’re suffering from context sprawl—when teams waste hours searching for information, switching between apps, and hunting down files across disconnected platforms

If you’re exploring AI-powered note-taking solutions beyond traditional apps, this video walks through some of the best alternatives to NotebookLM that can help streamline your research and knowledge management workflow.

Why Teams Choose ClickUp for Note-Taking and Project Management

Ideas captured in notes often don’t translate into action. A brainstorming sketch in GoodNotes may never become a task, and research in Evernote may never reach the project manager. This gap between information and action is where productivity breaks down, creating work sprawl—the fragmentation of work activities across multiple, disconnected tools—that fragments your team’s efforts.

Eliminate this disconnect by bringing your notes and work into a single, converged AI workspace—a platform where projects, documents, and conversations live together with contextual AI embedded as the intelligence layer—with ClickUp.

Create documents, wikis, and knowledge bases that live right alongside your projects with ClickUp Docs. You can collaborate in real-time with comments, mentions, and even assign action items directly from your notes. Use nested pages to build out complex documentation that’s easy to navigate.

Turn any line item in a Doc into a ClickUp task with an assignee and due date. Link Docs directly to Tasks so all the context for your work is in one place, ending the hunt for scattered information.

Capture ideas the moment they strike with ClickUp Notepad. It’s available across your entire workspace for capturing quick thoughts. With one click, you can convert any note into a task, so ideas become actionable.

Supercharge your workflow with ClickUp Brain. It’s an AI assistant that understands the context of your entire workspace. Use it for note summarization to get key takeaways instantly or for action item generation to pull next steps from your meeting minutes. Get insights that siloed note-taking apps can’t match because ClickUp Brain connects your Docs, Tasks, and people.

Get started for free with ClickUp and connect your notes to your work today. ✨

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a GoodNotes alternative for Android and Windows users?

Since GoodNotes is not on Android and its Windows app is limited, users on those platforms should look at OneNote for cross-platform stylus support or Noteshelf for a similar handwriting experience on Android. For teams needing a fully cross-platform solution that connects notes to project workflows, ClickUp Docs delivers.

Can you use GoodNotes or Evernote for team project management?

No, neither app is built for project management. They lack core features like advanced task tracking, dependency management, and different project views (like Gantt or Kanban boards), which are essential for managing team projects.

Is Evernote still worth using after its ownership changes?

Evernote is still a functional app. You should evaluate it based on its current features and decide if it fits your workflow, rather than relying on its past reputation.

What’s the best note-taking app if you need both handwriting and AI features?

This depends on your needs. GoodNotes offers AI focused on enhancing handwriting, while Evernote provides AI for general writing assistance. For a more powerful solution, get AI that works across both your notes and your tasks with ClickUp Brain, giving you a complete picture of your work.

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