Digital planner apps are lifesavers. They let you access your quarterly goals, to-do lists, project objectives, meeting notes, or anything else you’re planning anywhere, at any time.
They even let you share your thoughts and progress with just one clickable link. There is no need to transfer handwritten data to a chat or document or worry about the readability of your handwriting.
Goodnotes is one such digital planner. In this post, we share five of the best Goodnotes planner templates and their benefits to help you get the most out of this tool.
Towards the end, we’ll also share five free alternatives for those with professional planning needs. Let’s dive in!
5 Free Goodnotes Templates for Digital Note-Taking
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits Of Using Goodnotes Templates
With over 21 million monthly active users, in 2022, Goodnotes users created a total of 1.9 billion digital notebooks. Goodnotes 6 is an AI digital paper application that allows users to take handwritten digital notes, search for handwritten text, and organize all notes in a digital library.
Goodnotes for digital planning has been popular among Apple users since its first four versions were iOS-friendly. Here’s why.
1. Extensive applications
Goodnotes templates offer structured layouts for various purposes (such as daily schedules, project planning, or meeting notes). These layouts help you easily organize your information no matter what you need help with—from digital planning to daily to-dos and habit tracking.
2. Time-saving design
Save time using the pre-designed layouts Goodnotes templates provide instead of creating layouts from scratch. This lets you focus more on meaningful tasks rather than formatting or brainstorming on how to create layouts to match your requirements.
3. Customizable options
Goodnotes templates have customizable elements, so you can personalize them to fit your unique preferences and workflow. They let you adjust colors, fonts, and sections to create templates that best suit your needs.
4. Consistent formatting
Using Goodnotes digital planners ensures consistency in formatting across all your notes and documents. Consistency makes it easier for you to navigate your digital notebooks and find relevant information quickly.
5. Professional appearance
Since Goodnotes planner templates are professionally designed, they improve the appearance of your notes and presentations. Whether it’s business meetings, presentations, or academic projects, you’re bound to impress your audience with professional-looking notes.
6. Generative AI note-taking
The handwriting AI note-taking features of Goodnotes 6 can identify spelling mistakes in your notes and use AI to correct them. For typed text, Goodnotes’ integration with Claude helps you shorten, expand, summarize, and change the tone of your notes.
Summarize this article for me please5 Free Goodnotes Templates
The Goodnotes development team creates some templates for Goodnotes, while others are designed by third-party creators specializing in creating templates for digital planning tools.
These templates are available on online marketplaces, personal websites, and digital planning communities.
If you’re looking for Goodnotes templates for AI and digital note-taking, check out our handpicked collection of the five best Goodnotes templates to make the best of this note-taking app.
1. Aesthetic All-In-One Planner Template
This All-in-One Aesthetic Goodnotes Template is suitable for tracking year-round personal goals. It’s one of the best digital planners offered by For Little Lion on Etsy and costs $20.57.
The kit offers the following planning pages:
- 366 daily planning pages
- 366 daily reflection pages
- Monthly calendar, overview, and review pages
- Yearly calendar, overview, half a year at a glance, goals, and critical dates pages
- Nine goals pages
- Nine project plan pages
- Nutrition pages, including meal planner, grocery list, recipe book, kitchen inventory, and food journal pages
- Wellness pages, including mood, habit, hydration, sleep, and vitamins and supplements pages
- Fitness pages, including fitness plan, exercise plan, diet plan, steps tracker, workout log, progress tracker, and fitness journey pages
- Finance pages, including monthly finances, yearly finances, bill tracker, savings tracker, and debt payoff tracker pages
You also get additional planning sheets, such as Vision Board, Brain Dump, and Accounts, meaning this template has a planner sheet for every aspect of life.
The template offers three colors, various covers, and 10,000+ digital stickers to help you customize the visual layout.
Given the details, this Goodnotes aesthetic template might confuse users new to digital planners and productivity tools.
While this Goodnotes digital planning template is ideal for self-care and daily personal planning, it lacks a weekly planner, making it less suitable for business-related planning.
2. Cornell Notes Template
Cornell Notes Template is a free template crafted by Goodnotes. Download Goodnotes on your device and start a notebook with the Cornell Notes template to access it.
If you already use Goodnotes and have used up your three free notebooks, you must subscribe to their paid plan to use this template.
The template is based on the Cornell note-taking system, one of the most popular note-taking strategies. The strategy divides study material into sections for main points, cues for review, and summaries. This structured approach enhances comprehension, retention, and engagement with the material.
Here’s how Goodnotes recommends using the template:
We recommend this digital planning template to students and researchers.
3. Digital Ultimate Planner
The Digital Ultimate Planner is one of the best goal and habit tracker templates. It integrates Google and Apple calendar entries with digital scheduling on Apple devices.
Use this free Goodnotes digital planning template as a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly planner. You can track your habits, fitness, and self-care with productivity templates.
It offers:
- Synchronization with Google and Apple calendars (but there are no AI calendar features)
- 30+ productivity layouts, including ideas inbox, personal tasks, priority matrix, and to-do lists
- The ability to manage up to 10 projects with timeline views, Kanban board, and project budget layouts
- The ability to add up to 10 custom sections to the planner with your names and layouts
You also get 50+ note-taking layouts:
The only downside is that, like the first template on this list, the Digital Ultimate Planner might be overwhelming for users unfamiliar with digital planning.
4. Graph Paper Template
Here’s another template offered by Goodnotes. It features over 40 different types of graph papers in three colors. The Graph Paper Template is free if you have a free notebook in your Goodnotes account.
Goodnotes recommends this template for writing neatly on the iPad, which makes it great for students.
The idea is to start writing on graph paper, which will help you write in a straight line and keep your notes tidy. Once you’ve done this, switch the template to blank paper so it looks like you’ve mastered digital handwriting on blank pages.
5. Lined Paper Template
This is a plain-lined template offered by Goodnotes. Consider using the Lined Paper Template if you prefer designing your tables, lists, and layouts when planning.
Here’s what it looks like:
There are over 50 lined paper templates to choose from, including:
- One column
- Two columns
- Three columns
- Single column mix
This is one of the simpler daily planners recommended for basic note-taking and everyday to-do lists. But it may not be a great choice if you prefer pre-made planning layouts and don’t want to spend time creating tables or labeling.
Summarize this article for me pleaseLimitations of Using Goodnotes Templates
Despite Goodnotes’ raving reviews, there are four main limitations to using its templates. These include:
- No note interlinking: You can’t link notes between pages, meaning complicated planners will quickly become disorganized and difficult to use
- Poor image support: Adding photos is difficult and tiring if you add multiple images. Goodnotes templates also tend to become slow if you add too many images
- Clunky copy-paste functionality: For example, if you have a section set up in the daily planner and you want to copy and paste it to the next day, the formatting will get messed up and need to be redone
- Cost: Most Goodnotes templates are priced, meaning your digital planning might quickly turn into an expensive endeavor
Don’t worry, though. We’ve got the perfect alternative to Goodnotes templates—ClickUp templates for digital planning.
Summarize this article for me please5 Alternative Goodnotes Templates
With collaboration features like task assignments, comments, and real-time editing for professional use, allowing your team to plan, track, and measure progress collaboratively, ClickUp offers so much more than Goodnotes.
ClickUp templates are ideal for planning and note-taking as they’re free, customizable, integrate with third-party apps, and are also perfect for personal use. Choose from 1000+ free customizable templates organized into 13 neat categories.
Below, we’ve reviewed the top five ClickUp templates for note-taking and digital planning.
1. ClickUp Project Note Template
The ClickUp Project Note Template is fully customizable and best suited for beginner project planners or managers. It helps you stay organized at every stage of a project.
Here’s how the template looks:
Some of the key features include:
- Custom statuses, which let you update the progress of different milestones
- Custom fields, which allow you to set up different project attributes (like task resources and duration)
- Custom views, which help you look at your progress in the list, board view, or timeline views
- Link files or leave comments, which help you collaborate with team members and use the template for cross-referencing
Within the template, you can enter details such as purpose, goals, timeline, key milestones, and other relevant information.
ClickUp’s built-in AI writing assistant—ClickUp Brain, comes in handy when leaving feedback or drafting notes, making it an excellent AI tool for note-taking.
When you create subtasks within the template to complete the project or build your action plan, use ClickUp Brain to accelerate the process.
If your task was to plan company-wide SOPs, it may lack the details required to determine the next subtasks. Over the next few days, as your conversations evolve along with the addition of audiences, delivery formats, and timelines, ClickUp Brain will ingest the new information.
It will recommend customized subtasks based on updated context and details such as the people involved and their responsibilities, types of documents to create, and more.
2. ClickUp Daily Notes Template
The ClickUp Daily Notes Template is a beginner-friendly template for capturing quick notes and action items in real time, tracking the progress of your goals visually, and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
The key features of this template are similar to the ClickUp Project Note Template. But the layout is a bit different:
The template also comes with a ‘Getting Started Guide’ that explains how to use it to its full potential.
It is the best life planning template because it allows you to prioritize projects based on importance and urgency and visualize your workload and schedule with ClickUp’s Gantt Chart View.
Overall, it’s an excellent free template for daily personal and work-related planning needs, especially if you’re trying to break old habits, build new routines, or establish an organized work-from-home routine.
3. ClickUp Meeting Note Style Template
Whether leading a team discussion, participating in a client presentation, or trying to stay on top of your tasks, the ClickUp Meeting Note Style Template provides the ease and clarity you need to stay focused and productive.
You get a neat, well-structured, and all-embracing format streamlining the meeting management process.
The template comes with the following dedicated sections:
- Agenda items
- Discussion points
- Action items
- Follow-up tasks
You want to be organized and consistent in capturing your meeting notes and what’s being discussed.
The meeting note style template is an excellent way to capture and store information, including the key ideas, decisions, and action items to accomplish—all in the same format. It allows you to refer to past notes and review information from previous meetings when needed.
Use this one-pager template to take basic notes, and it will supplement other meeting materials, such as the ClickUp Minutes of Meeting (MoM) Template.
4. ClickUp Class Notes Template
The ClickUp Class Notes Template is designed for students. Here’s what it looks like:
Students often stress out juggling between multiple subjects, assignments, and study materials. This template eliminates the stress by allowing you to organize class notes, homework, and helpful links all in one convenient location.
If you’re using this, you don’t need to search through piles of printouts or struggle to find the right notebook.
5. ClickUp Cornell Note Template
The ClickUp Cornell Note Template is based on the Cornell note-taking system. There are four main sections:
- Cues
- Notes
- Summary
- Reviews
This template alternative allows students and academicians to review and process large amounts of information from lectures and recordings.
Here’s how students benefit from this free ClickUp digital planner:
- Organize notes into different categories, such as key ideas, questions, summaries, doubts, etc
- Sort and manage notes in a logical format to review and recall information for tests and examinations
- Summarize sections to identify critical sections and important facts during revisions
Summarize this article for me pleaseLevel Up Your Digital Note-Taking with ClickUp
Digital planning through Goodnotes templates saves time and helps you create professional-looking notes. However, there are several limitations to Goodnotes, such as the inability to interlink notes and cost barriers that make people look for alternatives.
That’s where ClickUp comes in. ClickUp is the ultimate note-taking app. It provides free customizable templates and collaborative features to help you stay on top of your tasks. ClickUp Docs can be used for all of your note-taking needs. And if you’re looking to optimize your note-taking with AI, utilize ClickUp’s AI writing assistant, ClickUp Brain to summarize notes, create outlines, agendas, and more!
Sign up for free today and take digital planning to the next level!
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