Pencora vs Goodnotes

Goodnotes is polished and popular — but its free plan stops at three notebooks, it needs an account, and it can’t write your text for you, build geometry or turn another app’s PDFs back into ink. Pencora does all of that, free.

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Where Pencora is ahead of Goodnotes

Pencora compared with Goodnotes
Feature Pencora Goodnotes
Price
Free — every feature. No subscription, no ads
Free plan: 3 notebooks and watermarked exports. The full app is from $11.99 a year, or $35.99 once
Account
Not needed — open the app and write
Needed to save your own notebooks
Typed text in your handwriting
Teach it your letters once, then type or paste a whole Markdown document — lists, formulas — and it’s written in your own hand. Russian and English, on the iPad
Only Spellcheck: it redraws a misspelled word in your style (8 languages, no Russian)
Graphs on the page
Functions, implicit curves, points and tables — typed, imported from CSV or read from a hand-drawn table; ink on the plane sticks to its coordinates
Basic 2D graphs from an equation
Geometry constructions
Bisectors, perpendiculars, tangents, reflections, triangle centres — drag a point and everything built on it follows, in real millimetres
Shape clean-up and a ruler — no constructions
PDFs from other apps
Handwriting comes in as real, editable strokes on the right paper — lasso, recolour or erase any of it
Flat pages — “you can’t edit the notes anymore,” says Goodnotes’ own help
Paper
Lined, grid, dotted and more — or any PDF page as your paper
Templates and stationery need a paid plan

Moving over from Goodnotes

  1. Export the notebook as a PDF from Goodnotes.
  2. Open the PDF with Pencora — from the Share sheet, or with Import inside a notebook — and choose to bring it in as editable ink.
  3. Pencora detects the paper ruling and turns the handwriting into real strokes, page by page. Long notebooks open at once and finish converting as you go.

Other comparisons

Compared with what Goodnotes says about itself on its own website and App Store page, checked September 2026. Apps change — if something here is out of date, tell me and I’ll fix it. Goodnotes is a trademark of its owner; Pencora is not affiliated with or endorsed by it.