Goodnotes has always been the place to capture your ideas — from quick notes to big plans. Now, it goes even further.
With powerful AI and flexible tools built for your Mac workflow, Goodnotes helps you connect the dots, unlock insights, and turn ideas into action.
*Goodnotes 5 users can continue using it indefinitely or upgrade to the new Goodnotes. Either way, your notes are safe and fully accessible on Mac.*
For professionals: Supercharge your productivity on Mac
■ Text Documents + AI: Create intelligent documents that think with you. On Mac, enjoy a superior typing experience with inline blocks and flexible layouts that make the most of your screen. AI-powered summarization, automated note generation, and transcription support help turn rough notes and meetings into polished and shareable content.
■ Whiteboard + Goodnotes AI: One of our most requested features is here. Brainstorm, diagram, and mind-map freely on a spacious, infinite canvas that grows with your thinking. Perfect for larger screens and multitasking on Mac. Enhanced diagramming tools and real-time collaboration let teams workshop and problem-solve together, while Goodnotes AI helps capture and organize ideas instantly.
■ AI Audio & Meetings: Stay focused in your meetings while Goodnotes on Mac works behind the scenes. AI-powered transcription and summarization tools record your conversations and structure them into clear meeting notes, ideal for remote work and hybrid teams. Merge transcripts with your own notes to create polished, shareable documents in seconds.
■ Present directly from your Mac via AirPlay or HDMI to an external screen — no need for third-party tools.
■ Use Laser Pointer to guide your audience during virtual or in-person presentations.
■ Export your notes easily via email, print, or as PDFs.
■ Share notebooks via link for collaborative editing — perfect for async work or team brainstorming.
■ Import documents quickly by emailing them to your Goodnotes address — available on all devices, including Mac.
For students: Study smarter, wherever you are
■ Record audio notes that sync with your writing, perfect for lectures.
■ Instantly search across all your notes with Mac’s powerful tools.
■ Study Sets turn your notes into flashcards using active recall and spaced repetition.
■ Use AI to summarize, rewrite, or edit your notes with tone suggestions and corrections.
For planners & creators: Organize with freedom
■ Customize paper size, templates, and colors to match your workflow.
■ Add or design stickers, stamps, washi tapes, images, and more to make your workspace yours.
Digital notebooks on Mac: All-in-one workspace
■ Combine handwriting and typing on a single page, ideal for hybrid note-taking.
■ Choose from customizable templates like Blank Paper, Ruled Paper, Cornell, Checklists, Planners, and more.
■ Navigate long documents easily with outlines or imported PDF tables of contents.
■ Sync seamlessly across Mac, iPad, and iPhone with iCloud.
■ Back up everything to Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.
■ Edit handwriting with your mouse or trackpad — resize, recolor, or reposition effortlessly.
Privacy Policy: https://www.goodnotes.com/privacy-policy
Terms and Conditions: https://www.goodnotes.com/terms-and-conditions
This digital notepad and PDF markup tool covers all the bases. Create notes with your keyboard or Apple Pencil: the app transforms your hand-drawn shapes into perfect ones, and can even convert your handwriting to text.
No need for paper file blocks
farmerpug
Downloaded this app before returning to Uni for a masters. I remember 6 years ago doing my first degree how many file blocks were used, the hassle of carrying lots of books and papers. With good notes i have not needed to use a pen or paper since starting this course. A very powerful app, really makes the ipad a very useful device. Love how i can take screenshots off my mac and paste directly into the ipad (apple possibly to thank for that innovation) but then annotate the screenshots in this app is super useful. All my lecture notes are saved onto good notes which lets me annotate them as the lecture takes place, far far handier than how it was back in the day printing lecture notes out 6 slides to a page and scribblig over small previews of each slide. Now i have the full slide per screen and can easily add pages to the document to add in extra notes based on explanations the lecturer gave. The best app i have put on the ipad and worth every penny.
Brilliant app. Pricing needs a rethink.
GB_UK
I bought goodnotes for my ipad when I started university 3 years ago. I chose it because it was the best for my uses and my friends recommended it and I'm glad I did. I paid just under £10 for the most useful app in terms of using my apple pencil to put my solutions to math equations. I orginally rated it 5/5. This has been improved with goodnotes v6, the math and AI elements have come in and do help to meet my needs in these circumstances. However, given I paid for this app in the first place, and put up with it's flaws (there were some tedious processes, cutting and pasting across pages being buggy, resizing issues, template cropping, and they still haven't quite workout out a way to convert handwriting to text that does involve multiple clicks and a weird copy-paste-resize and erase method) but I am most offended to open this and be asekd to pay a monthly pricing model for their improvements, or another one-off fee (which is oxymoronic at the least) to access the simple improvements, and the trial hinders my use of the existing functionality. If you can't make improvements to the existing software such that new users can be attracted and draw income and share them with people who paid for your software, especially students like me who can't afford to drop money repeatedly to have useful features, then just fix the bugs. I hope this issue resolves, because for the helpfulness of the app in the past, I don't want to leave this app with such a negative review in the future.
Usability problems on macos
gn_poweruser
Having been a power user of GN5 on both macos and iPadOS for several years now, the upgrade to GN6 essentially rendered the macos experience near useless. In the earlier GN6 versions, there were memory leak issues that crashed the app nearly every 5 minutes (on Apple Silicon M1 and M1 Max machines), leading to the loss of several pieces of work. More recent updates seem to have targeted this issue, but now even on my M1 Max Mac Studio with 32GB of RAM, the display of notes is extremely glitchy: upon opening a notebook, pages are displayed as completely blank; only after about 5s the first page loads, and scrolling over several pages hence is restarting the rendering process (and wait time) again. This behavior is reproducible even with a notebook just containing 2-3 pages of handwritten notes. It feels like the developers took some sort of quick fix on macos to tackle the memory overflow problems of GN 6 on macos, but this is not acceptable, as in this present form the core functionality is impacted.The reason I mention these problems in detail is that they simply did not occur in GN 5 on macos, where the experience was near flawless. In particular, even for notebooks with close to a hundred pages of handwritten notes, scrolling was fluid, and with no memory overflow problems. I therefore urge the developers to investigate and fix these issues, potentially by offering a dedicated macos app for the (nowadays standard) Apple Silicon platform.
* Introduced Quick Diagramming. Tap any edge dot on a selected shape to instantly create a connected node and build flowcharts without switching tools.
* Connectors now automatically switch to a cleaner route when shapes are repositioned. Added the ability to add and remove control points on Connector paths for more precise editing.
* Added keyboard shortcuts for Text Document, including inline code, subscript, superscript, block quote, bulleted and numbered lists, to-do/checklist, add comment, paste without formatting, and table cell navigation.
* Fixed several visual polish issues across dialogs, coachmarks, and Search empty states under Liquid Glass.
* Fixed an issue where certain Vietnamese characters didn't display correctly when previewing files to import.
* Restored "More from Templates" in the Add Page menu for Education users.
* Education: Fixed the Ask Classroom button text being truncated, and the Search result bar moving from the bottom of the screen in Teaching mode.
* Fixed a visual glitch where shrinking a shape containing text could leave ghosting on the canvas.
* Fixed an issue where the Lasso object menu could stop appearing after using circle-to-lasso.
* Fixed an issue where the Laser tool could get stuck.
* Fixed an issue where accepting an org invite while already a member could show a misleading error.
* General bug fixes and stability improvements.
Version 7.1.12
The developer, Goodnotes Limited, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Used to Track You
The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:
Identifiers
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Identifiers
Usage Data
Diagnostics
Privacy practices may vary based, for example, on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More