CollaNote vs Good Notes: How Is The Best Note-taking App For You In 2024

Intro of CollaNote vs Good Notes

In today’s article, we will be comparing CollaNote vs Good Notes two apps that I have talked about on my channel. Both are apps that I have used extensively, but this article is going to compare different aspects of both applications that I think are very important when choosing a good app to take all of your notes in.

Price

I think it would be stupid of me not to talk about this at the start of it because I think the price has a lot to do with how much you expect from an application. If you give your money away to developers, then you expect something in return or quality and consistency in that app that you have almost invested in.

This is where we start talking about CollaNote being fully free and GoodNotes costing about 10 dollars, give or take, where you live. Because I know it kind of fluctuates as well as your currency, you’ll be spending around ten dollars for the app. If you think it’s going to be a one-time purchase, it’s not going to be that.

Unlike Notability, where it’s a one-time purchase, and then with every single update, you just get the update and you don’t have to pay again. For them to change things or tweak things in the app, the notes have had different versions on the market.

Right now, we’re on GoodNotes 6, which means that if they do make GoodNotes 7, that means that you would have to take another 10 bucks out of your pocket and buy the new version. Then again, they do update things on GoodNotes 6. It’s just that if they change a good amount of things, then they would rather just make a new app instead of having to tweak everything that’s wrong in the current one. I would recommend it.

User Interface

Now let’s talk about the UI. CollaNote is fairly new, My point, though, is that CollaNote has not had a lot of time for them to improve, whereas GoodNotes has been on the market for so long. Saying that, though, I think that GoodNotes has almost mastered the UI, and the user interface of their application because of how sleek it is and how not fussy their app is.

On the other hand, CollaNote, the new kid on the block, has a few quirks that I think will improve over time. I’m mostly talking about the lag because I have noticed a bit of lag on CollaNote. You kind of get used to it at some point when you get to understand that clicking it multiple times doesn’t actually make it faster.

You’ll see that it’s an enjoyable app. For that, I’ll give CollaNote a seven out of ten, and GoodNotes an eight out of ten because in CollaNote, the lag isn’t everywhere. It’s specifically when you’re trying to select a folder and edit it. I just think it’s kind of clumsy the way that it’s all set up for it to move and delete and stuff, and there is a lag. But again, that’s something that you can overlook because of the quality of the app in general.

Aesthetics

When you compare GoodNotes to Notability, you will notice that GoodNotes is a bit more sleek, a bit more minimalistic, and it’s just… I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s just sleek and minimalist. CollaNote, with its blue accent, it’s not something that I prefer, but I’m sure other people do like the little dash of color.

Generally, I go for apps that let you customize accent colors, for example, or apps that just stick to white and black – how the folders look, the customization of the folders, etc. I’ll give CollaNote an 8 out of 10, and GoodNotes a 9 out of 10.

Organization

When it comes to organization, I think that it all depends on how you use your applications. I think a lot of people might go for GoodNotes just for the fact that it is an actual notebook, and you have an endless amount of pages that you can add to a notebook. Whereas other people would go for Notability, which is a bit more of an organization-based app that kind of resembles files more.

Funny enough, I think CollaNote is a mixture of the two. It’s a notebook folder with more options to organize things in subfolders than, for example, GoodNotes. Yet, they also add on bookmarks to CollaNote, so it’s a mixture of the two.

I would have preferred it to be more like GoodNotes where you have one notebook and then you add pages to the notebook and bookmarks to the notebook for it to be a bit more seamless. But it’s not like that on CollaNote. You choose a folder, name the folder, and then add notes to the folder, somewhat like Notability but with more of a notebook aesthetic.

Personally, I prefer how GoodNotes does it, and I would give GoodNotes a nine out of ten. I would give CollaNote a seven out of ten, merely for my preference. I know a lot of people actually enjoy how CollaNote does it, but it’s personal, it’s my take on it.

Paper Options

Now we go into paper options, which is very, very important when you’re using an app and actually writing on an app. Here again, I lean more towards GoodNotes. I prefer the fact that we can add our own templates to the app, which means that we can just upload a PDF and then make that a template. Whereas with CollaNote, you don’t really have an option to make your own templates; you have to rely on their templates.

When talking about their templates, I don’t really like the way their papers look. They have a lot of options, which is not something that GoodNotes has in terms of variety. But I don’t like the fact that they have borders on every single page or template because I like having the option to choose and customize the border width, etc.

And when they already put it there, it’s just something impersonal, almost like I would have loved to be able to customize it. Secondly, if they don’t allow you to put your own templates onto their app, I would like them to let you choose the color of the lines or the color of the actual page. When talking about cute templates, though, Color Note takes the win. I give GoodNotes an 8 and CollaNote a 6 on that.

Because we were comparing Notability to GoodNotes, and then over the past few months, Notability has just improved tremendously on the way that your writing looks on their app. It has some sort of like almost a snap, which makes your handwriting look way better.

GoodNotes has just stuck with the thing that they’ve been doing for years. Again, this whole issue of them not actually changing things that their users are asking for. Instead, they just add a button and then hope that we’ll be happy with the new sticker function as if we’ve not been asking for the audio to be added to it or a couple of other things such as the writing feel.

I’m just thoroughly disappointed with that. CollaNote kind of came in, barged into the scene, and had the best, I will say by far the best feeling when writing on their apps. You feel like it’s paper, especially when you’re writing with a pencil. Just know that I’ll give CollaNote a 10 out of 10, and GoodNotes like a three. Sorry, you’ve not improved.

Tools

Now we’re going to the tools option. CollaNote and Notability have variety in their tool options. Something I wish CollaNote had was a ballpoint pen because CollaNote has three writing options: the highlighter, the pen, and then the pencil. Whereas GoodNotes has an ink pen, fountain pen, ballpoint pen, and highlighter.

Really, the ink pen and the fountain pen, I don’t really care about, but I just wish CollaNote gave you the option to either choose to remove pressure sensitivity, which would make the line thicker all the time, or just give you the option to use ballpoint pens, which makes it so that there isn’t actually pressure sensitivity. One of the two would make CollaNote the best thing ever.

CollaNote also has the option to add favorites, which includes the size of your pen as well as the color of your pen. GoodNotes really just have those three little accents on the top left of your screen where you can change, but it doesn’t recognize the size that you chose or anything like that.

It’s just the color. So, maybe that’s something that GoodNotes should consider. CollaNote also puts your favorite pens on your paper as you’re writing on it, which makes it so accessible, especially when you’re writing in a lecture where you’re trying to be fast and stuff.

Switching between pens and highlighters and pencils is seamless, and it’s really, really nice. Something I have to say, I don’t really enjoy the fact that CollaNote doesn’t allow you to choose the size of your eraser. I could be totally wrong, and I might not have seen how to do that, but I just wish you could if you know what I mean.

The last thing, which is something that again I don’t really know if I’m right or wrong on this matter, but I wish CollaNote had the option to swipe through your pages instead of scrolling through your pages, which is something GoodNotes has the option to do like infinity scroll or swiping through pages. It makes it seem like it’s more of a notebook than like a digital device writing thingy, if you know what I mean. Again, on that front, I think I’ll give GoodNotes a 7 and CollaNote a 6

Developers

Lastly, developers. If you were to compare the developers from CollaNote and the developers from GoodNotes, I don’t think you could even compare them. I think it’s because GoodNotes is already established to the point that they don’t really need to listen to their users because they’re so well-known.

Everybody knows about GoodNotes; it’s like one of the first things that people tell you to download whether it’s good or not at this point. Whereas CollaNote is building a community around it, and it really does feel like a community, especially because of the public notes and the public questions that are always open 24 hours, seven for the developers to see or the moderators to see.

It feels like it’s a community, and then it also feels like the developers are actually listening to us. They have various ways of contacting them, whether it’s in-app queries or in-app suggestions, or whether it’s you contacting them through their Instagram, their YouTube, email, as well as the public notes thing that I was talking about.

I mean, there are so many ways to give them feedback. Whereas GoodNotes, you can make a YouTube video or you can add feedback on the App Store, but their reply is always going to be the same. It feels so impersonal, and that really shows with their lack of updates and their lack of actually doing things that their users have been asking for.

And CollaNote, I can’t say the same thing about them. They’ve always listened to their users, the little things that their users don’t like. For example, apparently, now they’re gonna switch the cut tool to the lasso tool, which are little things that users notice when they’re using the app that developers might not notice at the start, but things that do matter.

It’s just very refreshing to see a group of people actually caring about the products that they’re making, instead of just being like mass-produced. Here you go, this is GoodNotes, we’ve changed a couple of things. I know you wanted the audio thing, but I’m sorry, we can’t do that.

Conclusion

So in conclusion both apps are pretty good and pretty feature-rich. In terms of how many options you get while using both of the apps. So in my opinion CollaNote is a pretty new app and Good Notes has been available for many years. But still, both have pretty much every feature that you need for everyday note-taking.

Ending Note: So guys this is the comparison between CollaNote vs Good Notes. So guys you can download both note-taking apps from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store as well. Hope this article adds something to your knowledge. In case you are new here we make plenty of other comparison articles as well. so if you are interested in that just click on our Apps comparisons category and read those articles as well.

So guys it takes a lot of time and research to make this kind of comparison. So it would be very helpful for us if you could share our articles with your friends. Because it will help us to grow more and more and reach more people. So other people also can read our articles and make their everyday routines better organized. So this is it for today’s article we will see you in our next article. Bye!