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Apple Freeform vs Notability
March 09, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
8★
Freeform is a great place to bring your ideas to life. Sketch out a project, design a mood board, or start a brainstorming session on a flexible canvas that supports almost any kind of file. And with iCloud, all your boards stay in sync, whether you’re on your Mac, your iPad, or on your iPhone.
16★
With Notability and iCloud, your office travels with you. All of your notes, sketches, plans, and forms are available to mark up, review, or send to a client anytime, anywhere. Allows PDF annotation for editing and marking up documents.
See also:
Top 10 Visual Collaboration software
Top 10 Visual Collaboration software
Apple Freeform and Notability are, at their core, attempts to help humans do what they’ve been trying to do since the dawn of time—scribble things down before they forget them. Both let you write, draw and add images, which is handy if you suddenly need to illustrate a point with a badly drawn cat. They also allow collaboration, meaning you can watch in real time as your colleagues misunderstand your ideas. Most importantly, they exist solely within the Apple ecosystem, which means that if you have an Android device, you might as well be trying to take notes with a potato.
Apple Freeform, a relative newcomer from 2022, is Apple’s gift to those who believe that notes should be sprawling, infinite and possibly sentient. It’s built for brainstorming, meaning that at some point, it will contain a collection of arrows pointing to cryptic phrases like "Big Idea" and "Revolutionary Concept" with no further explanation. It is gloriously free, which is great, but it also lacks some of the finer features of more serious note-taking apps—like the ability to record a lecture while pretending to listen to it.
Notability, meanwhile, has been around since 2010, which in software years is roughly the age of a fossilized tree. It’s designed for people who prefer their notes to be neatly structured rather than a free-flowing existential crisis. It records audio, syncs it with handwritten notes and makes students feel very accomplished until they realize they still don’t understand the lecture. However, true to modern economic principles, many of its best features hide behind a subscription, ensuring that even your own thoughts require a monthly fee.
See also: Top 10 Visual Collaboration software
Apple Freeform, a relative newcomer from 2022, is Apple’s gift to those who believe that notes should be sprawling, infinite and possibly sentient. It’s built for brainstorming, meaning that at some point, it will contain a collection of arrows pointing to cryptic phrases like "Big Idea" and "Revolutionary Concept" with no further explanation. It is gloriously free, which is great, but it also lacks some of the finer features of more serious note-taking apps—like the ability to record a lecture while pretending to listen to it.
Notability, meanwhile, has been around since 2010, which in software years is roughly the age of a fossilized tree. It’s designed for people who prefer their notes to be neatly structured rather than a free-flowing existential crisis. It records audio, syncs it with handwritten notes and makes students feel very accomplished until they realize they still don’t understand the lecture. However, true to modern economic principles, many of its best features hide behind a subscription, ensuring that even your own thoughts require a monthly fee.
See also: Top 10 Visual Collaboration software
