SumizAI vs GoodNotes

What GoodNotes is

What GoodNotes is

GoodNotes is a notebook from Hong Kong, known primarily for "digital paper" — handwriting with a stylus on an iPad and other devices with a smooth, natural feel close to real pen and paper. The app combines annotating PDFs, PowerPoint files, and Word documents with organizing notes across unlimited folders.

Key features

Handwritten notes are fully searchable thanks to handwriting recognition, and iCloud sync works across every device. Audio recording synced to notes lets you jump back to the exact moment in a lecture when something was written down.

Who it's for

GoodNotes appeals primarily to students writing by hand on an iPad who want to keep the natural feel of pen on paper while gaining digital organization and searchability.

Use cases

In practice, GoodNotes works well for handwriting notes during lectures with automatic background audio recording, annotating uploaded PowerPoint slides directly with a stylus, and solving math problems with AI spotting errors in your work as you write.

Pricing and business model

GoodNotes offers a free version, Special Edition, Essential, Pro, and a separate AI Pass. The yearly subscription costs $11.99 in the US, with price varying by region, available on Apple devices, Android, Windows, and the web. The Teams plan starts at $10 per user per month, and Enterprise has custom pricing.

Limitations and what to watch for

The app's full value shows up mainly on devices with a stylus that supports handwriting, so on a computer with no touchscreen the handwriting AI features lose much of their point. Advanced AI features, like the math assistant, may require a separate AI Pass beyond the base subscription.

AI notes among handwritten notes

GoodNotes doesn't integrate with an external chat model, but handwriting the key points from a conversation with an AI assistant as an ai notes entry benefits from the same handwriting recognition and searchability as the rest of the notebook. Such an ai notes entry written with a stylus lands in the same organized folder system as lecture notes.

AI Math Assistance as a bridge between writing and solving

Spotting errors in handwritten equations in real time, as you write, is a feature rarely found in competing notebooks — it combines natural handwriting with instant feedback, instead of requiring you to retype the equation into a separate calculator.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before choosing GoodNotes, check whether your device and stylus support the full handwriting AI features, and whether you need a separate AI Pass beyond the standard subscription.

Bottom line

GoodNotes is a leading handwriting notebook with advanced AI features assisting handwriting recognition, at the cost of limited value without a stylus device. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land automatically without handwriting them out will find a better-fitting tool elsewhere.

Comparison with SumizAI

GoodNotes and SumizAI differ in content source. GoodNotes is a notebook for handwriting with a stylus, with AI assisting handwriting recognition and correction. SumizAI generates these notes directly from a conversation with an AI model — question, answer, Markdown file in the vault with a title and place in the table of contents assigned automatically, on your own API key to one of seven providers. Anyone who wants to write by hand with a stylus and AI help will pick GoodNotes; anyone who wants these notes from AI conversations to be created automatically without handwriting will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool.

What SumizAI is

A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk.

A vault is a directory holding base.md, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a notes/ folder with one .md file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist.

The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used.

Every answer kept this way becomes one of these ai notes, ready to search again months later without hunting back through old chats.

Side by side

Where they differ

• AlternativeTo's description of GoodNotes does not mention an AI model. That is the whole starting point in SumizAI: you have a conversation with a model on your own API key, and the answers worth keeping become notes without you filing them.
• GoodNotes is freemium: there is a free tier and a paid one, and the line between them is the thing to read before committing. SumizAI has one plan at a dollar a month, so there is no feature held back for a higher tier — and an unpaid account still opens and exports every vault it already has.
• AlternativeTo's description of GoodNotes does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard .md files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them.
• GoodNotes supports handwriting or drawing. SumizAI is typed text only.

Which one to pick