CollaNote: Handwritting & PDF 4+

Amazing free app!

I’m a university student who needs to annotate PDF’s , write up my maths assignments and use the iPad for online tutoring. CollaNote is a great, free app that has lasso tool, ability to insert images, huge range of colours and many features that beat some of the paid apps out there. Definitely recommend! Two small suggestions would a better text-adding interface and the ability to insert pages in between preexisting pages. That being said, this app offers far more than you would usually expect from a free app and I can get around both of these issues easily using online PDF editors.

Edit: I wrote this review more than a year ago and since then, the text interface has been much improved and insert page feature has also been added. It was an easy decision to make a one-time purchase for the premium version when it recently became available. The developer was also generous enough to offer a discounted upgrade price for long-term users. (Of course, it’s still an amazing app in its free form. A must recommend for any uni student in need for note taking)

Developer Response ,

Hello, thank you for writing review and I'm glad you like the app.
But if you want to request for new feature, please use the requesting feature in the Settings Menu.

Thank you!

A Must Have for Students

Goodnotes who? Notability what? This app contends with the big players by offering a lot of the paid features you find in the premium note taking apps, but for free. This is clearly a love child from a student developer, who has bothered to put time, care and curious intelligence into an app for students. Because it’s primarily developed by a student, along with recommendations from app users(who I’m guessing must be predominantly students, I know aim) the usability for students is very high.

Like any other app, it has its time to get used to the interface, the options and all the behind the scenes stuff, and of course it isn’t extremely polished, but for 0 dollars, I don’t need polished, I just need it to work and be a rival to the big money making corporations. Some apps yes must be bought as they have no rival (just buy procreate, don’t even bother with others) but this app goes to show that when a developer puts effort into a product, it pays off.

If you’re reading this developer, thankyou for saving me $15!!

Great app but still got a lot of kinks to be worked out!

I downloaded this app a while ago because I needed a free app to take notes on and this was the one I saw reviews for and people said it was great so I downloaded it. It was a really great app at first but after a while, the experience was not good at all. My main issue was that the app was very inconsistent. One day randomly my app crashed multiple times, and after that day the app was never the same for me. The app would crash randomly and it was very tedious when I wanted to export pdf files, the pages would be rendered and it would work at the beginning and then when you got to the last few pages it would crash. I restarted my iPad and the app numerous times and I even deleted CollaNote and installed it again but it didn’t solve the issue. However, on another day, the app decided to work fine. This inconsistency left me no choice but switching to another note-taking app. If this app becomes more consistent and smooth in the future, I will definitely consider reinstalling it. Other than that, great work! The app definitely has some amazing features.

Developer Response ,

I am sorry about that. The important thing is that the iOS version is up to date, then there should be no problems. If there is a bug, you can send a bug report in the left menu at make CollaNote better - then I can see what the bug is and can fix it very quickly - Greetings, Quốc Huy