Switching from Goodnotes or Notability
A Goodnotes alternative that teaches, not just stores
Goodnotes is a genuinely good notes app. This page is not going to pretend otherwise — the question worth asking is what a notebook should do once it can read what you wrote.
What Goodnotes and Notability already do well
They are mature, fast, reliable handwriting apps with years of polish in them. If all you need is somewhere to write, organise and annotate PDFs, they do that well and Plumi is not claiming to do it better on day one.
Being straight about that matters, because the honest difference is not “ours is a nicer notebook”.
The difference is what happens after you write
In any normal notes app, a page of working is stored and that is the end of it. The app does not know whether the integration on page four was right, and could not tell you what to revise if you asked.
Plumi reads it. It marks the working, helps in the margin when you are stuck, and keeps a picture of which topics you have actually demonstrated. The notebook stops being a filing cabinet and starts being the thing that notices.
And the writing part is free
Everything you would use a notes app for — handwriting, the full set of pens, folders per subject, PDF annotation — is free in Plumi and intended to stay free. If you know Goodnotes or Notability, you already know how it works.
The paid part is the tutoring and the practice, which is the part no notes app offers at any price.
- Free: handwriting, pens, folders, PDF annotation.
- Paid: on-page tutoring, marking, and practice built from your own work.
- Not yet: the years of polish those apps have. Plumi launches on 25 September 2026.
Questions students ask
- Can I import my existing Goodnotes notebooks?
- You can bring PDFs in and annotate them. A direct Goodnotes notebook import is not available at launch — worth raising in the community if it is what would decide it for you.
- Do I have to pay to take notes?
- No. The notebook is free, and that is deliberate: the writing is not the part being sold.
- Is Plumi as polished as Goodnotes?
- Not yet, and it would be strange to claim so before launch. Goodnotes has had years of refinement. What Plumi has is a notebook that can read what you wrote and do something useful with it.
Keep the notebook. Add the part that teaches.
Plumi hasn’t launched yet. The community is where you see it first.