The Apple Pencil has transformed the iPad into a versatile creativity machine. With a device that feels like pen and paper but has the power and flexibility of an advanced tablet, artists, writers, note-takers and creatives of all kinds have found new ways to express their ideas.
But to truly unlock the magic of the Apple Pencil, you need the right apps. There‘s now a robust ecosystem of illustration tools, multifaceted note apps, elegant writing interfaces and more – all designed to let you harness the precision and natural feel of the Apple Pencil.
In this guide, we‘ll highlight the 11 best Apple Pencil apps across a range of categories. Whether you want to paint, animate, take notes, annotate PDFs or map out ideas, these apps will help you use the Apple Pencil to its full creative potential.
Drawing and Illustration Apps
Procreate
For digital artists and illustrators, Procreate is the gold standard for creative apps. With a powerful rendering engine, enormous canvas sizes, hundreds of customizable brushes and advanced features like layer blending, it‘s become the go-to for illustration on the iPad.
Procreate harnesses the pressure and tilt sensitivity of the Apple Pencil to allow for natural, expressive strokes. And the app feels instantly responsive when sketching and painting thanks to Procreate‘s Silica painting engine and 128-bit drawing. Whether you‘re an animator storyboarding a sequence or an illustrator finessing an editorial piece, Procreate delivers desktop-class tools in an intuitive iPad interface.
Adobe Illustrator
For vector illustration, Adobe Illustrator remains a hugely popular choice – and the iPad version paired with the Apple Pencil offers users the same suite of versatile vector tools. With the same panels and UI as the desktop app, Illustrator for iPad feels familiar. And it makes sketching with the Apple Pencil super smooth.
You can easily manipulate vector paths with touch gestures or the Apple Pencil. And you‘ll have access to all of Illustrator‘s advanced capabilities – from image tracing to gradient mesh editing and beyond. For graphic designers and digital artists already fluent in Illustrator, being able to leverage the same toolset on the iPad is a major win.
Affinity Designer
For both raster and vector illustration, Affinity Designer from Serif Labs has also proven to be a winning choice. It combines the broad toolset and adjustment capabilities of programs like Photoshop with extensive vector tools as well.
On the iPad, Affinity Designer utilizes the Apple Pencil‘s full capabilities – including pressure, tilt and palm rejection. Brush lag is imperceptible thanks to a highly optimized rendering engine. And when sketching out ideas, Affinity Design makes it simple to convert rough pencil illustrations into refined vector artwork. For comic artists, product designers, UI artists and more, Affinity Designer strikes an excellent balance between power and usability.
Note Taking Apps
GoodNotes 5
For pure note taking, GoodNotes 5 remains a leader in marrying advanced organization with a seamless writing experience. The app‘s simple three-pane interface – featuring a notebook catalog, quick navigation sidebar and the active writing canvas – makes accessing and interlinking your notes intuitive.
Within a notebook, you can write smoothly with the Apple Pencil, leverage thick and thin ink to indicate emphasis and use highlighters for quick references. GoodNotes 5 also does an excellent job leveraging the iPad‘s touch capabilities – you can erase ink with your finger or stretch elements with a two-finger drag. And for students or professionals collaborating on notes, real-time coediting is simple.
Notability
Similar to GoodNotes, Notability focuses squarely on delivering a best-in-class note taking experience. It also nails the basics – big toolset, easy organization, quick navigation. But where Notability excels is in its intuitive and comprehensive media capabilities.
You can record a lecture or meeting and take handwritten notes that sync perfectly with the audio playback. Or import a PDF presentation and annotate over it with highlights, commentary and drawings with the Apple Pencil. Images and documents can also be imported easily into notes. And collaborative notes or presentations can be shared out in a variety of formats. For a notes app tailored to media integration and sharing, Notability hits the mark.
OneNote
As Microsoft‘s cross-platform notes solution, OneNote offers the most robust experience in working across iPad, Mac and Windows devices. Like other apps, it leverages the Apple Pencil for natural inking. But you also get Microsoft‘s formidable syncing capabilities, allowing you to pick up notes, sketches and scribbles on whatever device you move to.
Within the app, core note taking functions are straightforward. But you also have additional capabilities like inserting images and video into notes, clipping content from the web, collaborating in shared notebooks and tagging elements. For many, OneNote will strike the right balance between familiar Microsoft tooling and flexible iPad note taking.
PDF Annotation and Markup
PDF Expert
For working with PDFs, PDF Expert lives up to its name. With fast rendering, smooth Apple Pencil support and best-in-class annotation tools, it makes navigating, editing and marking up PDFs a breeze. Core tools like highlights, freehand drawing and text comments are robust and intuitive.
But PDF Expert takes it further with specialized shape tools perfect for technical diagrams. Add arrows, lines, geometric shapes or callouts anywhere a PDF. Or utilize photo markup tools like magnifiers that make collaborating on complex documents easier. If working through literature reviews, source materials, research papers or collaborative designs, PDF Expert brings usable tools without unnecessary bloat.
LiquidText
While PDF Expert focuses on refinement of core PDF capabilities, LiquidText completely reimagines the experience of truly engaging with document contents. It leverages iPad multitouch in conjunction with the Apple Pencil to allow for radical new ways of annotating.
With your finger, you can pinch and manipulate discrete text elements, pull them out into standalone comment bubbles, group related ideas into a stack, or isolate lines and snippets for additional context. The Apple Pencil then allows you to annotate these fragments or tie together concepts between documents. For actually digesting and connecting ideas – not just commenting on a finished product – LiquidText delivers advanced capabilities.
Concept Mapping and Brainstorming
MindNode
For organizing and visualizing concepts, MindNode provides an infinitely flexible canvas. Its core mind mapping experience is perfectly suited to iPad and Apple Pencil – simply write an idea and draw branches to related concepts. Build out an entire vision drawing connections where you see fit.
On its own, this brainstorming experience is frictionless. But MindNode also brings best-in-class features like click-and-drag reorganization of branches, multipage maps, icons and images, filtering by tags and map outlines. Whether planning a research paper, assembling a presentation, or structuring a new project, MindNode makes it delightful to map out interlinking ideas.
iThoughts
Similar to MindNode, iThoughts leverages visual mapping to facilitate brainstorming and organization. You can easily draw parent-child connections between ideas, color code branches based on themes or priorities, and restructure on the fly. iThoughts offers additional advanced features like focus mode, map comparison, presentation export and mind map templates to get you started.
Used in conjunction with the Apple Pencil, an app like iThoughts makes it simple to whiteboard out a line of thinking – perfect for a creative jam session or team strategy meeting. You can even collaborate simultaneously in real-time within a single map or export finished versions to share broadly.
Writing Apps
Notes
For basic note taking, Apple‘s built-in Notes app deserves a mention. It won‘t compete with many third parties on features, but the writing experience with the Apple Pencil remains super fluid. Notes also indexes drawings and scribbles to make searching handwritten notes a breeze.
Factor in seamless integration across Apple‘s ecosystem through iCloud syncing and Notes delivers a lot of value out of the box. If you want basic note capturing rather than advanced organization, it‘s a great Apple Pencil-optimized option on iPad and Mac.
Nebo
For a writing-centric app tailored to the Apple Pencil, Nebo is a standout choice. Its handwriting engine is top notch – with automatic writing detection and advanced palm rejection, Nebo allows you to write with amazing responsiveness. And the app converts handwriting to text with impressive accuracy thanks to AI assistance.
Nebo makes accessing common formatting options like bolding or bullet points a cinch as well. And similar to Notes, it indexes drawings and diagrams to keep your work searchable. If you want the feel of writing with real pen and paper while still making your work digitally malleable, editable and shareable, Nebo delivers.
Conclusion
The Apple Pencil has enabled new forms of computing – smoother, more tactile and more expressive. And each year, developers unveil new creative apps tailored for it and the iPad‘s touch capabilities.
Whether sketching out storyboards, taking notes in lecture halls, marking up research papers, brainstorming strategy guides or writing first drafts, the possibilities have expanded enormously. By matching complementary apps like those above to your use cases, you can take full advantage of the Apple Pencil‘s creative promise.
