How Tansy compares.

GoodNotes is the best-known handwriting app on the iPad and has grown into a subscription with cloud sync, AI tools and apps on every platform. If you like GoodNotes but don't want a yearly plan, want your notebooks as plain files, or want your notes, novel, sketches and flashcards in one place, Tansy is built for that.

Notability is a polished handwriting and audio-recording app, long an iPad favourite, and now on Android, Windows and the web with a free tier, a yearly Plus plan and, since mid-2026, a one-time Classic option again. Tansy covers the same handwriting ground, then adds writing, drawing, music, flashcards and planning in one library, with no account.

Notion is a connected workspace in the cloud: pages, databases and wikis that teams share and link together. Tansy is for one person's whole creative life, offline-first, with handwriting, drawing and music alongside typed documents, tasks and tables, and every file in a folder you own.

Obsidian and Tansy agree on the big thing: your notes should be files on your own device, not rows in someone's database. Obsidian does it with plain Markdown, a huge plugin community and a free personal licence. Tansy does it with rich files: handwritten notebooks, planners, canvases, scripts, sheet music and flashcards, linked the same way.

Evernote is the original everything-bucket: clip it, scan it, search it, from any device. In recent years it has become a subscription with a tight free tier. Tansy takes a different route: one purchase, files in your own folder, no account, and a library built for making things as well as keeping them.

Scrivener is the writer's workhorse: a binder, a corkboard and a compiler that can produce almost any manuscript format. It's a one-time purchase per platform, with no Android version. Tansy is also bought once and also compiles manuscripts, then adds scripts that read themselves aloud, story maps, handwritten notebooks, planning and flashcards in the same library.