CollaNote: A Truly Free Note-Taking App
When I made my last guide to free note-taking apps, I received multiple comments suggesting CollaNote as another free note-taking app.
I’ve been testing out the app over the past week. Here’s what I’ve learned:
The App’s Story
Originally, CollaNote was a built as a small side project by a student from Hamburg University. Since then, it has grown significantly, with over 5,639 ratings on the App Store. What’s especially remarkable is the fact that it has a 4.9/5 rating on the App Store — higher than Notability (the highest ranked note-taking app in the App Store)
The app is completely free, and has no in-app purchases as of now, making it one of the only truly free note-taking apps on iPadOS. In addition, the app has won a variety of awards from the App Store team, including App of the Day, New App We Love, and Big App From Small Team.
Features
As with most note-taking apps, CollaNote has a few interesting features that stand out to users. For me, CollaNote had five cool features that intrigued me.
Dark Mode
The first stand-out feature was Dark Mode. With CollaNote, users can change whether a note is in Dark Mode or Light Mode by tapping the settings of a note, which changes the color of the note itself.
Unfortunately, CollaNote doesn’t seem to have an automatic switch for this setting. I would have loved it if this switch between note color was based on system settings, but I wasn’t able to do so. I’m unsure if this is an app error or a user error, but CollaNote’s App Store photos indicate the latter.
Swiss Army Knife
The second stand-out feature was the “Swiss army knife” of the app.
With the Swiss army knife feature, users can add a variety of tools to their Apple Pencil. These tools include a laser pointer, an automatic shape tool, a fill tool, a curve tool, and even a translate tool (which could be incredibly useful for people, like me, in foreign language classes).
Note: the translate tool appears to be a little buggy (the app returned a translation after around 5 minutes of using the translation tool).
Paper Formats
The other thing that stood out to me was the insane amount of paper notes. If my counting was correct, CollaNote offers over 80 different templates for users.
No matter what type of work you’re doing, CollaNote probably has the template you need.
Collaboration
The fourth cool feature was collaboration. Within a note, users can invite other users to take notes together through CollaNote nicknames or email addresses.
As a high school student, I doubt many others would want to work together to take notes. But for those in college classes, club meetings, work meetings, etc, this feature could be incredibly valuable.
Audio Recording
The fifth and final feature I’ll discuss is the ability to record audio in the app. This could go hand-in-hand with the previous section on CollaNote’s collaboration features.
Users could listen to lecture recordings after a class, while also following along with the notes of their classmates. Again, I wasn’t able to test this feature out, but I’m sure it’ll be useful for college students.
How I’ve Been Using The App
To be honest, I haven’t found myself using CollaNote as any special note-taking app. So far, I’ve been using it as a standard GoodNotes or OneNote style app.
I’ve been using it to take class notes, meeting notes, and brainstorming session notes, but the app hasn’t particularly changed my note-taking method.
As a result, I’ll continue sticking to GoodNotes for now (which I bought around a month ago using a gift card). For those who don’t want to purchase GoodNotes or Notability, however, CollaNote is truly a fantastic app.
Conclusion
While the interesting features I mentioned above were, well, interesting, I couldn’t make the most of them. But for college and university students, those features could be game-changers.
And as a truly free app, CollaNote is genuinely an incredible app and the developer has done a fantastic job.
