Both apps open a hyperlinked PDF planner and both let you write on it. If that were the whole question there would be nothing to write about. The differences show up in navigation, in how each app thinks about a document, and in what happens after six months of use.
We test every planner in both before release, so this comes from watching the same files behave differently rather than from spec sheets.
Both handle links, with the same catch
Internal PDF links work in GoodNotes 6 and in Notability. Tabs jump, month grids link to weeks, weeks link back. Neither app is a compromise on this.
Both share the same catch, too: links only fire when you are not holding a drawing tool. In GoodNotes that means the read-only toggle. In Notability it means switching out of the pen into the hand or selection tool. Tap a tab with the pen active in either app and you get a small mark instead of navigation.
This is the single most common support question we get, across both apps, and it is never a broken file. If your tabs stopped working, check what tool is selected before anything else.
Tip. In both apps, get into the habit of switching tools before you navigate rather than after you fail to. It takes about a day to become automatic and it removes the only real friction in either app.
Navigation is the real difference
GoodNotes treats a document as a book. There is a thumbnail grid, an outline, bookmarks, and a page counter. For a 214-page planner that structure helps, because the app already assumes you have a lot of pages and gives you several ways through them.
Notability treats a document as a continuous surface. Scrolling is smoother and more natural, and for lecture notes or a long meeting that is genuinely nicer. For a planner it is slightly against the grain, because a planner is a set of discrete pages you jump between rather than a scroll you move down.
In practice this means GoodNotes suits the weekly-and-monthly rhythm better, and Notability suits a daily page you write on at length. Neither is wrong; they are built around different mental models.
The other navigation difference worth knowing: GoodNotes lets you open the same document in two tabs side by side. For planning, having the month grid open beside the current week is a genuinely useful thing, and Notability has no direct equivalent.
Handwriting and tools
Notability's pen feel is, to most people we have asked, slightly better. The ink has less lag and the stroke tapering looks more like a pen. If you write a lot of longhand, that difference compounds.
GoodNotes has the better shape recognition and a more capable lasso. Drawing a rough box around Thursday and having it snap to a rectangle is the kind of small thing that matters in a planner, where you are annotating a grid rather than writing prose.
Both have good highlighters that stay under your writing rather than over it. Both handle the Apple Pencil double-tap gesture, which is the fastest way to flip between pen and eraser, or pen and the tool that lets links work.
Notability's audio recording, tied to the position of your pen at the time, is excellent and completely irrelevant to planning. If you are a student recording lectures, that feature alone may settle the question for you regardless of what the planner prefers.
Search and finding things
GoodNotes searches handwriting across your entire library. Notability searches within a document. For a planner this is more significant than it sounds: "where did I write that address" is a library-level question, and six months in you will ask it.
Both search typed text in the underlying PDF, so the printed labels in our planners are findable in either.
If you keep several planners going at once, a work one and a personal one, GoodNotes' library organisation with folders and nested folders is noticeably better. Notability's is flatter and starts to feel cramped past a few dozen documents.
One practical difference that only shows up later: backup and export. GoodNotes exports a document as a PDF with your handwriting flattened in, and the links survive. Notability's PDF export also carries the handwriting but drops the link layer. If you intend to archive a finished year as a single searchable file with working tabs, GoodNotes is the one that does it.
Neither app charges again for the planner itself. Our files are plain PDFs, so nothing about them is tied to a subscription in either app.
Which to pick
If the planner is the main thing you are buying the app for, GoodNotes. The book model, the side-by-side tabs, the library search and the folder structure all suit a hyperlinked planner with a couple of hundred pages.
If you already use Notability for notes and the planner is joining an existing setup, stay where you are. The planner works properly there, the pen feel is better, and the navigation difference is a preference rather than a problem. Do not buy a second app to open one file.
If you have neither and you also take a lot of longhand notes, try Notability first. The writing experience is the thing you will notice every day, and a planner is perfectly usable in it.
And if you are on Android or Windows, this whole comparison is moot: use Samsung Notes, Xodo or any PDF annotator that preserves links. Our files are plain hyperlinked PDFs precisely so the choice of app stays yours.