21 Best Apps for the Apple Pencil in 2025

The Apple Pencil can transform the iPad from a touchscreen tablet to a sophisticated computer with a precise pointing instrument. With the help of the best accessories for the Apple Pencil and the best accessories for your iPad, tasks like editing photos, taking notes in class, drawing, creating music, and graphic design, have become far more intuitive, faster, and more manageable. These are twenty-one of the best Apple Pencil apps you can get to enhance your experience with the iPad.

Note: the list is in no particular order, and we have included the best apps for the Apple Pencil from different categories based on our preference, usefulness, number of functionalities, value for money, positive reviews, and ease of use.

The best apps for the Apple Pencil at a glance

App	Category	Highlight	Price
Zinnia	Journaling, planning, note-taking	Best for bullet journaling	Free \| $9.99/month
Procreate	Graphics and design	Best for digital artists	$12.99
GoodNotes	Writing and note-taking	Best for digital note-taking	Free \| $9.99/year
Adobe Photoshop	Photo and video	Best for professional photo editing	Free \| $7.99/month
Flow	Writing and drawing	Infinite canvas for drawing	Free \| $2.49/month
Tayasui Sketches	Graphics and design	Most realistic drawing tools	Free \| $7.99
Bear	Writing and note-taking	Minimalist note-taking app	Free \| $2.99/month
Symphony Pro	Music	Best for composing music	$14.99
Shapr 3D CAD modeling	Productivity	Professional CAD modeling	Free \| $37.99/month
Apple Notes	Note-taking	Best built-in notes app	Free
Pixelmator	Photo and video	Affordable yet powerful editor	$9.99
Evernote	Productivity and note-taking	Best for organization	Free \| $11.99/month
Concepts	Graphics and design	Infinite canvas and vector tools	Free \| $4.99/month
Notability	Writing and drawing	Best for students	Free \| $2.99/month
Astropad Studio	Drawing	Turns iPad into a drawing tablet	$14.99/month
Adobe Illustrator: Vector Art	Graphics and design	Best for vector illustrations	Free \| $9.99/month
Pigment	Entertainment	Best for stress relief coloring	Free \| $9.99/month
Sketch Club	Graphics and design	Community-driven drawing app	$2.99
Sticker Doodle	Entertainment	Create custom stickers	Free \| $1.99
Brain Dots	Games	Fun puzzle game for Apple Pencil	Free \| $3.99
Nebo	Writing and note-taking	Best AI-powered handwriting recognition	Free \| $14.99

1. Zinnia

📌 Category: Journaling, planning, note-taking
💲 Price: Free | Full: $9.99/monthly

The digital planning and journaling app Zinnia is considered one of the best Apple Pencil apps for bullet journaling and layout design. It comes with a Studio full of digital content, such as calendars, productivity templates, and digital designs (stickers, washi, paper packs).

Tappable checkmarks, auto-date templates, and cross-device syncing make it a go-to for tracking daily tasks. The Apple Pencil pairs perfectly with Zinnia’s toolkit, which has handwriting smoothing, PDF markup, and customizable brushes. Zinnia is great for vision boards, scrapbooks, travel planning, and creative projects.

2. Procreate

📌 Category: Graphics and design
💲 Price: $12.99

The Procreate drawing app has an impressive collection of brushes and pencil options that will delight professional illustrators and beginners alike. In addition, it offers ultra-high-definition canvases that can be up to 16K on compatible iPad Pros. Its 64-bit painting engine provides exceptional performance, and users can import Adobe Photoshop brushes from their PC and iPad to use on the app.

3. GoodNotes

📌 Category: Writing and note-taking
💲 Price: Free | Goodnotes 6 (1 year): $9.99

GoodNotes is an excellent and complete note-taking app you can use with your Apple Pencil. It basically turns the iPad into digital paper, allowing you not only to convert your handwritten notes to typed text but also to work with PDF text, outlines, folders, hyperlinks to media, sync to iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and much more. GoodNotes lets you draw perfect shapes, move and resize your handwriting, use stickers, pictures, tables, and diagrams, and record audio notes.

4. Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop app for iPad screenshots

📌 Category: Photo and video
💲 Price: Free | Mobile & Web: $7.99/monthly

Some desktop-class apps are making their way into the now powerful iPad. As a result, Adobe Photoshop is now available on Apple tablets. Adobe has designed the app to take advantage of the iPad’s touchscreen and includes support for the Apple Pencil.

You can create complete PSDs with layers and use features you are familiar with from the desktop version, such as spot healing and blending. Also, there are other similar tools like the Layer stack and Toolbar. The app’s UI is context-aware to help you further while performing your tasks, so it will only show you the tools you really need.

5. Flow

📌 Category: Writing and drawing
💲 Price: Free | Membership: $2.49/monthly

Flow by Moleskine brings the popular notebook to your iPad. One of the app’s unique features is that documents are of infinite width, so you can pan and continue the drawing. It also lets you create custom tools available with a single tap using a virtual toolset with no limits but your imagination. In addition, it has customizable gestures with double-tap for the second-generation Apple Pencil.

6. Tayasui Sketches

Tayasui Sketches app for iPad screenshots

📌 Category: Graphics and design
💲 Price: Free | Pro: $7.99

Tayasui Sketches offers some of the most realistic tools to draw with your Apple Pencil on the iPad. The app is very user-friendly and versatile and includes more than 20 tools to draw. The toolbar will disappear when you draw, so you can have a clear canvas. At the same time, your drawings can be synced with iCloud, and the community will prevent you from running out of ideas!

7. Bear

📌 Category: Writing and note-taking
💲 Price: Free | Pro: $2.99/monthly

Bear is a beautiful and minimalistic note-taking app that works wonderfully with the Apple Pencil. It has excellent organization and editing tools to write your notes, plus a browser extension and a sync feature to have all of your notes at hand on your iPad, iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch. The Pro version allows you to encrypt notes, protect them with a password, and unlock them with Face/Touch ID.

8. Symphony Pro

📌 Category: Music
💲 Price: $14.99

If you are a composer or simply love music, Symphony Pro is one of the best apps out there. You can seamlessly convert your Apple Pencil strokes into note objects. The latest updates revamped the interface with a customizable score layout and improved gestures. At the same time, the developers made it available for iPhone and Mac, so you can take the app and boost your creativity anywhere.

9. Shapr 3D CAD modeling

Shapr 3D CAD modeling app for iPad screenshots

📌 Category: Productivity
💲 Price: Free | Pro: $37.99/monthly

Shapr3D is a professional-grade CAD modeling app based on the Siemens Parasolid geometric engine and HOOPS Exchange translation software. CAD has been tricky to translate to the tablet format due to the lack of required precision. Still, this limitation has been overcome in Shapr3D, thanks to the 9ms latency of the Apple Pencil and the performance of modern iPad hardware.

10. Apple Notes

📌 Category: Note-taking
💲 Price: Free (it comes preinstalled)

Let’s not forget about Apple Notes! This app comes preinstalled on your iPad, and it’s pretty useful for handwriting, sketching, creating checklists, scribbling, drawing, and whatever you need. To use it with your Apple Pencil, tap on the Pencil icon at the bottom and the toolbar will be revealed. From there, you will able to choose the pen and colors you wish. The best thing about this built-in app is its integration with iOS across multiple devices, and you can also use it with the Apple Vision Pro.

11. Pixelmator

📌 Category: Photo and video
💲 Price: $9.99

Don’t be fooled by appearances! Pixelmator looks like a fairly simple yet effective app for photo editing, but it has more to offer than it seems. Using the Apple Pencil, you can add images, sketches, and paintings to create beautiful designs using layers. Adjust, retouch, and enhance photos, create beautiful illustrations, and easily design beautiful text to accompany them.

12. Evernote

📌 Category: Productivity and note-taking
💲 Price: Free | Personal: $11.99/monthly

Evernote is a well-established name when it comes to note-taking and organizing information. Although the UI is somewhat overstuffed sometimes, it is an excellent app to write notes, and to-do lists, organize your information, and save useful data in one place. It seamlessly syncs between devices, and it can also record audio while sketching. Evernote offers automatic palm rejection and pressure sensitivity for a better experience with your Apple Pencil.

13. Concepts

📌 Category: Graphics and design
💲 Price: Free | Everything: $4.99/monthly

Concepts is one of the most versatile graphics and design apps we have seen, and it works perfectly with the Apple Pencil. The infinite canvas will let you create sketches, notes, drawings, plans, vectors, and much more. Among its features, we highlight the dozens of realistic pens available, drawing suggestions, customization of brushes (even creating your own brush), and the Nudge, Slice, and Select tools to quickly fix anything that needs improvement.

14. Notability

📌 Category: Writing and drawing
💲 Price: Free | Subscription: $2.99/monthly

Notability is a multitasking app for handwriting, note-taking, sketching, and organizing your writing. It’s handy for students and iPad users who wish to write everything down as if it were paper. In addition, you can record audio for quicker annotation, and the infinite scrolling feature lets you give shape to your ideas without limits.

15. Astropad Studio

Astropad Studio app for iPad screenshots

📌 Category: Drawing
💲 Price: $14.99/monthly

Astropad is a superb solution for drawing directly on your iPad and mirrors any Mac or PC desktop software, including some of the apps we have reviewed in this article. Among other features, we can highlight Pinch to Zoom, Liquid Extreme, Wifi & USB connectivity, keyboard support, and complete customization of gestures and shortcuts. Although there were some complaints about latency, recent updates have addressed this issue.

16. Adobe Illustrator: Vector Art

Adobe Illustrator app for iPad screenshots

📌 Category: Graphics and design
💲 Price: Free | Subscription: $9.99/monthly

Adobe Illustrator is the first choice for vector art among many graphic designers nowadays, and its app for the iPad leaves no one indifferent. Although it’s an “adapted” version of the desktop software, it’s a beautiful tool for graphic design. The Apple Pencil 2 works like no other, and the app becomes easier to navigate and use sometimes than in the desktop version. Create vector lines, add effects, use calligraphic brushes, build polygon-shaped creations, and draw everything you need with Adobe Illustrator.

17. Pigment

📌 Category: Entertainment
💲 Price: Free | Premium: $9.99/monthly

How about a coloring book to relieve stress or just have some fun? With Pigment, you can access a huge library of more than 8500 coloring pages, from portraits and mandalas to other drawings, and offers more than 25 coloring tools. As you can imagine, the Apple Pencil works magic with it.

18. Sketch Club

📌 Category: Graphics and design
💲 Price: $2.99

Sketch Club is a community-driven app to sketch, draw, edit, and paint. Its main features are a huge library of brushes, effects, filters, and layers, with an up to 16K canvas and many built-in tools to explore and create. Participate in the daily challenge and weekly competition to boost your creativity and keep you motivated.

19. Sticker Doodle

📌 Category: Entertainment
💲 Price: Free | Create Unlimited Stickers: $1.99

You can create stickers manually to send to your friends with Sticker Doodle and your Apple Pencil. The app also lets you turn any photo, or a portion, into a sticker and then edit it. Share the stickers you create on iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and Slack, and sync them on iCloud.

20. Brain Dots

📌 Category: Games
💲 Price: Free | Remove Cut-In Ads: $3.99

Brain Dots is an interesting game in which you must solve more than 300 stages by drawing with your Apple Pencil and bumping two balls through increasingly difficult levels. Users can even create their own stages.

21. Nebo

📌 Category: Writing and note-taking
💲 Price: Free | Full: $14.99

The AI-powered digital note-taking app Nebo has been praised as one of the best Apple Pencil apps for handwriting recognition. The app understands 66 languages and transposes handwritten notes into a nifty email-able format. The Apple Pencil goes perfectly with the Nebo app, allowing you not only to write but also create shapes, sketches, and layouts.

Conclusion

The Apple Pencil is a wonderful tool for your iPad. These apps will only help you enhance your experience with the tablet even more, whether you are a writer, illustrator, graphic designer, or want to keep your ideas and thoughts in order.

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