Cocoa Notes vs Apple Notes

Where Apple Notes wins, honestly

• It is free and already there. No decision, no download, no price.
• It is on your iPhone and iPad, syncing instantly, which Cocoa Notes is not. If you need a note in your pocket, Apple Notes wins and it is not close.
• Handwriting and Apple Pencil. Cocoa Notes has neither.
• Scanning, Quick Notes, shared notes, the lock screen — the whole system integration Apple can do and a third-party app cannot.

For quick capture, lists, and anything you need on your phone, Apple Notes is the right tool and this page is not trying to replace it.

What happens when a note gets long and serious

Apple Notes is built around short notes in an endless scroll. That is the right design for most of what most people write. It starts to strain when a note is a semester of lectures for one course:

• No pages. A 3,000-word chapter is one continuous scroll with no page numbers, no page count, and no sense of where you are in it.
• Highlighting is a colour. You can highlight text, but the highlight means nothing and goes nowhere. There is no way to ask "show me everything I marked as a formula".
• No study anything. No cards, no recall, no quizzes.
• Search is by note, not by what you marked inside it.
• Your notes are in a database. They are in iCloud, in Apple's format. You can export them one at a time as PDF, but there is no folder of files to open, copy or read in another app.

What Cocoa Notes does with the same material

A note is a paginated document — real pages on ruled, squared, dotted or blank stock, page numbers, a page count, dog-ears to fold a corner, thumbnails down the side. Printing matches the screen exactly.

Highlighters have names. Not yellow — Formulas, Terminology, Dates, On the Exam. Everything you mark with a pen gathers into a list under that pen's name, across the folder or the whole library. Those marks become flashcards, recall sessions, quizzes and exams with no card authoring at all.

Lecture slides sit beside the page, and any sentence can be linked to a specific slide. Click the words, slide 14 opens next to your writing.

And the notes are plain Markdown files in a folder you chose. Open the folder in Finder. Every note is there as text.

The iCloud storage thing

Worth mentioning because it catches people. Apple Notes counts against your 5 GB of free iCloud storage, along with your photos, backups and everything else. A few years of notes with images in them is a real amount of that.

Cocoa's notes are text files, measured in kilobytes. If you keep the folder in iCloud Drive it still uses iCloud storage, but Markdown is very small; and if you keep it on your Mac instead, it uses none.

Side by side

Bringing your notes over

Cocoa imports Apple Notes directly — File › Import › Apple Notes. It reads what is on this Mac and writes each note as a Markdown file into the folder you pick, telling you how many came in.

Formatting comes across as Markdown: headings, bold, italic, lists and checklists survive. Attachments are copied next to their note. What does not survive is handwriting and sketches, since Cocoa has no handwriting — those stay in Apple Notes, which is the right place for them.

Who should use both

Most people, honestly. Apple Notes on the phone for capture, lists, scans and anything handwritten. Cocoa Notes on the Mac for the four or five courses whose notes you will be examined on. They do not conflict, and neither one is trying to be the other.