Digital planners are specially designed .PDF files and, for the best experience, require an app that allows the user to write in and navigate through the document. There are many of these apps, both paid and free, and each have their pros and cons. I will go over a few of the more popular ones here.
Personally I use Goodnotes on my iPad Air 5 and I have experience using Penly when I had an Android tablet.
Everyone is different, so give a few of these a try to find your best fit. If you are still trying to figure out if digital planners would work for you, try out those that are free or have trial versions first, then upgrade once you know digital planning is for you!
Goodnotes 6
Available for iPad and Android, with different pricing models. iPad is the only one that offers a one-time purchase.
Goodnotes is built for digital planning, with great support for the Apple Pencil, page templates to create notebooks from, a marketplace to find planners and stickers, and other great features such as audio recording and handwriting search.
Noteshelf
Available for both iPad and Android, with the iPad version having a free trial version. I haven’t personally used it myself yet, but with a small $7.99 price, it seems like a great option. Everything from notebook templates to audio recording.
Notability
Available for iPad, Notability’s free version is fairly limited and has a subscription based model. However, it also sports powerful tools such as handwriting search, templates and audio recording.
Penly
Specifically built for using digital planners, Penly is one of the top options for Android users. It is a one-time purchase. Digital Planners in both portrait and landscape mode are included. While it may not have some of the
Free Options
Orignotes
Available for iPad I found this app to be a rather clean, easy to navigate free option for digital planners.
Xodo
Available for both iPad and Android, it has enough features available for free to get one started with digital planning.
Foxit
Available for both iPad and Android, I found Foxit to be different from others when importing documents, and filled with ‘premium’ tools I had to avoid as I found out how to use the free tools.