Notes and Whiteboards in One Document: How InkBoard Combines Them

The short answer

Notes apps and whiteboard apps are usually two apps, and any thought that needs both ends up in one of them and nowhere else — the diagram goes to the whiteboard, the paragraph goes to the notes app, and neither is ever complete.

InkBoard's answer is that there is only one document type and it holds both: text cards, handwriting, drawings, inserted images and PDFs on a single canvas you arrange freely.

What decides whether that combination actually works is what your ink is. In InkBoard every stroke is an object rather than a picture — lasso a scribble and you can move it, resize it, recolor it, or change its pen type long after you drew it. Because strokes are objects and not pixels, they can also be indexed, which means a word you wrote by hand is findable with search.

InkBoard is an iOS 17+ app that stores everything on the device and asks for no account. Its free tier is a working whiteboard, not a demo.

Why you are actually here

The stated problem is "I want notes and a whiteboard in the same place". Underneath it is usually a sharper one: you have stopped being able to edit what you already wrote.

In most note apps, handwriting is flattened the moment you lift the pencil — it becomes a picture of ink. That one decision produces a list of downstream annoyances: you cannot move a bad line without erasing it, recolor something you marked yesterday, revise a diagram without rewriting it, or find a note by the words inside it, because the words are pixels. People report this as "notes apps are bad at diagrams" or "whiteboard apps are bad at text". Both are the same underlying defect in different clothes.

InkBoard's own onboarding names it in one line: what you wrote isn't a picture — every stroke is an object you can grab. That is the design centre of the product, and most of what follows is downstream of it.

What one document actually contains

A page is a canvas with no fixed grid, carrying two kinds of thing.

Cards are the non-ink layer, and all four kinds are in the free tier: image, text, PDF, and widget cards — the last covering things like a clock, weather, a quote or a to-do list rendered inline. A PDF card carries its native text layer and a text card carries its own text. Both are searchable, which matters a few sections down.

Ink is the drawing layer: pen, marker, pencil and highlighter, in four widths. Ink is not pinned to the page or locked beneath the cards — it floats with them. A selection can be brought to front, sent backward, or pushed to the back, and the selection menu exposes cut, paste and copy-as-image alongside recolor, re-width and change-pen-type on anything lassoed. That is why the "one document" claim is worth testing rather than taking on faith: set a heading as a text card, sketch a diagram beneath it in ink, drop a screenshot of the real UI between them, paste in the spec as a PDF — all on one page, all rearrangable afterwards.

For pages that need structure there are page templates grouped as Basic, Ruled, Music, Planner and Custom. The concrete set is Blank, Ruled, Ruled (Narrow), Ruled (Wide), Grid, Grid (Fine), Dotted and Dotted (Fine). Music staff and planner templates are the ones a pure whiteboard app tends not to carry, and they are free. Pages can be added blank or duplicated from the current page; deleting one takes its ink and cards with it, and is undoable.

Above the page sit multi-page documents in notebooks, with folders, a starred-only filter and search. Ruler, protractor and compass overlays sit on top of the canvas, as does document scanning.

Shape snap, and why editing ink afterwards matters

Two mechanics get bundled into the phrase "infinite canvas", and they are worth separating.

Shape snap. Hold a stroke still for about 0.8 seconds and a wobbly line straightens into a clean shape. This is the difference between a whiteboard app that makes you redraw the third attempt and one that does not, and it costs nothing — you were already pausing to think.

Restyling after the fact. Ink is data, so color, width and pen type are editable properties of a stroke rather than pixels baked into a layer. You lasso a paragraph written with the wrong pen and change all of it at once. This is the capability that turns handwriting from a commitment into a draft.

Handwriting search, and exactly where its edges are

This is the part competitor pages skip, because it is the part with a real engineering cost.

InkBoard maintains a full-text index over page content covering three sources: OCR'd ink, text typed into cards, and the native text layer of inserted PDFs. A search for a word therefore finds it whether you wrote it, typed it, or it arrived inside a PDF you dropped in. Tokenization splits Chinese by character and English by word, with prefix matching on each token, and the index persists to a search-index.json in Application Support.

The interesting constraint is when it runs. It deliberately does not index per stroke. Vision text recognition at .accurate costs a few hundred milliseconds per call, so running it during writing would occupy CPU continuously and push Apple Pencil touch latency past the 12ms budget a 120Hz ProMotion display demands — which shows up as ink trailing behind the pencil tip. So a page is indexed when it goes inactive: you switch pages, close the document, or background the app. Content is fingerprinted too, so flipping back and forth over an unchanged page re-runs no recognition at all.

The honest limits follow from that design. Search reflects the index as of the last time a page went inactive, so a word you have just written will not match until you leave the page. Recognition prioritizes zh-Hans then en-US, so pages in other scripts index less reliably. And converting a lassoed scrawl into an editable text card is a Pro capability, not part of the free index: finding your ink is free, turning it into text you can edit is not.

What the free limit actually is

The free tier gives you three notebooks, and inside them effectively no ceiling on the things people actually hit limits on: unlimited pages, all templates, folders, every pen and tool, lasso and transform, shape snap, document scanning, all four card types, single-page export to PDF, PNG or JPEG, and handwriting search across every note.

Notebook count is the only real cap, and it reads as a considered choice — three is the category anchor (GoodNotes 6 sits at the same number), enough for a course, a project and a scratchpad before you hit a wall. The upgrade bar on the document list shows your usage as a running count, so you always know where you stand rather than discovering it at the moment you want a fourth notebook.

Pro removes the notebook cap and adds three things about the edges rather than the core: audio notes that play back and jump to the stroke you wrote at that moment, whole-notebook PDF export with printing, and lasso handwriting-to-text. It is sold monthly, yearly or as a one-time purchase, with US base prices of $2.99/month, $14.99/year and $34.99 lifetime; other regions differ and the app shows the live price, and a free trial is offered on eligible plans. None of the four Pro capabilities are required to treat InkBoard as a notes-plus-whiteboard surface.

What InkBoard does differently

The differentiator is not the marketing claim that it has both notes and whiteboards — several apps satisfy that by shipping two editors behind one icon. It is what the ink is. Strokes are objects: grabbable, rearrangeable, recolorable, restylable and indexable. That is why you can correct a diagram from last Tuesday instead of erasing it, and why you can find a note by words you never typed.

The honest limits are equally clear. Documents and canvases live on the device, with no account and no cloud sync — Settings reports the real storage state instead of shipping a sync toggle that does nothing, which is right and also a real constraint if you need a notebook on a second device. The free tier stops at three notebooks. Audio notes, whole-notebook export and handwriting-to-text are Pro. Search indexes a page when you stop writing on it rather than while you write, and reads zh-Hans and en-US first. Page insert can briefly fail with "this note isn't ready yet" while a document is still loading, and document scanning needs the device to have a scanner at all. None of that is hidden, which is a form of quality too.

The decision you can now make

If your notes and diagrams are split across two apps, and one symptom is "I cannot go back and fix what I drew", this is the product built for that case — and the free tier is enough to find out in an afternoon.

If what you mainly need is structured text with a sketch attached, and handwritten search is not on your list, a conventional notes app will serve you fine — do not switch on the strength of this page alone.

If you do switch, do not test the pen feel first. Test whether you can correct yesterday's diagram without starting it again. Try InkBoard on that.