As a senior staff writer, I have researched, tested, and written about all types of home-office gear and stationery for Wirecutter, including pens and notebooks, since 2019. Prior to joining Wirecutter, I covered technology and productivity for over a dozen years for sites and publications such as Consumer Reports, Lifehacker, PCWorld, and Laptop Magazine.

For this guide:

• I spent over two months ditching my usual paper notebooks and writing and drawing in digital notebook contenders exclusively, as well as reading ebooks and annotating PDFs.
• I interviewed Timothy O’Malley, associate vice president of US operations at E Ink, a pioneer in ePaper technology, via email.
• I combed through hundreds of digital notebook owner reviews on enthusiast forums, on Reddit, and in YouTube videos.
• Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete editorial independence. I’m never made aware of any business implications of my editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

If you regularly write by hand, perhaps juggling multiple notebooks, a digital notebook can organize all of your writing in one place, much as an e-reader can store a library of ebooks in one thin device. The best digital notebooks also serve as e-readers too, and they have the same distraction-free, E Ink screens, which are easier on the eyes, allowing you to fully focus on your writing, drawing, or reading.

The digital conveniences of these devices can be a game changer for your writing, storing your notes in the cloud and making them searchable, convertible to text, and easily shareable.

And just as important, they can look and feel like writing on paper, unlike the writing-on-glass-with-a-rock experience of a traditional tablet and stylus.

That said, if you’re not passionate about writing by hand or your work wouldn’t benefit from a device that lets you take electronic notes or annotate documents, you don’t need a digital notebook. An iPad with an Apple Pencil or an Android tablet with a stylus may suffice for your casual note-taking needs—along with just about anything you can do with a computer.

Also, although digital notebooks have been around for several years, they’re still pricey, niche devices with a lot of potential. Unlike e-readers, for example, most digital notebooks aren’t waterproof. Most require you to tap an onscreen keyboard to input text for titles or to do a search, rather than letting you use the stylus. And many lack a backlight or a color display, though more models with those features are emerging each year.

Depending on your needs, a digital notebook probably can’t replace a keyboard. I wrote the majority of this guide using our picks; while the experience was enjoyable and convenient in many ways (I was able to easily write in bed while sick, for example), in others it wasn’t. I still had to turn my handwriting into text, copy that text into my Google Doc and format it, add in external links, and correct a few OCR (optical character recognition) mistakes.

If you need a digital notebook right now, our picks are the best available. But if you’re not in a hurry, it might be worth waiting until next year to see what the next generation of digital notebooks brings.

Few companies make digital notebooks, so we compiled a list of the most popular and most recommended models from the major manufacturers—Boox, Rakuten, Ratta, reMarkable, and Amazon. We also considered a few lesser-known models from companies such as BigMe and Meebook but dismissed them from testing due to poor reviews from buyers or limited availability.

That left us with seven digital notebooks to test. We spent a few days poking around each contender’s interface and settings, and then we went to town taking copious notes, making to-do lists, doodling and sketching, and marking up PDFs. While evaluating each digital notebook, we considered:

• Build quality and accessories: As something you’re going to hold a lot, a digital notebook should feel sturdy and pleasant in the hand. The same goes for the stylus and case options.

• Ease of use: Finding and getting to your notes and books shouldn’t take more than a few taps.

• Writing experience and features: A paperlike experience is one of the main selling points of these devices, so we spent a lot of time contemplating the feel of the stylus on the screen. We also considered what kinds of tools and capabilities the writing apps offered, such as the different types of brushes, the ease of converting handwriting to text, templates, and handwriting searchability.

• Reading and drawing features: We gave bonus points to the digital notebooks that functioned well as e-readers, as well as those with drawing-specific tools.

• Syncing and sharing: The more cloud storage services the devices connect to seamlessly, the better, so you can have your notes on all of your devices. We appreciated digital notebooks that let us save our notes to different formats.

You might be wondering about specs. Hardware specs that matter more in a traditional tablet like an iPad or a Galaxy Tab—such as RAM and processor speed—don’t matter as much with digital notebooks because of their relatively limited, simple uses.

Top pick

Supernote A6 X2 Nomad

The best digital notebook

This compact E Ink tablet covers all the bases, offering a smooth writing feel, a sophisticated notes app, a built-in Kindle app, and a robust drawing app. The stylus, sold separately, starts at $60.

Buying Options

$299 from Supernote

Ratta’s Supernote A6 X2 Nomad is one of the most versatile digital notebooks we tested, and it offers the best combination of writing feel, drawing tools, and e-reader capabilities. Its compact size makes it easy to have on hand, whether you’re on the go or sitting at a crowded desk.

It’s travel-friendly and upgradable. The 7.8-inch tablet is available with a white plastic or clear (“crystal”) plastic back. It feels solidly built and nice to hold, although it’s thicker than the metal reMarkable 2 and not quite as premium-feeling as that model. The Nomad’s crystal version in particular shows off one of the tablet’s unique features: modularity. It’s the first device of its kind to have a user-replaceable battery, and unlike most digital notebooks, it has an SD card slot to expand the storage capacity from an already generous 32 GB.

Sidebars and gestures offer shortcuts. The Nomad has several apps and a lot of functionality, so the provided shortcuts are necessary for not getting lost. On the left and right sides of the bezel are bars that you can tap or swipe to access recent or pinned documents, open apps such as the Kindle app, or use editing tools like the lasso eraser.

It has a pleasant pen-on-notepad feel—once you get used to it. The screen takes a while to get used to because it has some “give,” almost like a phone with several screen-protector layers on it. Getting the pen to leave marks on the Nomad’s “self-repairing screen” requires more pressure than you might be used to with a ballpoint or gel pen, but once you get accustomed to the friction, working on the Nomad feels intuitive and comfortable.

The pen options, starting at $60, may also convince you that you’re writing with a real pen. The three options, including one made by Lamy, look and feel exquisitely like fancy, stylish pens. Ratta says the ceramic nib on the pens never needs replacing.

The writing features are robust. More than any other digital notebook we tested, the Nomad provides ways to make your notes dynamic. You can link to other notebooks or to external websites within a note, create a table of contents, or add keywords for searching within your notebooks. Searching within handwritten notes works well, and it’s a critical feature when you have hundreds of pages of notes. Unlike with most competing digital notebooks, you can import your own templates into the Nomad, which is handy if you have a particular layout you use frequently for, say, meeting notes.

The Kindle and drawing apps are great. The Nomad’s built-in Kindle app works just like Amazon’s Kindle app for mobile devices. Is the experience the same as reading on a dedicated Kindle device? Not quite—on the Nomad, you might notice some laggy page turning or other slowness. But it has all the essential features.

The Atelier drawing app also adds to the Nomad’s functionality. It boasts multiple types of drawing tools, 16 levels of grayscale shades, a zoom function, and other features lacking in the writing-focused apps of similar devices.

It gives you syncing and sharing options. The Supernote Nomad can create and export to Word document and text formats or export to PDF or PNG files. And unlike with the reMarkable 2, you can have your files automatically synced to Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive, so you’re not stuck in one ecosystem—and there’s no subscription needed.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

• It has no built-in lighting. This is, one might say, by design, to further the immersive paperlike experience. But it also means you’ll probably need a source of light sometimes.

• The sidebars aren’t always responsive. It can take a couple or more swipes or taps for the Nomad to register your input.

• The calendar and email apps could be better. You might not even use these apps if your goal is distraction-free writing, but if you do want these features, they could use a bit more work before they’re as good as the apps on your phone. The email app’s font size is nonadjustable and very small, for example, and calendar events require typing rather than writing.

Best for

reMarkable 2

Best for replacing your paper notebooks

This large digital notebook offers the most intuitive writing experience, but it lacks access to an ebook store. The stylus starts at $80.

Buying Options

$379 from reMarkable

$449 from Amazon
(bundle with marker plus)

$449 from Best Buy
(bundle with marker plus)

The reMarkable 2 excels as a minimalist writing tablet. It’s the most premium-feeling of the digital notebooks we tested and the easiest to use, although it lacks dedicated e-reading and drawing apps and features such as unlimited cloud storage, automatic sync, and editing and notes creation in the desktop and mobile apps. It comes with only a one-year warranty; getting three years of coverage requires a subscription.

The build quality is top-notch. With a slim aluminum frame and frosted glass on the back, the reMarkable 2 is elegantly designed and looks and feels more expensive than the plastic-made competition. It’s a delight to hold.

Like the Supernote Nomad, the reMarkable 2 has no built-in lighting, but its larger, 10.3-inch screen is quite roomy for lengthy writing. You have two pen options to choose from—the $80 basic marker or the $130 premium marker with the eraser on the top—and reMarkable sells several cases, including a type folio for when you want a physical keyboard.

It’s intuitive to use. You don’t have a lot of menus to get lost in on this device. That’s by design, since it’s meant to mimic paper as closely as possible. You basically have a home page where you can see and access your files or add a new notebook or note. Or you can open a notebook or note and get to writing. That’s it. Tap the X button on the upper right to close the notebook or note. And the reMarkable 2 has infinite vertical scrolling, so you don’t have to add new pages as you write.

It offers a variety of writing tools. The reMarkable 2 gives you eight types of writing instruments to choose from, each with three line widths and some available in color shades for when you export the file (for example, if you use the yellow or pink highlighter). This variety allows for more customization of the look and feel of your notes in comparison with all the other digital notebooks we tested, aside from the Boox tablets, which have even more writing-tool options.

With over 50 templates—from lines to grids to checklists to sheet music—you can create many different kinds of notebooks. But you can’t import your own template.

Drawing and reading on the reMarkable 2 are enjoyable but limited. The reMarkable 2, like the Supernote Nomad, offers layers for separating parts of a drawing, but it doesn’t have a dedicated drawing app with more advanced artist-friendly tools. Similarly, although you can import your own ebooks and PDFs onto the reMarkable 2 and annotate them, you won’t find features such as dictionary lookup or saved highlights as you would in a dedicated e-reader app.

Unlimited cloud storage and automatic syncing require a subscription. Without the company’s Connect subscription, which costs $3 per month after the free 100-day trial, only files that you’ve used and synced online in the past 50 days are stored in the cloud and accessible via reMarkable’s mobile and desktop apps. You have no option to use other cloud storage providers such as Google Drive, although you can connect your device to your computer and import or export files manually through the reMarkable desktop app.

Best for

Kobo Elipsa 2E

Best for reading and annotating ebooks

This 10.3-inch digital notebook combines the best e-reader features with basic note-taking capabilities and has built-in lighting. The stylus and case are included.

Buying Options

$389 from Amazon

$350 from Walmart

Rakuten’s Kobo Elipsa 2E is a full-featured e-reader that happens to have a handy notebooks section for note-taking. Although the Elipsa 2E’s writing features aren’t as robust as those of our other picks, it’s great for annotating both PDFs and ebooks—something that the other digital notebooks we tested can’t do.

It’s large and has built-in lighting. The Elipsa 2E’s adjustable brightness and temperature warmth make it comfortable to use in different lighting conditions. Its 10.3-inch size makes it one of the largest e-readers available, and a nice grippy texture on the back of the recycled-plastic body and a thick bezel on one side allows for holding the tablet comfortably.

Navigation is pretty straightforward. The Elipsa 2E gives you separate sections for your ebooks library, notebooks, and ebooks store, which makes navigating between reading and writing a cinch—although once you’re in a notebook or ebook, returning to the home screen can take several taps.

It offers both basic and advanced note-taking options. The Elipsa 2E gives you two choices for note types: a basic one, in which you can write or doodle anywhere (much as with a blank sheet of paper), or an advanced one, which is lined and ready to convert handwriting to text.

The latter type adds the ability to insert special sections such as a diagram or math equation—useful, perhaps, for students or those who work in certain professions.

Writing with the rechargeable pen is smooth but less precise than on our other picks. The Kobo stylus requires charging, which is an annoyance, and the highlighter button on the side is too easy to press accidentally. On the plus side, writing on the Elipsa 2E feels slick but not too slippery; it has a tad more friction than writing on an iPad with an Apple Pencil.

That said, our handwriting was worse on the Elipsa 2E than on our other picks. We experienced some latency (lag between when we made a stroke and it showed up on screen), and sometimes the tablet missed the mark we were trying to make. We did a factory reset to see if it would fix the problem, but it didn’t.

As for writing features, the Elipsa 2E doesn’t offer as many as the other tested digital notebooks do. It has only four pen brush types and no templates for the advanced type of notes, and its conversion of handwriting to text was glitchy in our tests, creating separate text boxes of different font sizes willy-nilly.

Reading and annotating are the Elipsa 2E’s strong suits. Although we weren’t especially impressed with the Kobo stylus and the Elipsa 2E for copious note-taking, they shine in marking up PDFs and ebooks. The Elipsa 2E’s closest competitor, the Amazon Kindle Scribe, can’t mark up ebooks, but Amazon is releasing a second-generation Kindle Scribe in December that will fix that problem; we’ll compare the two in a future round of testing.

Like other Kobo e-readers, the Elipsa 2E provides access to a large universe of ebooks through its own store, as well as your local library’s catalog via OverDrive.

Syncing and cloud storage are seamless. In addition to syncing with Kobo’s own cloud service, you can import and export files with Google Drive or Dropbox, or save articles to read from the web via the Pocket extension.

If color is a must: Consider the reMarkable Paper Pro. In addition to having a color display with an adjustable reading light, the Paper Pro is the largest digital notebook we’ve seen of its kind, measuring 11.3 inches. We found the Paper Pro to be a bit faster than the reMarkable 2 at both writing responsiveness and menu opening. However, even at max brightness, the Paper Pro’s screen is still dim enough to require additional lighting in low-light environments, and we think the price is a bit high unless your work is dependent on color-coding.

Amazon recently released its newest version of the Kindle Scribe, which offers a redesigned display, a redesigned premium pen, and the ability to write directly in ebooks. The $400 second-gen Scribe goes on sale December 4, and we’ll report back once we’ve had the chance to spend time with it.

The Amazon Kindle Scribe is the first Kindle you can write on and has a sharp 10.2-inch front-lit display. It needs a few essential features before we can recommend it, namely the ability to sync handwritten annotations to other Kindle apps and devices, a way to sync and store notes in the cloud (not just through email), and the ability to annotate ebooks.

The Boox Go 10.3, the company’s latest digital notebook, is slightly thinner and lighter than the competition so far. It’s a full-fledged Android tablet capable of downloading and running apps from the Google Play store, but whether those apps run well on an E Ink screen is another matter. The built-in writing and drawing app had every feature we wanted and then some, but the system overall was slow, and the interface was complicated.

The Boox Note Air 3C is a large color tablet that suffers from the same issues as the Go 10.3.

The Kobo Libra Colour has a color display and is compatible with the Kobo Stylus. It has the same limited functionality for note-taking as the Elipsa 2E, and we think the Libra Colour’s smaller, 7-inch size makes it less useful. It may still be worth a look if you want a small e-reader on which you can take occasional short notes.

This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Erica Ogg.