The best iPad Pro apps for Apple Pencil

(Image credit: Procreate, Notability, Concepts, Adobe)

Jump To:

Note-taking apps
Digital art apps
Design apps
Games

Installing the best iPad Pro apps for the Apple Pencil will optimise your tablet and stylus, be it for creating digital art, editing images, note-taking or pure relaxation. Pairing the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil allows you to tap into a whole new level of productivity, especially now that the latest Apple Pencil Pro has exciting new functionality such as haptic feedback.

In this guide, I've experimented with a number of apps perfectly suited to creative outlets from sketching to 3D design, to find out how well they work with Apple's stylus. The apps have been evaluated based on features, usefulness, compatibility with the Apple Pencil and performance. In some cases, we've conducted more in-depth analysis so look out for the linked review for more details.

Latest Videos From Creative Bloq

Bear has apps for macOS, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, plus a browser extension, and you can seamlessly sync your notes across all of your Apple devices via iCloud. You also get encryption and password-protection or unlock using Face or Touch ID. Just bear in mind (no pun intended) that this is an intentionally minimalist option – there's no formatting panel for example. If you do need more features, consider an app like GoodNotes or Evernote.

Notes' ease of use is seriously underrated. If your Apple Pencil is connected, all you need to do is open a note and draw on the screen. It will automatically be prepped to draw. This means you can write like you would in a notebook, and add a few sketches to go with it. It's synced across all your Apple devices within seconds, and all you need to do is open the keyboard to add text too. And to top it all off, it comes automatically installed on the iPad.

Nebo is the go-to app for digital note-taking and is praised highly for its handwriting recognition. It has the ability to understand a whopping 66 languages and can even translate your handwritten notes into a format that can be sent as an email – pretty nifty. Using Apple Pencil, you can also create a range of shapes and sketches, making digital notes that we found feels almost as natural as taking notes on paper.

Now on its sixth iteration, GoodNotes is one of the most popular iPad Pro apps for Apple Pencil for note taking. It turns your iPad into digital paper, offering a lot of freedom to create searchable handwritten notes. This is a note-taking app that goes well beyond a basic pad to scrawl on – it can handle everything from equations to mind maps, and its handwriting-to-text conversion is one of the best we've seen.

Finally, the last in our pick of the best note-taking apps for Apple Pencil is Microsoft OneNote. If you've been to university recently, you'll know that this is the most popular tool for students. That's because of its organisation system. You can create project folders containing multiple notebooks, making it ideal for coursework, research or anything that requires high-intensity organisation. It allows you to sketch and add annotations with the Apple Pencil, and text to drawing is a seamless transition.

There's no need for a graphics tablet now that the Photoshop app includes all the powerful drawing tools found on the desktop version. You should bear in mind though, that its typography is a battle to work with successfully and there's not much in the way of effects. It's a stripped back version of Photoshop as you would usually think of it, but is thoroughly equipped for your illustration needs. It features an endless selection of brushes that all work with the sensitivity of your Apple Pencil, with the pressure controlling flow and thickness.

In fact, we found we forget all that technical stuff when we experienced the joy of sketching with a 6B pencil, turning it flat to block in areas of shade, or playing about with paints, really connecting with the work itself. When we tested Procreate, we were blown away by its 3D painting features (including compatibility with other 3D apps like Zbrush and Blender). To learn more about those and other updates, see our hands-on Procreate review (and don't forget to check out Procreate Dreams below if you want to animate your creations).

Astropad was built by former Apple engineers with the objective of turning the iPad Pro into a graphics tablet for the Mac. When we first tested it (see our Astropad 2.0 review), we found that they certainly succeeded. Apple has its own Side Car feature, but that's pretty limited when it comes to the wealth of functionality you want to get from the Apple Pencil. Downloading Astropad and its free Mac companion app allows you to treat your iPad just like a graphics tablet.

Adobe's Illustrator CC remains the industry-standard software for vector art, so it stands to reason that the iPad version is a great addition for the Apple Pencil, allowing you to design on the go with your Apple device. Though it's a streamlined version of the desktop software, in our Illustrator for iPad review, we found it still works very well, and it can hold up as a standalone program (we tested a full version of Illustrator for iPad on the 11-inch iPad Pro (M1, 2021) using an Apple Pencil 2.)

You can add effects such as point gradients, radial repeats, patterns, and symmetry, and invite others to edit your projects, too. Of course, there's seamless cloud integration so you can work across your Creative Cloud apps. There's also community support accessible via live streams on the app, including tutorials and inspiration from professionals. See below for the best current prices on an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, which includes Illustrator in all its versions.

Take a look through the online support files and you'll learn how initially simple-looking tools can be used to create graphs, org charts and Venn diagrams, to easily duplicate shapes, link shapes with lines (with optional arrows at one or both ends) and much more. Paper doesn't demand the kind of precision offered by the Apple Pencil, but the stylus is a very welcome addition, and the slightly cartoonish media works great with its sensors.

Fully optimised for iPad without compromising on power, we think the Affinity Designer for iPad offers the functionality of a professional desktop app, adapted to a tablet workflow. We especially like the seamless switching between drawing modes and the extensive import/export modes. Best of all, you can get it for a one-off cost rather than a subscription. See our Affinity Designer for iPad review for more details.

The desktop-style UI means an Apple Pencil is virtually essential here unless you have particularly slim and pointed fingertips. But once you've familiarised yourself with the fiddly buttons and menus, you have a feature-dense drawing app to use. There are many cheaper apps, but if you specialise in this area of art and design, there are few better and with such a vast repertoire of tools. See our roundup of the best Clip Studio Paint tutorials if you want to improve your skills.

Although Adobe's Illustrator is now available for the iPad (see above), some creatives still swear that Graphic is the best vector drawing app available on iOS. This app offers a host of brushes and tools, but it also packs in some other useful features including geometry settings pane with -/+ nudge buttons, three and four-finger tap gestures to undo/redo. You can also customise the screen tap gestures to perform whatever actions you find most help your workflow.

The best iPad Pro apps include a sketching tool for everyone. Linea Sketch is one of the best for creatives that want something more powerful than a basic pen-and-paper app but more streamlined than fully featured painting and drawing engines like Photoshop or Procreate. Eschewing the infinite canvas of some of its rivals, Linea Sketch opts for a fixed canvas and familiar drawing layers that can be repositioned anywhere in an infinite layer stack.

It doesn't go over the top with tools but still offers several pens, colour palettes and background textures, plus there's a transform tool, automatic ruler, grid tool, which gives you backgrounds for note-taking, drawing and user interface design, plus other useful additions. You can share work via the usual applications and export in Photoshop's PSD as well as JPG and PNG file formats. Some of the premium features have a cost but they're reasonably priced, making this is a pleasingly pared-back app that won't weigh heavily on your pocket or on your iPad's processor.

Another one from Affinity, Affinity Photo is a fantastic Photoshop alternative thanks to its solid toolset and one-off cost rather than a subscription. The iPad version has been used by Apple to demo the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil! The app is compatible with earlier iPad models, but paired with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, Affinity Photo really comes alive, taking full advantage of the Pencil's pressure and angle sensitivity.

It's great for tasks from painting with its professional brush engine, or for applying realtime lighting effects. Affinity Photo is also built for a professional workflow, with support for raw and PSD files. It offers full cross-platform performance and file compatibility in case you feel the need to add some final polish on your desktop, although you probably won't need to. See our Affinity Photo review for more details.

Sometimes you just want to step away from the mouse or the trackpad and immerse yourself in your design a few inches closer to what you're making. The downside to InDesign is that it's desktop-only – for understandable reasons – but the Apple Pencil gives you that little bit more freedom to play around. Not only is it a well respected professional software, Affinity is also cheaper than Adobe. See our Affinity Publisher review for more details.

It's an excellent way to get an idea down quickly without having to draw the basics first. It's been rated the best iPad app of the year, and we can see why. Each template includes basic lines that add important detail to the shapes, helping you work out how to put your product into a physical reality as you're designing it. It costs $9.99 per month, but if you're a budding fashion designer, Prêt a Template is worth it.

You can design external architectural plans as well as internal plans, and comes with an in-app ruler that helps you draw your designs to scale. It's been listed as a best app in Wired, and the free plan allows access to the basics. The sensitivity in the brushes gets the most out of the Apple Pencil, especially with the watercolour and pencil options. As it's a compact software, it's great for beginners just getting started in CAD design.

It's generally reviewed as beginner software, but if so the prices don't match. A one-week subscription costs $7.99, while committing to a year brings in a massive discount, coming in at $34.99. If you're just getting started in AR and need to dedicate some time to getting the gist of it, this would be perfect, but with its focus on learning, it wouldn't be as suitable for a professional already well into their AR career.

Its only drawback is that it's designed for short-form animations only, but there's nothing stopping you from editing your scenes together in Premiere Pro. Also, if you solely use Adobe products for illustration or video editing, you might find it a more clunky workflow to export different files and go between softwares, but it's the best way to make your illustrations come to life on iPad so it's worth the hassle. Read our Procreate Dreams review.

Even if you're a bit clumsy, your lines get smoothed into flowing curves, and with practice, it's possible to create some elegant, organic forms at speed. The precision of the Apple Pencil's tip make this process easier. It might be frustrating for highly technical engineering work, but you could use this as a tool to get down an initial concept down before exporting to IGES or OBJ files to develop it further in other apps. You can also import and open .SKP files directly in uMake.

Shapr3D is sensibly offered for free as an entry point so you can learn the ropes of the application. The free version is limited to low-resolution exports and a maximum of two designs but it still gives you access to all the modelling tools. The Pro version is free for students, and for the rest of us costs a fairly reasonable $25 per month to unlock features professional features, including import and export of images, and to desktop CAD formats.

Acrobat is known for its advanced PDF abilities, but the iPad takes it up a notch. It might seem obvious if you hadn't thought of it yet, but Acrobat on the iPad is a game-changer for the PDF reading experience. No more typed or exported signatures – instead you can utilise your iPad and Apple Pencil to just sign your real signature on a document. And it's synced to the Creative Cloud, so you can access the synced file on your computer and phone too.

And, even better, it makes marking up a more exciting game than it ever has been. Using the Apple Pencil, you can mark up and edit documents with your own handwriting, arrows and lines with a precision a simple shape tool can't get you. And it's free to access all these features. It might not be an everyday app, but it's an essential one to have installed, because at some point or another we all have to e-sign a document. You could also try UPDF for managing PDFs.

Part of the joy of Donut County is its simple art direction and pastel colour palette, but there's also a left-field sense of humour at play. Every time the hole gobbles up items, animals and people it grows, combing 'eaten' things reveals some weird and wonderful effects, whole stuff you've collected can be hurled back out of the hole to solve puzzles. Deceptively simple in art and design, Donut County is a rewarding game about holes that need filling.

This is essential for loyal Animal Crossing lovers. For anyone who plays the game regularly, this will be a fuel to your addiction as it brings some limited Animal Crossing features to your phone so you can play it even more on-the-go than with a Nintendo Switch. As it's historically always been used with a stylus – on the Nintendo DS and now often on the Nintendo Switch – it's literally designed for use with the Apple Pencil.

TOPICS

A writer and editor dedicated to helping audiences achieve more with technology, Orestis is a veteran from the days of the 8-bit ZX Spectrum. He is always interested in the fastest, slickest way to make computers do new and exciting things.

With contributions from

Ian DeanEditor, Digital Arts & 3D
Mabel WynneWriter & multi-disciplinary artist

Recommended reading

The best iPad Pro apps for Apple Pencil

The best iPad Pro apps for Apple Pencil available now

The best iPad Pro apps for note-taking

01. Bear

02. Notes

03. Nebo: Notes and PDF annotations

04. GoodNotes 6

05. Evernote

06. Flow

07. LiquidText

08. Microsoft OneNote

The best iPad Pro apps for digital art

09. Photoshop for iPad

10. Procreate

11. Astropad

12. Illustrator for iPad

13. Paper

14. Affinity Designer 2

17. Clip Studio Paint

18. Adobe Fresco

19. Graphic for iPad

22. Linea Sketch

The best iPad Pro apps for Apple Pencil for design

20. SketchBook

16. Affinity Photo

23. Affinity Publisher

24. Prêt a Template

25. Concepts

26. Morpholio Trace

27. Sketchar

28. Procreate Dreams

29. uMake

30. Shapr3D

31. Adobe Acrobat

The best iPad Pro games for Apple Pencil

32. Donut County

33. Brain dots

34. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Please wait...