The 4 Best Styluses for Your iPad of 2025

Top pick

If you want to draw on your 5th- to 10th-gen iPad, the Apple Pencil offers best-in-class accuracy and speed, and it’s the only option that features pressure sensitivity along with tilt recognition and palm rejection—but those features will cost you.

This stylus adds premium features such as haptics, rolling functionality, and a squeeze feature to the 2nd-gen Pencil’s functions, but it works only with M2 iPad Airs and M4 iPad Pros.

Whether you’re a professional artist or an amateur doodler, the Apple Pencil (1st generation), and Apple Pencil Pro are the only full-featured options for drawing or painting. The right Pencil for you depends on which iPad you have, but regardless of which of these versions you buy, the Apple Pencil is the industry standard for iPad styluses, largely because it’s the only one that provides pressure sensitivity across every app that supports the feature.

However, Apple Pencil features and compatibility can be confusing. Currently Apple has four Pencil models, and the only version that works on every iPad released since 2018 is the USB-C Apple Pencil, released in late 2023. But because that version lacks pressure sensitivity, we don’t recommend it for people who want to use a stylus to draw on their iPad.

The 1st-gen Apple Pencil and the Pencil Pro fully support pressure sensitivity. This makes drawing on an iPad feel natural. Pressure sensitivity is key to replicating a more natural feeling while you’re drawing on a tablet, and as of mid-2024, the most popular art programs on the iPad, including Procreate, offer full support only for Apple’s 1st- and 2nd-gen Pencils and the Pencil Pro. That pressure sensitivity, along with tilt detection, produces a smooth and refined level of feedback that makes drawing and painting feel mostly natural for anybody who has just about any drawing experience at all. We also like the Pencil Pros’s double-tap functionality, which is useful in programs such as Procreate, where the action lets you switch between a brush and the eraser tool, and it also adds haptic feedback, plus “squeeze” and “barrel roll” functionality. (More on those in a minute.)

It just works (if it’s compatible). Every Apple Pencil model syncs easily with the iPads it’s compatible with. When you’re using the 1st-gen Apple Pencil, connecting it via a Lightning cable to your entry-level iPad (or via the Lightning–to–USB-C adapter for a 10th-gen iPad) syncs it up, and it stays that way until you sync it to another iPad. With the Apple Pencil Pro, the process is even simpler—the Pencil magnetically attaches and automatically connects to any compatible high-end iPad. Just make sure that you’re buying the stylus that works with your specific tablet: iPads that work with the 1st-gen Pencil don’t support the 2nd-gen Pencil, and vice versa. The Pencil Pro works only with the M4 iPad Pro and M2 iPad Air.

The battery life is great. The 1st-gen Apple Pencil and the Apple Pencil Pro each get approximately 12 hours of battery life on a single charge, hours longer than the battery life of almost any other premium iPad stylus. With the Pencil Pro, you’ll probably never need to go out of your way to charge at all: Because you attach the stylus to the edge of your iPad when you aren’t using it, and doing so also charges the stylus, only the most extreme usage scenarios are likely to put a meaningful dent in the battery life. The 1st-gen Pencil can charge from zero to 20% in about five minutes.

The experience is just like holding an actual pencil. The Apple Pencil is comfortable enough for most people. Every Pencil is well balanced and pleasantly weighty, without being heavy.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Every Pencil is really expensive. The 1st-gen Apple Pencil is $100, and the Pencil Pro retails for $130 — they’re much pricier than devices from third-party accessory makers. (Apple does make a less expensive Apple Pencil, the $70 3rd-gen version, but it lacks pressure sensitivity, so we don’t recommend it.) If you don’t plan on drawing regularly on your iPad, one of our other picks would be better and cheaper.

The 1st-gen Pencil requires a Lightning cable to charge. Plenty of styluses need to use a cable to charge, but the 1st-gen Pencil’s use of Lightning is particularly annoying in 2024, especially as Apple has finally moved away from its own standard with the most recent iPad. Newly purchased 1st-gen Pencils at least come with the Lightning–to–USB-C adapter, but the end result is the same: a cable dangling out of the bottom of your iPad and connected to your Pencil.

The Pencil’s nib can be a little noisy. Though the Apple Pencil is accurate and comfortable to hold, it can be a little noisier than some other styluses due to the material of the nib it ships with. That nib is more plastic than rubber, so aggressive writing or drawing might produce more clacky noises than you find acceptable. But it won’t scratch your screen: After more than a year of using the Pencil Pro with an M4 iPad Pro, I’ve found that the display is still damage-free.

The Pencil Pro’s unique features don’t have much use yet. The Pencil Pro’s squeeze functionality and barrel-roll detection are interesting, but few apps take advantage of those features. Drawing apps are using the squeeze feature to bring up right-click-like context menus, but the barrel-roll support does little aside from allowing for rotating flourishes while you’re using drawing tools. Developers may find useful ways to take advantage of these features, but they seem a little unnecessary for now.

Compatibility is confusing. The 1st-gen Apple Pencil works only with specific iPads, and while we had hoped that Apple would simplify this confusing lineup with the Pencil Pro, Apple instead decided to make things more complicated, as that model works exclusively with the M2 iPad Air and M4 iPad Pro tablets.