The 3 Best Digital Notebooks of 2025

Top pick

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 $65.

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 $65, may also convince you that you’re writing with a real pen. The three options, including one made by Lamy, look and feel like fancy pens, and come in several sleeve colors. 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.