Linwood Butterfly vs Rnote

Linwood Butterfly

• Handwritten lecture notes and PDF markup with a stylus
• People who want a free, AGPL-licensed note app on Android and desktop
• Nextcloud users who want their notes synced over WebDAV

Rnote

• Students and teachers who write by hand with a stylus or drawing tablet
• Annotating PDFs and pictures on a Linux desktop
• People who want a free, GPL-licensed handwriting app

Linwood Butterfly

• iOS is a preview only: an unsigned IPA that has to be sideloaded with AltStore or Sideloadly, and it is not on the App Store.
• There is no hosted sync service. Remote storage supports only WebDAV, and it is not available in the web version.
• Collaboration is experimental and has to be switched on with an experiment flag.
• The web app performs better in Chromium-based browsers; the docs say Firefox and Safari lack the WebAssembly features it uses.

Rnote

• The site warns that the file format is still unstable and may break compatibility between versions.
• Installs are listed for Linux, macOS and Windows only; there is no phone or tablet app or web version.
• The macOS app bundle is packaged by a community contributor and downloaded from a separate GitLab project.

Linwood Butterfly

Infinite canvas with editable elements

Handwriting, shapes and imported media sit on an unbounded canvas, and each element can be moved, resized, recolored and reorganized after it is placed.

Pen and drawing tools

Stroke width, color, smoothing and texture are adjustable, and the toolbox adds labels, shapes, polygons, tables, rulers, grids, stamps, a laser pointer and a presentation tool.

Import and export

Imports PDFs, images, SVG, Markdown, Xournal++ files and OneNote sections. Exports to PDF, SVG, image and Xournal++, plus its own documented .bfly and .tbfly formats.

Templates and packs

Templates bundle backgrounds, tools, layers, areas and pages for new documents, and packs hold reusable stamps, palettes and styles that are available across documents.

Local storage with WebDAV sync

Notes are saved to a folder on the device. The native apps can add a WebDAV connection such as Nextcloud and mark remote files for offline editing.

Experimental collaboration

Behind an experiment flag, several people can edit one document at once through an end-to-end encrypted Swamp relay or a WebSocket server run on one participant's computer.

Rnote

Stylus-focused input

Pressure-sensitive stylus input with several configurable stroke styles, stylus button shortcuts that can be reassigned, and optional pen sounds.

Page and canvas layouts

A document can use fixed pages, a continuous vertical layout or a canvas that is infinite in every direction, with custom background colors, patterns and page formats.

Shapes and selection tools

A shape tool creates many kinds of shapes, and a selection tool moves, rotates, resizes and modifies content already on the page.

PDF and image import

PDFs, bitmap images and SVGs can be brought in for annotation, with drag and drop and clipboard support.

Export to open formats

Documents export to SVG, PDF and Xopp, and single pages or selections to SVG, PNG and JPEG. Files are saved in the native .rnote format, which a command-line tool can also handle.

Workspace browser and tabs

A built-in workspace browser gives quick access to related files, and tabs keep several documents open at once. Autosave and printing are included.

Linwood Butterfly

• Butterfly$0

  The full app for Android, Windows, macOS and Linux, a web app that installs for offline use, and a Docker image for hosting the web app yourself.

Rnote

• Rnote$0

  The full app as a Flatpak for Linux, an app bundle for macOS and an installer for Windows.