The 7 Best Smart Notebooks of 2025: A Hands-On Review

1. Rocketbook Core

Best Overall & Best Value

The Rocketbook Core (formerly Everlast) is arguably the product that brought smart notebooks into the mainstream, and for good reason. Its killer feature is reusability. The 32 pages are made from a polyester composite that feels smooth and synthetic, and you write on them with a special Pilot FriXion pen. The magic happens when you’re done: a drop of water on the included microfiber cloth erases the page completely, making it ready for a fresh start. It feels like science fiction, but it’s remarkably practical.

My Hands-On Experience: Setting up the Rocketbook app was a breeze. You assign each of the seven icons at the bottom of the page to a different cloud destination. For my workflow, I set one for my “Work” folder in Google Drive, one for a specific project in Trello, and another for my personal Evernote. After writing my notes, I simply marked the corresponding icon, scanned the page with the app, and it was sent to the right place automatically. The transcription accuracy for my messy cursive was about 90%, which is impressive for a service this seamless. The writing experience is very smooth, almost like a gel pen on a whiteboard, which might be a pro or a con depending on your preference for friction.

2. Moleskine Smart Writing Set

The Premium Creative Experience

If the feel of pen on paper is paramount to you, the Moleskine Smart Writing Set is your grail. This isn’t a reusable notebook; it’s a genuine Moleskine paper tablet. The magic lies in the “Ncoded” paper with an almost invisible grid of microdots and the Smart Pen, which has a tiny camera that tracks its position on the page. As you write, your strokes appear in real-time in the Moleskine Notes app. It’s a truly seamless and magical experience.

My Hands-On Experience: Unboxing the Moleskine set feels premium. The pen is substantial and comfortable to hold, and the notebook has that classic Moleskine quality. The immediate, real-time feedback in the app is fantastic for meetings where you might want to share a diagram on a screen as you draw it. The app allows you to tag notes, transcribe text, and even create time-lapsed recordings of your writing or drawing. The transcription is top-notch, and the ability to tap an icon on the page to send an email directly from the notebook is a clever touch. The downside is the cost of consumables—you have to buy Moleskine’s specific paper tablets and pen refills, making it a more expensive long-term proposition.

3. Wacom Bamboo Slate

Artists and Paper Aficionados

What if you love your specific brand of legal pad, Moleskine, or Rhodia notebook? Wacom, a long-trusted name in digital art, has the answer with the Bamboo Slate. This isn’t a notebook itself, but a smartpad that sits underneath your paper of choice (up to 80 pages thick). You write on your paper with the included Wacom smart pen, and the pad records every stroke. When you’re ready, you press a button on the pad, and the entire page is saved to the Wacom Inkspace app.

My Hands-On Experience: The freedom of the Bamboo Slate is its biggest selling point. I tested it with a simple notepad, and it worked flawlessly. It’s perfect for artists who are particular about their paper texture for sketching. The pen feels natural, though it does require specific ink refills. The app is robust, allowing you to export your notes as JPG, PNG, PDF, or even WILL (Wacom’s vector format), which is a huge plus for designers who want to import sketches into Adobe Illustrator. The live mode is also useful for collaborative sessions. The device itself is slim and well-built, making it a professional-looking portfolio.

4. Royole RoWrite 2

Elegant Design & Real-Time Sync

The Royole RoWrite 2 refines the “smart folio” concept seen in the Wacom. Encased in a beautiful textured fabric folio, it feels more like a high-end journal than a piece of tech. Like the Wacom, it uses a smart pen and a sensor board that you place your own paper on top of. It excels in its real-time sync capabilities and a very polished app experience.

My Hands-On Experience: The RoWrite 2 feels fantastic to carry and use. The pen is lighter and more comfortable than some competitors, and it uses standard D1 ink refills, which is a big plus for convenience. The app syncs almost instantaneously, and the ability to convert entire pages of notes into editable text with a single tap is impressive. It can also create a video of your note-taking process, which is a neat feature for showing your thought process. It’s a very strong contender that combines the flexibility of using your own paper with the premium feel of the Moleskine set.

5. NEWYES Smart Notebook

Best Budget-Friendly Reusable Option

The NEWYES Smart Notebook operates on the same principle as the Rocketbook: synthetic, erasable paper and a heat-sensitive pen. Where it differs is in the details and the price. The NEWYES often comes in at a lower price point and includes both lined and dotted pages in the same notebook, offering a bit more versatility. It’s a fantastic entry point into the world of smart notebooks if you’re not ready to commit to a more expensive system.

My Hands-On Experience: The NEWYES performs admirably and is functionally very similar to the Rocketbook. You write, scan with the “CamScanner” app (a widely used third-party app), and erase with a damp cloth or by applying heat from a hairdryer (a unique feature!). The page texture is slightly different, perhaps a bit more paper-like than the Rocketbook, which some may prefer. The integration isn’t as slick as Rocketbook’s dedicated app with its icon system, but the flexibility of using CamScanner means you get powerful document scanning features built-in. For the price, it’s an incredible value proposition.

6. Livescribe Symphony

Students & Journalists (Audio Recording)

Livescribe has been a pioneer in this space for years, and their standout feature remains a game-changer for certain users: synchronized audio recording. As you write in a special Livescribe dot-patterned notebook, the Symphony smartpen not only captures your strokes but also records audio from its built-in microphone. When you review your notes in the app, you can tap on a word you wrote, and the app will play back the audio that was recorded at that exact moment. It’s called a “pencast.”

My Hands-On Experience: For a student in a lecture or a journalist in an interview, this feature is nothing short of revolutionary. I tested it by listening to a podcast while taking notes. Tapping on a key phrase in my notes and instantly hearing the corresponding audio was incredible for clarifying context I’d missed. The pen itself is slim and modern, a big improvement over older models. The transcription is solid, and the app is mature and stable. The only real drawback is the reliance on proprietary, non-reusable notebooks, which can become a recurring cost.

7. reMarkable 2

The Ultimate Upgrade: Digital Paper Tablet

The reMarkable 2 is in a league of its own. It’s less a “smart notebook” and more a “digital paper tablet.” It features a stunning 10.3-inch E-ink screen that looks and feels remarkably like paper. There’s no glare, no backlight, and no distracting notifications—it’s designed purely for focused reading, writing, and sketching. It digitizes your notes natively and syncs them to the cloud through its own service.

My Hands-On Experience: Writing on the reMarkable 2 is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I’m writing on actual paper with a digital device. The surface has a subtle friction, and the sound the stylus makes is incredibly satisfying. It’s an ultra-thin, beautifully designed piece of hardware. It’s perfect for those who need to read and annotate lots of PDFs or take extensive, organized notes for work or study. However, its premium price and the subscription required for full cloud integration (like Google Drive or Dropbox) make it a serious investment. It’s the ultimate tool for dedicated digital minimalists who want to replace all their paper notebooks with one device.