LiquidText vs. GoodReader: A PDF Reader Comparison

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video, I will do a comparison of two PDF readers — LiquidText and Goodreader.

Just so you know a bit about my user profile — I am finishing up a graduate degree in social work and I work primarily on an early version of the iPad Pro.  I have been using Goodreader for some time, but I am pretty open to other apps if they would better suit my needs.  I use GoodReader for two reasons: to read and highlight PDFs and to manage PDF files. I use a different app, Notability, for handwriting/drawing, so I don’t need either of these apps to perform that function for me.  OK – let’s get started on this side by side comparison of GoodReader and LiquidText. First,

• Price - Goodreader is $6 in the App Store and you can download LiquidText for free.  Liquidtext has a pro version for $30, but most of those extra functions were outside of my basic needs.  I will happily throw down $6 for an app that makes my life easier, so I consider that cost differential to be negligible.  
• Sync Across Devices - Goodreader allows you to sync files across devices. Plus you can save files to the iCloud folder to make them available to all devices using the same Apple ID.  Syncing is not available in the free version of liquid text. It requires the $30 upgrade.
• Platforms - Goodreader is available for iOS devices. There’s an app for the iPad and an app for the iPhone. Liquidtext has an iPad app, but no iPhone app. However, it is available for android, PC, and I think the Mac version is out now.
• Appearance/file organization - Liquidtext clearly wins in this department. It is a slick looking app and allows you to view by thumbnail or by list.  Goodreader has been around since 2009 – and you can tell. It is clunky looking and looks like an old UseNet interface from the early 90s. File management (by which I mean deleting, renaming, and moving files) is awkward and takes more clicks than you’d want it to.  
• Importing PDFs - Goodreader does this easily using the share sheet from other apps, plus it allows you to import using the iPad file folder, photos, a computer connection, Google Drive or other cloud options.  Liquid text allows you to import a webpage or a photo, but the options beyond that are more limited. You can import from the iPad file folder, but when I tried using the share sheet from a different app, Liquidtext totally freaked out. It crashed the app multiple times and now I have these phantom files that I can’t get rid of.  To be safe, I would want to save the file to the iPad and then import it from the file folder – but this is a pain in the neck. Goodreader wins in this department.
• Highlights and comments - This is what I do the most in my PDF reader app. I read a lot of articles and textbooks and I highlight and comment as I go.  Both apps do a serviceable job of this. Goodreader has more options: you can highlight with different colors, comments, cross out, underline, squiggly underline.  With Liquidtext some of those options are not available in the free version. But to be frank, it meets my basic needs. In addition, Liquidtext allows you to fluidly move to the next page, whereas GoodReader requires you to save changes for each page before moving on. And again, Liquidtext has a prettier interface for all of us. LiquidText wins on this one.
• Exporting highlights - When I finish reading a chapter, I export all of my highlights and comments so that I can keep them separately in a note or a spreadsheet. You can see my video on this, if you are interested.  Both apps do a decent job of this. However, GoodReader exports a text file, which is easy to manipulate. Whereas LiquidText exports a word file, which is more annoying and requires a few additional steps for me.  GoodReader wins on this count.
• Navigation - LiquidText has a navigation bar on the left here. I like that you can see visually where the highlights and comments are. And if you drag the marker, you can navigate directly to a page number.  GoodReader’s navigation is slightly clunkier, with this navigation bar at the bottom. However, it has a nice thumbnail when you drag the marker and, most importantly, you can bring up this multi-page view, which I find absolutely essential when navigating through a document that is several hundred pages.  Goodreader wins on this one.  
• Liquidtext cool features - I was really excited about some of the innovative Liquidtext functionality. This app was created by students at Georgia Tech, so is developed specifically for hard-core research. It has something called a workspace, which you can expand by dragging this partition. You can drag excerpts, comments, etc. into the workspace and group them there logically or join them. Clicking on this arrow gets you back to the originating place in the text.  This allows you to engage with the information in a more tactile way, sorting and grouping similar thoughts and information. In addition, LiquidText allows you to pinch your document together so that all of your highlights and comments are visible and the other text is pinched out.  All of this is really cool in theory, but in actuality I struggled with it a bit. I found the workspace and navigating back to the originating text to be super disorienting. And I couldn’t get the pinching to work the way I wanted it to. Again, this is my own brain and probably some good old user error, but I much prefer to export important pieces of information and then manipulate it or group it within a spreadsheet outside the document. So, it turns out those features were not as useful for me.
• Goodreader cool features - where GoodReader really stands out for me is in its ability to manipulate PDF files.  I can do things on my iPad that on a PC would require software costing several hundred dollars. I can add pages, split a document, and append (or put two documents together).  I can rearrange and delete pages.  I use these functions all the time and LiquidText doesn’t have anything like it.

Everyone has different needs, but in the end, despite not being as slick or having fancy grouping features, I’m sticking with GoodReader. It is a solid app that handles extremely large files with ease and does all of the basic things that I need for grad school.  Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.