Resources

27 Best Apps for Grad Students

Written by Grad School Center Team We are a passionate team of experienced educators and advisors at GradSchoolCenter.com, dedicated to guiding students through their graduate education journey. Our experts, with advanced degrees across various disciplines, offer personalized advice, up-to-date program information, and practical insights into application processes.

Reviewed by David Krug David Krug is a seasoned expert with 20 years in educational technology (EdTech). His career spans the pivotal years of technology integration in education, where he has played a key role in advancing student-centric learning solutions. David's expertise lies in marrying technological innovation with pedagogical effectiveness, making him a valuable asset in transforming educational experiences. As an advisor for enrollment startups, David provides strategic guidance, helping these companies navigate the complexities of the education sector. His insights are crucial in developing impactful and sustainable enrollment strategies.

Updated: March 14, 2024, Reading time: 11 minutes

apps for grad students

Find your perfect college degree

Grad School Center is an advertising-supported site. Featured or trusted partner programs and all school search, finder, or match results are for schools that compensate us. This compensation does not influence our school rankings, resource guides, or other editorially-independent information published on this site.

Graduate school is challenging; therefore, you need the best resources and tools to keep succeeding! In the world we live in today, most of us reach for the latest app in order to ease the load that surrounds being a grad student.

Juggling between graduate school and a career requires Herculean strength, and only relying on traditional methods and paperwork isn’t enough!

Graduate students are no longer just confined to acing their exams, assignments, and books; many navigate graduate study like the back of their hand! They have access to a wealth of ways and strategies to become productive.

Thanks to technology, graduate education has undergone a transformation to benefit all stakeholders—graduate students included!

App for Grad Student
Grad School Center is an advertising-supported site. Featured or trusted partner programs and all school search, finder, or match results are for schools that compensate us. This compensation does not influence our school rankings, resource guides, or other editorially-independent information published on this site.

Apps and Technology

Luckily, grad students can browse through the best apps and technologies online and locate their most essential partners in times of need. The old standard of hand-written notes, notebooks, books, and papers can get lost, but the best apps—once installed and saved on smartphones—can always be accessed.

mobile app

Mobile apps also present modern convenience. Instead of carrying bulky materials or papers wherever you are, you simply log on to the app and access all the information you need or the data you saved.

An increasing number of apps are being developed to provide students with the utmost convenience and flexibility to promote productivity.

In fact, when used as a strategic advantage, university apps have a positive impact on students’ access to information, retention rates, and academic success, according to EdTech Digest.

This article highlights the best apps for graduate students. Use these page jumps to check out your favorite app:

Best Apps for Grad Students

Evernote

Evernote is an excellent app for graduate students to sync notes across different devices. It is a handy app that helps you remember all the essential things that you might need, such as meeting proceedings, annotated bibliographies, reading summaries, or outlined notes.

It also comes with an audio recorder that you can use to record ideas for group discussions, group work, or parts of a lecture.

Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the best apps for graduate students to save important documents and access them anytime for as long as there’s an internet connection. The app lets you share files, images, videos, documents, and other essential files with your colleagues, instructors, and friends.

Dropbox allows you to access your documents while you’re on the go.

Google Drive

Similar to Dropbox, Google Drive is a must-have app for graduate students. It is one of the safest places to save your files for group work, assignments, and collaboration. You can upload videos, documents, images, and other required documents that are important for your graduate education.

Through Google Drive, you can access your files anytime, anywhere.

Penultimate

If you prefer the traditional way of note-taking, i.e., scribbling in your notebook, Penultimate is one of the must-have apps for you. It is an easy-to-use and straightforward hand-writing app for iPad.

As a result, you’ll have the experience of writing on paper with the flexibility and convenience of using an iPad. You must have a stylus pen for you to use this excellent app for graduate students.

iProcrastinate

iProcrastinate is one of the best apps that helps graduate students narrow down long-term homework assignments into more organized and manageable components, sets prioritization for specific tasks, and organizes all to-dos and reminders into one place.

Graduate students’ task lists can be shared with and modified by their colleagues, friends, and classmates, which makes it an excellent tool for group work and projects.

iStudiez Pro

iStudiez Pro is a great app for prioritizing all your assignments and keeping track of your important timelines and schedules.

This app can help you plan and visualize your week ahead, notify you when an assignment is almost approaching the deadline, and sync with your calendar for important meetings and events, which is a perfect companion if you tend to juggle between personal and professional commitments.

Outliner

One of the most challenging tasks of creating a term paper is coming up with an outline. Outliner is the best app for graduate students when it comes to organizing their tasks and thoughts into an easily manageable outline format – whether you’re on the go or working at your desk.

PDF Expert

PDF Expert is a must-have for every graduate student. It is perfect for organizing and annotating all their PDF documents. PDF Expert can also automatically sync with Dropbox, which enables you to access your annotated documents from any device anytime, anywhere.

Mendeley

Mendeley is one of the best apps for graduates who are serious about research. It is similar to a personal research assistant, which helps you collect, manage, cite, and share research works.

Through Mendeley, graduate students can browse through the app’s catalog of more than 30M research works/papers, significant references and make personal libraries per project they’re working on.

Pocket

Pocket helps you organize and keep interesting distractions at bay. You can use Pocket to bookmark articles and websites you can’t read right then and there but want to revisit at a later time.

One of the noteworthy features of this best app for graduates is that you can read any type of articles, blogs, webpages, and other online content you’ve saved even without an internet connection.

app facts

Keynote

If you’re not a fan of bringing your laptop to school daily for a class presentation or reporting, Keynote is one of the best apps that you must have as a graduate student. Similar to PowerPoint, Keynote allows you to create, design, and display your presentation from any device. It is like a mobile version of Microsoft’s PowerPoint.

Slack

Slack is one of the best apps for collaboration. It is a simple and straightforward app that lets you add multiple Slack teams. That said, it is a must-have if you are working with multiple people for research projects, assignments, group work, and reporting.

Slack utilizes a social network-style platform for team collaboration. It is available in Android, iOS, Windows, and even Linux platforms, which makes it an excellent app in terms of convenience and flexibility.

Flipboard

If you are passionate about reading to update your knowledge and what’s happening around you, Flipboard should be installed on your devices. It is similar to a magazine where you can browse curated articles, videos, pictures, stories, blogs, and news based on your interests or preferences.

Flipboard allows you to be updated by reading news articles daily, anytime, anywhere.

Microsoft To-Do

Microsoft To-Do is another must-have app for grad students developed by Wunderlist. It is a cloud-based app that integrates entirely with Office 365. To-Do allows you to create tasks from scratch or even transfer/import other to-dos from other platforms such as Outlook and Wunderlist.

instaGrok

instaGrok is an innovative educational search engine where graduate students can find almost any information they need. It provides them with essential information and details they require in the best way possible through facts and figures, concepts, videos, relationships, and pictures.

Students can pin their favorite content to reference and take notes or inspiration from it.

Awesome Note 2

Awesome Note 2 is one of the best multi-purpose apps for task management for iOS devices. It offers serious list creators and taskmasters an effective tool to help them keep track of to-dos, ideas, events, and other essential tasks.

Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle is perhaps one of the most popular apps that have been widely used by graduate students for studying and note-taking. It provides them with the ability to read through PDF documents, newspapers, textbooks, magazines, and Kindle books on a straightforward and easy-to-use interface.

Sleep Cycle Alarm

Working and busy graduate students generally have days where they don’t get enough sleep. Sleep Cycle Alarm helps in analyzing their sleep routines/patterns and will wake them up even in the lightest sleep phase. This app helps them keep track of how much sleep they need since having a good night’s sleep is essential for good health.

Habitica

Habitica is one of the unique to-do list apps for graduate students that offers them a completely different experience. It converts their daily to-dos into a role-playing interactive game where they can earn rewards at the end of each game.

It is a fun app for task management where students are compelled to complete specific tasks on schedule and motivated to do more to level up their game’s characters.

university app

Google Keep

Google Keep is the perfect companion for graduate students who don’t need much in a task management app. It is mainly used for creating quick lists that can be opened from any device. It is a straightforward note-taking app where they can write all the significant tasks, save photos and voice notes, as well as mark off tasks as complete once they are done.

Google Keep is essentially integrated with Google Drive, allowing syncing with numerous devices conveniently and easily.

ToodleDo

ToodleDo emphasizes task management and allows grad students to organize their to-do lists in the easiest and simplest method. Under each specific task, they can add one or more sub-tasks, important notes, and prioritization together with other essential details.

This app helps in organizing tasks by outlining. All their tasks and sub-tasks are displayed in an outlined form for convenience and easier tracking.

Encyclopedia Britannica

Encyclopedia Britannica is one of the largest online encyclopedias where graduate students can access hundreds of thousands of images, videos, biographies, and objective articles. It is one of the most reliable knowledge repositories for accessing factual content.

Graduate students can organize or curate all the comprehensive information they can find for their group works, assignments, thesis, and other essential purposes.

SyncBackFree

Similar to other cloud-based storage platforms, SyncBackFree is a 100% zero-cost tool that helps graduate students create backups of important files and synchronizes with the devices they have even while they’re on the go.

Through SyncBackFree, they can create scheduled backups with unlimited lengths of file names, providing them with the convenience of renaming multiple files to avoid duplication and confusion.

nTask

nTask is one of the most powerful task management platforms created for teams and individuals such as grad students. With nTask’s user-friendly and simplified GUI allowing you to navigate a unique range of features, this app helps you make tasks and sub-tasks as well as schedule them as recurring or one-time tasks.

Through checklists, grad students can list down the tasks they need to accomplish. Advanced integrations such as Gantt Charts, timelines, and progress reports allow them to keep projects on time. This app helps them save time with powerful filter and search functionalities.

2Do

2Do is another must-have app for busy grad students to manage tasks. It comes with native features to help implement the “get things done” strategy efficiently. Through an easy access add feature, students can immediately add tasks before they have slipped out of their minds.

It lets them conveniently and easily convert to-do lists into projects or a checklist to organize them according to their priorities and needs.

Apple Reminders

If you’re an iPhone, iPad, iTouch, or Mac user, a simple reminder app is already integrated into your devices. Apple Reminders is already an efficient task management app if you don’t want to install and configure to-do list apps in the first place.

It is a simple and easy-to-use app for adding tasks and easily categorizing them according to the students’ needs. Are you in a hurry or too lazy to type? You can launch Siri to do the process for you. Also, you can share the lists with anyone who has a registered iCloud account.

Any.do

Any.do is one of the best and easiest apps for graduate students in terms of creating and managing their to-do lists. It has simple tasks and subtasks folders, which aid in the instant and easy creation and checking off tasks when completed.

The app has an integrated drag-and-drop option for documents. A noteworthy feature of Any.do is voice-entry integration. Suppose you hate typing long to-do lists and prefer talking it out, Any.do is the perfect app for this.

The app allows you to create a to-do list of tasks and subtasks by speaking into your mobile devices and then making the tasks for you, similar to a virtual assistant.

App mobile phone

We’re certain of one thing—your search for more information on picking the best graduate degree or school landed you here. Let our experts help guide your through the decision making process with thoughtful content written by experts.