These two products both promise the same relief, CPD that accumulates from work you were doing anyway, and they deliver it through opposite mechanisms. GPnotebook Pro tracks your reading and converts it into logged credits. iatroX assesses your knowledge and converts the gaps into corrected, re-tested learning. One documents exposure, the other verifies retention, and understanding that difference is the whole comparison.
What GPnotebook Pro actually does
GPnotebook remains one of the most-opened references in UK general practice, and Pro monetises that habit intelligently. Subscribers get unlimited access past the free tier's page limits, and the platform passively tracks pages read and videos watched, accumulating CPD credits while you work; reflective notes can be attached to activity, topical Round-up MCQs add a light assessment layer, and a yearly CPD statement exports for your appraisal portfolio. At £7.99 monthly or £71.88 annually (last checked August 2026), the pitch is friction removal: the looking-up you already do becomes documented professional development, and for locum and salaried GPs who dread the March scramble for evidence, twenty passively logged hours of genuinely clinical reading is a real product. Our standalone review at /blog/gpnotebook-pro-review-worth-it-pricing-cpd goes deeper on the value cases.
What iatroX does instead
iatroX starts from assessment rather than reading. Adaptive question sets across a GP's scope of practice establish what you actually know; missed questions trigger the Socratic Tutor, which asks for your reasoning and surfaces the misconception before showing the guideline-grounded correction; spaced repetition re-tests the topic weeks later; and My CPD binds topic, time, performance, correction and your reflection into an appraisal-ready record. Alongside sits askiatroX for the day's clinical questions, answered with direct citations into NICE, CKS, SIGN and SmPC sources, with those queries feeding the same CPD loop. The free tier covers askiatroX and selected full banks; the complete platform is £29 monthly or £99 annually.
Passive tracking versus question-based assessment
Here is the fair way to state the difference. A reading log proves the honest and useful fact that you engaged with relevant material; what it cannot prove is what you retained, because tracked exposure is silent on the difference between reading and learning. An assessed record proves what you knew, what you got wrong, and, after re-testing, that the gap closed; what it cannot do is document the broad, unstructured currency-maintenance that reading genuinely provides. Appraisal welcomes both, but they occupy different tiers of evidence: exposure with reflection is good; assessed correction with reflection is the strongest format an ordinary doctor can routinely produce.
Clinical search, compared
Both products also answer clinical questions, differently. GPnotebook's strength is the concise, GP-written topic page: fast, familiar, and excellent for orientation. askiatroX answers in natural language with citations that resolve to the underlying national guidance, which matters when the question is exactly what the current recommendation says and you want the trail, not a summary of it. Many GPs will recognise the workflow truth that these are complementary reflexes: the topic page for shape, the cited answer for the specific threshold you are about to act on.
Reflection and reporting
GPnotebook Pro attaches reflective notes to tracked activity and exports a clean yearly statement. iatroX prompts reflection against the specifics of your own misses, which tends to produce sharper entries because there is something concrete to reflect on, and packages each session as its own record rather than an annual aggregate. Neither writes your reflection for you, correctly, under current college guidance.
Balanced recommendations
Choose GPnotebook Pro if your CPD problem is evidentiary volume: you read constantly, log nothing, and want the year documented with zero behaviour change. Choose iatroX if your CPD problem is verification and correction: you want to know where your knowledge has drifted from current guidance and to hold evidence that you fixed it. Run both if the budget allows, and many will, because the combination covers the two tiers appraisal actually asks about: Pro documents the breadth of your ongoing reading, iatroX documents the depth of assessed, corrected knowledge, and the pair still costs less than most single update courses. They are not mutually exclusive; they are different answers to different halves of the same appraisal question.
Frequently asked questions
Is tracked reading enough on its own for appraisal?
It can pass, with reflection attached, but a portfolio built solely on exposure evidence is the thin end of what current guidance asks for. The robust pattern uses reading logs for breadth and assessed records for depth; each covers the other's weakness.
Does the iatroX free tier cover this use case?
Partially: askiatroX and selected full banks are free, enough to run the question-to-retrieval loop in those areas and evaluate the workflow properly. The GP-scope banks and full CPD machinery sit in the £99 annual tier, which is the relevant comparison price against Pro's £71.88.
Which should a GP trainee pick?
Neither, first: trainee portfolios and funded resources cover most needs, as our GPnotebook Pro review notes. The calculus flips at CCT, when self-funded, self-directed evidence becomes your own responsibility, and the exposure-versus-assessment question above becomes yours to answer.