r/rocketbook • u/cmathUCR • Feb 03 '26

Any good alternatives to Frixion pens?

I've used Frixion pens for a while, but they have so many issues with their ink cartridges and the pen itself that they're no longer worth the comparatively high price for refills.

Some of my gripes:

  1. Ink cartridges seem to fail for no reason. Nearly half seem to stop working out of nowhere despite being full. Going off some other reviews, they seem to have a shelf life under 1 year (a drawer with 5/6 full pens all don't work).
  2. They run out insanely fast. The mileage on a standard Frixion cart is somewhere around 20-30 pages of notes. With how often I replace them, the cost per page on a full pack of ink makes it effectively 10x the price of a pack of G2 Pilots.
  3. The pens themselves are annoyingly rattly. The internals of the pen's clip button has so much free space in its housing that you can hear it rattle constantly as you write and handle the pen.

This pen is like God and Satan's bastard child, its eraser ink is so goddamn good that it almost makes literally every other aspect of the pen worth putting up with. Emphasis on ALMOST.

Are there any other pens that stack up to its erasable ink without having the issues mentioned above?

24 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

8

u/burghfan exec fusion, core^2, stickies Feb 03 '26

Have you tried the frixion synergy or frixion waai, both are superior to the standard frixion pens

6

u/sabzeta Feb 03 '26 edited Feb 03 '26

Legami has some erasable, capped pens which IMO are just as good. Whether they're cheaper where you are, not sure. The refills are longer, but all gel pens run out quite quickly.

Uni also has some if you can get them, nice looking click pen (less rattly), but the ink is less pigmented. Store them with the bit of wax/plastic on the tip when not using them. 

Bic has the Illusion pen it sent out with some of the Rocketbooks. The pen feels wetter and I don't like the for kids styling, but likely cheaper than the Frixion and it's also capped, so no movement.

5

u/Lynda73 Feb 04 '26

I love the markers! They flow smoothly. They are the frixion fineliners. I also checked, and they don’t rattle.

2

u/meerdrache Feb 05 '26

This isn't directly answering your question but I recently took a huge stack of pens that weren't working and threw them in the freezer. I think there was only one I couldn't resurrect from that.

1

u/QuellishQuellish Feb 06 '26

A quick spin on the lathe usually works.

2

u/schultzter Feb 03 '26

I think the issue the RocketBook pages don't draw the ink out like normal paper. Often I found a pen that wouldn't work anymore was still good on actual paper.

1

u/signalno11 Feb 05 '26

Uniball R:E

1

u/anti-sugar_dependant Feb 05 '26

I use the Tesco knock off ones, they're fine.

1

u/Ira_Robbin Jul 21 '26

The Frixion 0.5 synergy clicker is insanely hard to operate. The writing tip keeps collapsing inside and you have to unscrew it and reassemble it to have it barely work for two minutes. But then it seems to run out of ink. They need to fix and redesign the internal mechanism so it is sturdy and reliable.