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The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 is a very different phone compared with the Note 4, but it also stands apart compared to other flagships. Many of the features Samsung removed from the Note line continue to exist elsewhere, but you won’t have quite the same experience. Take the LG G4 as an example: It’s more modular and lighter, but are the missing software features worth the tradeoff? Let’s see how they stack up.

Design

Samsung and LG are taking fundamentally different approaches to making smartphones right now, and you can tell the instant you pick one up. The Note 5 is a solid slug of metal and glass, just like the Galaxy S6. There’s no flex or give anywhere in its frame, and the glass back, while slippery, feels and looks great. Samsung added a slight curve to the rear glass panel to make it easier to hold as well.

The LG G4 still relies mostly on plastic for the frame and back cover. The device is only a little smaller than the Note 5, but it’s substantially lighter (155g vs 171g). It has a less subjectively “premium” feel because of it, but it can be more comfortable to use for long periods. LG’s stab at a premium design element is the optional leather back cover. It’s the same as the plastic cover, but there’s a (very) thin layer or genuine leather stretched over top. It doesn’t feel or look as nice as Motorola’s leather backs, but the G4’s backs are removable. And what’s back there? So many wonderful things.

LG has equipped the G4 with a removable 3000mAh battery and a microSD card slot behind the back cover. The Note 5 also has a 3000mAh battery, but it’s completely built-in. There’s also no microSD card slot. The Note 5 also has a wireless charging coil built-in, but LG makes you buy a clunky “Quick Circle” flip case if you want to add wireless charging to the phone.

Samsung has also implemented the great touch-based fingerprint sensor in the home button from the GS6 on the new Note 5. The LG G4 doesn’t have an equivalent hardware feature — it uses software nav buttons anyway. The G4 does have a cool button layout that makes the phone convenient to use. The volume toggle and power button are in the middle of the back cover, right below the camera lens. That’s right where your index finger is likely to rest while holding the phone.

Display

The Note 5 uses a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 2560×1440. It’s very similar to the display on the Galaxy S6, just a little larger. It’s the best screen on a smartphone right now. There are plenty of phones that have good screens, but nothing can touch Samsung’s most recent AMOLED panels.

LG isn’t completely out of the running with the G4. This phone has a slightly smaller 5.5-inch LCD display also at 2560×1440. It’s every bit as clear as Samsung’s AMOLEDs, but some other qualities are lacking. LG did a good job improving the LCD panel in this year’s flagship compared to the G3, but you can tell next to an AMOLED that it’s dimmer and less vibrant. This is just how LCD technology behaves at super-high resolution.

Samsung is really into curved screens these days, but it’s LG that has a curved screen in this comparison. They call it a “quantum display” but let’s not go crazy. It’s a nice high-resolution LCD with a slight top-to-bottom curve. I don’t think it makes any functional difference, but you can set the phone face down on a table without worrying about the screen being scuffed.

The Note 5’s big trick is the S pen, which nests neatly in the slot on the bottom of the phone. The screen contains a special digitizer to take advantage of this stylus. The G4 doesn’t have any feature to match this, so if you want stylus input, the Note 5 is the clear victor. You can use a capacitive stylus on any phone, but the Note’s version is considerably more accurate and has pressure sensitivity built-in.

Internals

The Galaxy Note 5 has absolutely top-of-the line specs. There’s a 64-bit Exynos 7420 SoC, just like the one found in the Galaxy S6. To say this is a fast ARM chip would be a spectacular understatement. It destroys everything else in benchmarks, and even performs well in real life. This chip has a quad-core cluster of high-power Cortex-A57 CPUs and a second cluster of four efficient Cortex-A53 cores.

The LG G4 is a bit more modest because the non-Samsung equivalent of the 7420 is the octa-core Snapdragon 810, which is prone to overheating. So LG went with the Snapdragon 808. This chip has only two Cortex-A57 cores and four low-power A53s. On paper it sounds like a disadvantage, but there’s very little performance impact. The G4’s GPU is a little weaker, though. The G4 is probably more stable than it would have been with the 810 anyway.

Samsung has opted to add another gigabyte of RAM to the Note 5, for a total of 4 GB. The LG G4 only has 3GB, but these devices will likely utilize that RAM in different ways. If the Note 5 behaves like the GS6 (and it probably does), apps will be closed in the background faster than they are on the G4 and other devices. That tends to make Samsung’s phones a little faster in general usage, but slower at multitasking. The RAM management scheme is probably something to do with multi-window mode.

Internal storage in the G4 is 32GB in all variants, but you can add a 128GB card for not too much coin. It’ll be slower, but it’s fine for archiving media or photos. The Note 5 will come in 32GB and 64GB variants, and that’s all the storage you get. Samsung accidentally listed a 128GB version of the device online last week, but that was an error. Samsung uses incredibly fast UFS 2.0 NAND in the Note 5. In sheer access speed, it leaves the G4 in the dust.

Software and Everything Else

Both phones have Android 5.1 right now, which is the latest version of the OS for the moment (not for much longer, though). The Note 5 will have an updated version of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI layer. TouchWiz used to be pretty terrible, but it has improved over time. Samsung has pulled out many of the superfluous features and cleaned up the interface. In fact, I think TouchWiz looks more modern these days than LG UX 4.0 on the G4. Samsung simply made the transition to Lollipop a little better — LG’s software looks too bland by comparison.

The system-level alterations made for the S Pen are the main difference between the G4 and Note 5. You can pull up Samsung’s floating tool panel at any time with the stylus to capture a screenshot, take a note, and so on. The G4 has a built-in note app, but it’s nothing special. Samsung also has a very deep multi-window system in the Note 5. LG has a similar feature in the Note 4 (Dual Window), but it’s not nearly as good.

The Note 5 will rely heavily on the aforementioned fingerprint sensor, but the G4 does at least have a cool software trick that makes it easier to unlock the phone. You can set a Knock Code lock method that lets you simply tap on the screen in a certain pattern to both wake and unlock the phone in one step. Both phones, of course, support all the standard unlock methods as well.

The Note 5 has a 16MP camera with an f/1.9 lens. That’s the same configuration as the GS6, which means it’s very similar to the G4. LG’s device has an 16MP sensor too, but the lens is slightly better at f/1.8. The G4 does very well in low-light situations, and the camera app is incredibly powerful. You can tweak the exposure, focus, white balance, ISO, and even capture RAW files. Samsung has some of these more advanced options, but no built-in RAW yet. The Note 5 is likely to continue Samsung’s tradition of amazing HDR camera performance, though. No other OEM can touch Samsung in this department.

Another difference is price. Samsung is asking over $700 for the 32GB Note 5, but LG has been dropping the G4’s price in recent weeks to try and gains some ground on Samsung. You can get this phone for around $450-550 depending on carrier.