an evernote alternative

shizumu is an evernote alternative for people who want the writing on their own machine, with nothing to file and nothing to renew.

how the two behave

evernote is a filing system with an account. notebooks, tags and a web clipper, kept in its cloud, sold as a subscription that has climbed over the years. that is why most people looking for an evernote replacement say the same two things: the price, and wanting their own data back.

shizumu is a page. no account, no subscription, and the writing is a database on your device. sync is optional, end-to-end encrypted, and free for two devices, and you can run the relay yourself. the app is free on linux, android and windows, and the source is on github, apache-2.0 on the client and agpl-3.0-or-later on the relay.

what you keep, and what you leave behind

years of notes are the hard part when you migrate from evernote. evernote exports to its own enex format and to html, and the words move; the structure does not, because shizumu has no notebooks to move them into. there is no web clipper either. what replaces both is that every day starts on an empty page, and what you pin comes back when you open the trail it belongs to.

people who used evernote as a filing cabinet will miss the cabinet. people who used it because they had to put a thought somewhere tend not to.

what a page does instead

you write to think. when something turns out to matter, you pin it. when a thread continues past today, a book, a job search, a project, you put the page on a trail, and the pins you kept there come back onto the page the next time you open it. everything else stays in memory, searchable. that is the thing to check for in any apps like evernote list: whether there is a way back to what mattered, or only a pile with search over it.

if you are switching because of where your data lives

the writing never leaves the device unless you turn sync on, and when you do, every page is sealed before it goes. the relay holds what it cannot read, and neither can we. you can read how that works and run the relay yourself: how sync is encrypted, the deploy guide.

try before you move

the whole app runs in your browser with a few weeks of writing already in it: try it. if you are weighing a note app like evernote against something quieter, that is the fastest way to tell. also worth a look: a notion alternative and a joplin alternative.

try it in your browser download