a notesnook alternative

shizumu is a notesnook alternative for people who came for the encryption and would rather not sort notebooks to get it.

how the two behave

notesnook is an encrypted note app: notebooks, tags, an account, and paid tiers for the larger features. the encryption is the reason people pick it, and the filing comes along with it.

shizumu seals your writing the same way and asks for no account at all. the writing is a database on your device; sync is optional, end-to-end encrypted and free for two devices; and the relay is yours to run if you prefer. the app is free on linux, android and windows, and the source is public: apache-2.0 on the client, agpl-3.0-or-later on the relay.

what you keep, and what you leave behind

notesnook exports markdown and html, so the words move. the notebooks and tags do not, because there is nothing here that files. that is the whole trade of this notesnook alternative: no place to put a thought, so the thought goes on the page instead.

what a page does instead

every day starts empty. you write to think, you pin what matters, and a page on a trail gets back the pins you kept there. everything else stays in memory, searchable. the way back is the pins, not a tag you hope you will remember.

what the relay can see

every page is sealed on your device before it leaves, so the relay holds what it cannot read. the primitives are written down rather than asserted: how sync is encrypted, and what the relay can and cannot see.

try before you move

the app runs in your browser with a few weeks of writing already in it: try it. also worth a look: a standard notes alternative and a joplin alternative.

try it in your browser download