a private notion alternative for your own writing

how the two behave

notion is a workspace. pages inside pages, databases, views, templates and a team to share them with, all in its cloud behind an account. it is good at being a system, and the work of a system happens before the writing: deciding the structure, then filling it in.

shizumu is a page. you open it and write. nothing to design first, nowhere to file the result. the writing is a database on your device, and it opens straight into the page.

who it fits, and who it doesn't

if your notion is a team's operating system, with shared databases, assigned tasks and a wiki other people edit, keep it. shizumu is a solo writing surface, and it stays one. it fits the person whose own daily writing got buried under the structure built around it, and who wants a private place where the first sentence is the first thing that happens.

platforms and sync

shizumu runs on linux (flathub, x86_64 and arm64) and windows. android is a closed test on google play: ask to join. mac is a beta download and iphone is a testflight beta.

sync is optional and end-to-end encrypted. the relay holds what it cannot read, and neither can we. hosted sync is free on two devices, and a relay you run yourself is free on every device: pricing. the relay sees sealed blob sizes and timing, not content, titles or filenames, and that is written down in the threat model and how sync is encrypted. the client is apache-2.0 and the relay agpl-3.0-or-later, so the privacy claim is one you can read.

moving over

notion exports markdown and csv, and there is no notion importer here. what carries across is the writing: paste a markdown page in and its headings, lists, tasks and code come in as blocks. the databases, relations and views stay in notion, because nothing here is built from them. on the way out, shizumu writes every page as a markdown file into a folder you choose, plus a full backup of the database.

what a page does instead

a new page starts empty. you write, you pin what turns out to matter, and when a thread continues past today you put the page on a trail. a trail is for a project, not a day: a book, a job search, anything you'll come back to tomorrow. choose the trail and the pins you already kept there are on the page, so the context finds you instead of you going to look for it. everything else lives in memory, searchable.

the page still has real tools: / for a table, a chart, an outline, a block of code, and @ to reach a page, a pin or a trail. mod+k opens the trail index and the command palette. a local notion alternative does not have to mean a plain text file.

on writing that writes itself

people looking for a notion ai replacement often want fewer generated paragraphs and more of their own sentences. shizumu will not write for you, because the writing is the thinking. tools that help you find what you already wrote are a different matter.

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: an evernote alternative and an obsidian alternative.