a penzu alternative

how the two behave

penzu is a diary you reach through a browser or its phone apps: an account, entries behind a password, reminders, and paid tiers for the extras. privacy there means nobody else can log in as you.

shizumu is an app on your device, and privacy means the writing never leaves it unless you turn sync on. when you do, every page is sealed on the device before it goes: the relay holds what it cannot read, and neither can we. it still sees the size of each sealed blob, its hash and when it arrives, but not content, titles or filenames. that is written down in what the relay can and cannot see and how sync is encrypted.

who it fits, and who it doesn't

if you want to open your diary from any browser on any computer, penzu's shape suits that better: shizumu is installed, not visited. and people who came to penzu for the reminders tend to miss them, because every day here starts on an empty page and the app does not ask whether you wrote yesterday. it fits people who want somewhere private to think, on a machine they own.

platforms and sync

it runs on linux (flathub, x86_64 and arm64) and windows. android is a closed test on google play, and the android page is where you ask to join. mac is a beta download and iphone is a testflight beta. hosted sync is free on two devices, your own relay is free on every device, and hosted sync for more devices is what you pay for (pricing).

what a page does instead

you write to think. when a sentence turns out to matter, you pin it, and the pin points back into the page it came from. a trail is for a project, not a day: a book, a job search, anything you'll come back to tomorrow. choose a trail and the page picks up context: the pins you already kept there, already on the page. everything else lives in memory: search it, or open one trail, one date, pages, or pins.

moving your diary over

whatever export your penzu plan gives you, the text of an entry pastes onto a page here, and pasted markdown keeps its headings and lists as blocks. the words move; the reminders and the locked-journal ritual stay behind. if you leave shizumu later, every page exports as a markdown file into a folder you choose, and settings can make a full backup of the database.

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 morning pages app and a day one alternative.