a penzu alternative

shizumu is a penzu alternative for a private diary that lives on your machine rather than in a browser tab behind a login.

how the two behave

penzu is a diary on the web: 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. there is no account and no tier. sync is optional, end-to-end encrypted and free for two devices, and the relay holds only sealed pages.

what you keep, and what you leave behind

penzu exports pdf and text, so the entries move. the daily prompts and the reminders do not, and neither does the locked-journal ritual. every day starts on an empty page here, and the app does not ask how you feel or whether you wrote yesterday.

people who came to penzu for the nudges will miss them. people who came for somewhere private to think tend not to.

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 diary that runs past today goes on a trail, and the pins you kept there come back the next time you open it. everything else stays in memory, searchable.

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.

what holds on every platform

shizumu is free, on linux, android, and windows. your writing stays on your device. sync is optional and end-to-end encrypted: the relay holds what it cannot read, and neither can we. the app and the relay are open source: apache-2.0 on the client, agpl-3.0-or-later on the relay.

it will not write for you, because the writing is the thinking.

try it in your browser download