SumizAI vs AFFiNE

What AFFiNE is

AlternativeTo files AFFiNE under Note-taking, Todo List Manager. It is recorded as Freemium, Proprietary, from Singapore. It ships on Mac, Windows, Linux, Online, Android, iPhone, Self-Hosted. The topics its entry raises are Markdown, offline use, privacy, collaboration, self-hosting and tasks.

That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for AFFiNE — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.

What SumizAI is

A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk.

A vault is a directory holding base.md, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a notes/ folder with one .md file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist.

The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used.

Side by side

Where they differ

• AlternativeTo's description of AFFiNE does not mention an AI model. That is the whole starting point in SumizAI: you have a conversation with a model on your own API key, and the answers worth keeping become notes without you filing them.
• AFFiNE is freemium: there is a free tier and a paid one, and the line between them is the thing to read before committing. SumizAI has one plan at a dollar a month, so there is no feature held back for a higher tier — and an unpaid account still opens and exports every vault it already has.
• Both keep Markdown, which makes moving between them mostly a matter of copying files. In SumizAI a vault is a directory holding base.md — a generated table of contents — and a notes/ folder with one .md file per note.
• AFFiNE is described as something more than one person uses at once. SumizAI is not: there are no shared vaults, no comments, no permissions and no sync between devices. If the work is a team's, that is a reason to pick AFFiNE over SumizAI.
• AFFiNE can be self-hosted. SumizAI has nothing to host on the desktop — the vault is a folder on your machine — and if you want the model on your own hardware too, a local Ollama is one of the seven providers it speaks to.
• AFFiNE also does tasks. SumizAI does not — no boards, no due dates, no projects. It files knowledge, not work.
• AFFiNE offers a visual surface — a canvas, whiteboard or map. SumizAI has no canvas: the structure it maintains is a written table of contents in base.md, up to six levels deep, rebuilt as notes arrive.

Which one to pick