SumizAI vs Altretta

What Altretta is

What Altretta is

Altretta is a local vault combining files, notes, and code in one place, with AI-powered answers that cite the precise files and lines they draw on. No data leaves the user's device — a fundamental difference from cloud AI tools, where content travels to external servers. The app comes from Estonia and is built for people who want both the power of AI semantic search and full control over their own data.

Key features

Indexing across 16 languages lets you search and ask questions about content regardless of what language it was written in, which matters for multilingual users or international teams. History tracking gives visibility into how documents evolved over time, and signed edits add a layer of accountability for who made a specific change and when. 3D visual graphs let you see connections between documents more intuitively than a flat list or a traditional two-dimensional graph. Encryption for teams enables safely sharing a vault among multiple people without losing privacy. A plugin system lets you extend core functionality with custom integrations.

Who it's for

Altretta appeals to development teams wanting one place combining documentation, project notes, and the code itself, with the ability to ask AI questions that answer with exact reference to the source. People working with sensitive data, for whom sending content to a cloud API is unacceptable, find in the app's local nature a real solution. Multilingual teams working with documentation in several languages at once appreciate the broad language support of the indexing.

Use cases

In practice, Altretta works well on a large development project, where a developer asks the AI how a specific module works and gets an answer with an exact pointer to the files and lines of code it's based on. A team documenting a complex system can use the 3D visualization to understand connections between dozens of documents without scrolling long lists. A company with regulatory data-locality requirements can deploy Altretta as an AI tool that never sends content outside company infrastructure.

Pricing and business model

That model lets individual users test the tool before considering a broader team rollout.

Limitations and what to watch for

Local processing means AI answer quality and speed depend on your own device's compute power, unlike cloud tools that draw on server infrastructure. The app's closed, proprietary nature (despite local data processing) means dependence on the maker's continued development, unlike fully open-source alternatives.

AI notes in a local vault

Altretta combines notes with files and code in one vault, which itself creates a natural environment for ai notes — AI answers citing specific sources can be saved alongside the rest of the project's documentation. A user wanting to preserve an especially valuable AI answer as a lasting note can do so directly in the same vault, without moving content to an external tool.

Source citation as the foundation of trust

Many AI assistants generate answers that sound convincing but offer no way to verify exactly where a piece of information came from. Altretta flips that approach — every answer is anchored to a specific file and line, letting you immediately check whether the AI correctly interpreted the source instead of blindly trusting generated text. That trait matters especially when working with code, where a misinterpretation can lead to real production bugs.

3D visualization as an understanding tool

Traditional two-dimensional graphs of connections between notes or documents quickly become unreadable once the node count grows large. Altretta's 3D visualization adds an extra spatial dimension, letting complex connection structures spread out in a way more natural for human spatial perception, making it easier to navigate large, branching knowledge bases.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before fully deploying Altretta, check the hardware requirements for smooth local AI performance on your own device, and test citation quality on a representative set of your own documents.

The whole history in one place, forever

History tracking and signed edits mean Altretta becomes not just a tool for day-to-day work but an archive of project decisions — who changed a given document, when, and why, stays visible for years. For teams where staff turnover is natural, that history can be invaluable when trying to understand why a piece of code or documentation looks the way it does.

Multilingual teams and a shared knowledge base

Geographically distributed teams, where different members write documentation in different languages, traditionally struggle with fragmented knowledge — ai notes and documents in one language are practically invisible to speakers of another. Indexing across 16 languages in Altretta eliminates that barrier, letting anyone on the team ask questions and get accurate answers regardless of what language the source document, ai notes entry, or code fragment was written in.

Security without sacrificing usability

Many privacy-focused tools achieve that at the cost of convenience — strong encryption often means a more complicated login or sync process. Altretta tries to avoid that trade-off, offering team encryption as an optional layer rather than a default, mandatory hurdle, letting teams match their security level to actual needs instead of accepting one rigid standard for everyone.

Bottom line

Altretta is a local vault combining files, notes, and code with AI that cites exact sources, without sending data to the cloud. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land automatically in an organized, portable archive independent of one app might consider a complementary tool built for that purpose.

Comparison with SumizAI

Altretta and SumizAI both bet on privacy and local data control, but differ in scope. Altretta combines files, notes, and code in one vault with AI semantic search citing sources. SumizAI focuses narrowly on one workflow: turning an AI conversation into an ai notes entry saved as a Markdown file in a vault the user owns. A development team can use Altretta as its main project knowledge vault, and separately use SumizAI to archive specific, valuable fragments of AI assistant conversations as individual ai notes.

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.

Every answer kept this way becomes one of these ai notes, ready to search again months later without hunting back through old chats.

Side by side

Where they differ

• Both mention AI. The difference is whose key it runs on: SumizAI never resells inference — you connect one of seven providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server) with your own API key and pay that provider directly. Check what Altretta does with the model bill before comparing prices.
• Altretta 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.
• AlternativeTo's description of Altretta does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard .md files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them.
• Altretta 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 Altretta over SumizAI.
• Altretta advertises encryption. SumizAI answers the same worry a different way: on the desktop the notes never leave your disk, and the material a question sends to the model is capped at the table of contents plus at most five notes — and the app shows you which five it used.
• Altretta is extensible through plugins. SumizAI is not, and that is a genuine trade: you cannot bend it into something else, but there is also no plugin to keep working after the next release. What it does instead is fixed and small — a chat, a filing rule and a folder of Markdown.
• AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Altretta. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.

Which one to pick