SumizAI vs Beaver Notes

What Beaver Notes is

What Beaver Notes is

Beaver Notes is a free, open-source Markdown notes app built around a "local-first" principle — notes live primarily on the user's device, with no account required and no data upload to an external server needed just to get the app running. The project comes from Italy and is developed as an independent alternative to Notion, Obsidian, and OneNote, emphasizing privacy and full user ownership of data rather than a vendor.

Key features

Notes are organized with folders and tags, with full-text search and sorting by creation date, modification date, or alphabetical order. The Markdown editor has a toolbar with the usual shortcuts — bold, italics, underline, headings, bullet lists — so writing doesn't require memorizing syntax. Notes can be linked to each other, letting you build a web of related entries similar to what Obsidian offers, though in a simpler, less elaborate form. A "Focus Mode" hides interface elements and switches to full-screen, cutting distractions while writing longer pieces. Individual notes can also be locked with a password, useful for personal content not everyone in the household should see.

Three ways to store data — device, your own server, or BeaverSync

Users choose where their data lives: purely on the device, on a self-hosted server under full control, or — as of 2025 — through BeaverSync, an optional cloud service from the app's creators for people who want sync convenience without running their own infrastructure. That flexibility sets Beaver Notes apart from apps that mandate one storage model upfront, usually a vendor-owned cloud.

Who it's for

Beaver Notes appeals to people for whom privacy and independence from a single cloud vendor matter more than a long feature list. Open-source-conscious users migrating from Evernote, OneNote, or Notion who want a simpler, lighter tool without a subscription will find a direct match for the basics without extra baggage.

Use cases

In practice, Beaver Notes works well for jotting down thoughts offline, on a train or plane with no internet access, where local storage simply works without waiting on a sync. Someone keeping a personal journal will appreciate password-locking notes, and someone writing longer pieces will value Focus Mode stripping the interface down to the essentials.

Pricing and business model

The app is completely free, under the MIT license, with no monthly fees or premium tiers gating features. BeaverSync, the optional cloud sync service from the creators, is a separate piece — the app itself and its core functionality stay free regardless of whether anyone opts into it.

Limitations and what to watch for

No built-in account or cloud means syncing across devices without a self-hosted server or BeaverSync requires manual setup, for example through a third-party file-sync tool. The app also doesn't offer as extensive a plugin ecosystem as Obsidian, so users accustomed to deep customization may feel the functionality gap against more mature competitors.

AI notes pasted straight into Markdown files on disk

Beaver Notes has no built-in language-model integration, but since every note is a plain Markdown file on disk, pasting an ai notes entry from a conversation with an AI assistant and formatting it with the toolbar takes only a moment. That ai notes entry lands immediately in the local file system, so it doesn't depend on any external service — just copy, paste, and light heading or list formatting to keep the ai notes entry readable and easy to find later.

A small, independent team from Italy behind the project

Beaver Notes is developed by a small, independent team, which in practice means faster responses to GitHub issues than you'd get from large, corporate note-taking platforms. The repository even includes a dedicated AI_POLICY.md document, showing the creators think deliberately about AI's role in their own development process, even though the app itself remains a pure note-taking tool with no built-in chat with a model.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before installing, check the current status of BeaverSync (whether the service is fully available yet or still in early rollout) and whether the build for your OS — especially for Linux distributions — ships in your preferred package format: AppImage, Flatpak, or a plain binary tarball.

Bottom line

Beaver Notes is a simple, free Markdown notebook with full control over where your data lives — on the device, on your own server, or in the creators' optional cloud. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land in a searchable archive of Markdown files without depending on a single cloud vendor will find a solid, if simpler, alternative here.

Comparison with SumizAI

Beaver Notes and SumizAI differ in where note content comes from. Beaver Notes is a notebook for writing by hand, with no built-in AI-model integration — ai notes entries have to be pasted in manually. SumizAI flips that model: a conversation with a language model is the starting point, and answers worth keeping land automatically as Markdown files in a vault the user owns, using their own API key to one of seven providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, local Ollama, or a self-hosted server). Anyone who writes notes by hand and wants full control over storage location will pick Beaver Notes; anyone who wants these notes to build up automatically from AI conversations will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool, at $1/month after a 7-day trial with no card required.

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

Beaver Notes in depth

Origins and who keeps it running

Beaver Notes is a markdown notebook written in Italy and maintained by Daniele Rolli together with roughly eight regular code contributors and a wider circle of volunteers who handle translations and community work. The repository was opened in July 2023 and has since accumulated around 1,330 stars, 66 forks and a working queue of fewer than twenty open issues — a small project by the standards of the note-taking category, but one with a steady commit rhythm rather than a burst of activity followed by silence. Everything ships under the MIT licence. There is no commercial edition, no seat pricing, no upsell screen, and the interface is available in English, Italian, French and Spanish.

The pitch the project makes on its own pages is unusually plain: notes live on your machine, no account is created, no server sits between you and your text, and you decide whether and how anything synchronises. That framing matters because it explains a design choice that trips up people arriving from Notion or Evernote — Beaver has no hosted backend of its own that you are required to sign into. If you want the same library on a laptop and a desktop, you point the vault at a directory that Dropbox, Nextcloud, iCloud Drive or a self-hosted server already mirrors, and the application treats that directory as the single source of truth.

Writing surface and what it can render

The editor is a live markdown surface rather than a two-pane preview, so formatting appears as you type it. Headings, lists, tables and code fences behave the way anyone who writes markdown daily would expect, and code blocks get syntax highlighting so pasted snippets stay readable rather than turning into grey soup. On top of the plain-text base sit several rendering engines that considerably widen what a single note can hold.

• Mathematical typesetting through LaTeX, which renders equations inline as you enter them — the project's own demo content walks through the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, which gives a fair idea of the intended audience.
• Mermaid diagrams, compiled directly inside the note. The bundled renderer covers flowcharts, sequence and class diagrams, state charts, entity-relationship diagrams, Gantt charts, pie and quadrant charts, mindmaps, kanban boards, timelines, sankey and even Wardley maps.
• Freehand sketching, so a drawing or a handwritten fragment can be dropped into a note from any device and travels with the note when it is shared.
• Audio capture, aimed squarely at recording a lecture or a meeting and attaching the file to the notes taken during it.
• Arbitrary file attachments — PDFs, slide decks and similar — plus images that can be resized in place.

Organisation runs on labels rather than a rigid hierarchy, with folders available alongside them. Notes can be wired to one another to build a linked web of ideas, and search covers titles, body text and labels at once. A command palette handles navigation and settings without reaching for the mouse, and a focus mode strips the interface back when a long piece of writing needs undivided attention. Notes can be exported to PDF and shared straight to other applications.

The version 5 rewrite

The most consequential thing happening in this project right now is a platform change. Stable releases through 4.4.0, published in April 2026, run on Electron. Version 5 is a rewrite onto Tauri, with a Rust-backed shell instead of a bundled Chromium, and it is being developed in the open on a dedicated branch. Two betas have shipped so far, 5.0.0-beta.1 in July 2026 and 5.0.0-beta.2 in August 2026. The build tooling around it is conventional modern web stack — Vite, Tailwind, PostCSS, with Vitest and WebdriverIO for tests — and developers can run the beta locally by checking out the tauri branch and invoking yarn tauri dev.

The mobile story is bound up with the same rewrite. The project has stated that the phone app is being reworked and folded into the main Beaver Notes codebase, with a beta to follow once that work lands. Anyone evaluating Beaver primarily for phone use should treat the current mobile builds as a moving target and check the download page before committing a note archive to them.

Installation channels

Desktop distribution is broader than a project this size usually manages. macOS users can install through Homebrew with brew install beaver-notes. Windows is served by Scoop after adding the extras bucket. Linux has a Flatpak on Flathub (flatpak install flathub com.beavernotes.beavernotes), an AppImage, plain binary tarballs for x86_64 and ARM64, and an AUR package for Arch users who prefer yay. Direct installers for the remaining platforms come from the download page. Package managers are expected to follow stable releases once version 5 ships.

Privacy, in detail rather than in slogan

The application itself does not phone home, and no account is needed to use it. The project is nevertheless specific about the places where data does move, which is more useful than a blanket claim. The website runs Umami analytics to count visits without personal identifiers. Aggregate figures such as install counts and crash summaries arrive from Google Play and the Apple App Store under those platforms' own policies rather than being collected by Beaver directly. Translations are managed on a self-hosted Traduora instance, where contributors who create an account do hand over an email address and credentials. None of this touches note content, but it is worth knowing that "no telemetry" refers to the editor rather than to every surface the project operates.

What users actually say

The AlternativeTo listing carries a 4.3 average from nine ratings and about seventy likes. The recurring compliment is speed: reviewers describe it as loading quickly and staying light despite the Electron foundation, with one noting that the Mermaid integration performs better than they expected from a web-technology app. Others praise the clarity of the interface, the ease of sorting notes into folders and renaming them, and the combination of open source, cross-platform builds and a privacy posture that is not merely advertised.

The complaints are specific and worth weighing. The most repeated one is the absence of a tree view for the note list, which frustrates people used to deeply nested outliners. Reviewers have asked for Mermaid diagram theming that respects dark mode, for a way to inspect the raw markdown behind a note, and for Pandoc integration to widen the export options beyond PDF. None of these are defects so much as gaps, but they are the gaps that decide whether Beaver fits a particular workflow.

Who it suits

Beaver Notes is a good match for a student or researcher who needs LaTeX and diagrams in the same document as plain prose, for anyone who wants an editor that will still open their files if the developer disappears tomorrow, and for people who already have a sync arrangement they trust and simply want an editor to point at it. It is a poor match for teams needing real-time collaboration, for anyone who wants a vendor-operated cloud with support attached, and for outliner devotees who navigate by tree. Prospective users should also factor in that the project is mid-rewrite: the Tauri version is where the effort is going, and the Electron line is in maintenance.

How this relates to SumizAI

SumizAI is a different kind of tool — it summarises and analyses documents and conversations rather than storing a personal knowledge base — so the two do not compete directly. People who keep their reading notes in Beaver sometimes use a summariser upstream to condense long source material before writing it up by hand.

Product page: beavernotes.com

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

• AlternativeTo's description of Beaver Notes 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.
• Beaver Notes is open source (MIT), and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for Beaver Notes. The guarantee SumizAI offers instead is structural rather than legal: the notes are Markdown files in a folder you chose, so they open in any editor whether or not the application is running.
• AlternativeTo's description of Beaver Notes 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.
• Both are run from the EU: SumizAI's operator is registered in Poland and the servers are in Germany.

Which one to pick