SumizAI vs Buho

What Buho is

What Buho is

Buho is an open-source note-taking app built on MauiKit, a framework developed by the KDE community, and maintained by Nitrux Latinoamericana S.C. — a Mexico-based company also behind the Nitrux OS Linux distribution. The app lets you take quick notes, save links, and create "books" and pages for notes from classes or reading.

Key features

Notes are organized into books and pages, giving a simple hierarchy without having to build an elaborate tagging system. Saving links straight into the notebook makes it easy to collect sources while researching without switching between apps. Auto-save on closing the program protects freshly typed content without manually clicking "save." As a MauiKit app, Buho shares a consistent visual language with the rest of the Maui apps and integrates naturally with Plasma Mobile on Linux phones.

Who it's for

Buho appeals to Linux users — especially on Plasma and Plasma Mobile — looking for a lightweight notebook integrated with the rest of the system, without depending on web or cloud notebooks from big tech companies. Students taking class notes and anyone wanting to quickly jot down a thought or a link without opening a full text editor will find a tool matched to that scope.

Use cases

In practice, Buho works well for quick note-taking during a lecture, for collecting links to articles read throughout the day in one place, and for organizing a whole semester's notes into separate "books" per subject instead of one flat list of everything.

Pricing and business model

Buho is entirely free and open source, released under the LGPL v3 license, in line with the model typical of most MauiKit apps and the wider KDE ecosystem.

Limitations and what to watch for

The app is available mainly for Linux (desktop and Plasma Mobile) — no native Windows, macOS, or iOS version limits its usefulness for people working across a mixed set of operating systems. As a smaller, niche community project, Buho doesn't offer advanced features like cloud sync or real-time collaboration found in commercial notebooks.

AI notes kept in simple "books"

Buho has no built-in AI-model integration, but the simple book-and-page structure lets you quickly paste a fragment of an assistant conversation as an ai notes entry and file it under the right subject or topic. That ai notes entry gets saved locally alongside the rest of the notes from that context.

MauiKit as the foundation of a consistent ecosystem

Buho is one of several apps built on MauiKit — a UI framework designed so apps look and behave consistently whether launched on desktop, tablet, or a Plasma Mobile phone. For a user, that means learning Buho partly transfers to knowing other Maui apps.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before installing, check whether Buho is available in your Linux distribution's repositories or via AppImage if your distro doesn't package it by default.

Bottom line

Buho is a lightweight, free notebook for the Linux/KDE ecosystem, organized around simple books and pages. Anyone needing a more advanced place for ai notes from AI conversations available across more platforms should consider a tool with broader platform reach.

Comparison with SumizAI

Buho and SumizAI differ in platform reach and where content comes from. Buho is a hand-written notebook available mainly on Linux. SumizAI generates these notes directly from a conversation with an AI model and runs on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android — answers worth keeping land automatically as Markdown files in a vault the user owns. Anyone who wants a simple notebook integrated with Linux will pick Buho; anyone who wants these notes from AI conversations to build an archive on any platform will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool.

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

Buho in depth

The notes application of the Maui project

Buho is one of a suite of convergent applications produced under the Maui umbrella, a KDE-affiliated effort run largely by Camilo Higuita and the Mexican cooperative Nitrux Latinoamericana S.C. The word means owl in Spanish, and the codebase keeps the joke: internal namespaces and constants are prefixed OWL. Convergence is the point of the whole family — the same source builds an interface that adapts between a desktop window, a phone screen and a tablet, which is why an application from the KDE ecosystem also ships for Android and for Plasma Mobile.

The scope is deliberately modest. Buho does three things: it captures short notes of the sticky-note variety, it saves links with a preview, and it groups longer pages into books — the metaphor the developers reach for when explaining how to keep lecture notes or a structured set of pages together. There is also a sketching component in the source tree, a doodle handler, for freehand input. It is not a personal wiki, there are no backlinks, no graph view and no plugin system.

How your notes are stored

This is unusually easy to establish because the source is public and small. Buho keeps an SQLite database created from a short schema script, with tables for notes, for books, for the pages inside a book, and for links; each note row holds an identifier, a file location, a colour and a favourite flag, while the link table records title, preview, and dates added and modified. The text itself lives in files on disk that the database points at, so the database is an index rather than a container. There are separate synchronisation tables recording, per item, which server and user it came from and a timestamp.

Synchronisation is implemented against one target only. The provider class in the repository follows the Nextcloud Notes API — there is an abstract provider interface with a single concrete implementation behind it. For anyone running Nextcloud that is a clean fit; for anyone else there is no sync at all, and the abstraction that would allow other backends was written but never populated.

Platforms, packaging and what actually exists

The build configuration requires Qt 6.5.2 or newer, KDE Frameworks 6, and MauiKit 4 with its file browsing, accounts and text editor components; the language standard is C++17 and the build system is CMake. Those dependencies matter practically: MauiKit is not something most distributions carry by default, so building from source pulls in a stack that exists mainly to serve this application family. The catalogue lists Linux, Android, AppImage and Linux mobile, and the source tree does contain platform directories for Android, macOS and Windows — but the presence of those folders is not evidence of released builds, and no official macOS or Windows package is published anywhere the project points to.

The Android build is restricted to a single processor architecture, arm64-v8a, declared explicitly in the build file. Modern phones are covered; older 32-bit devices and x86 emulators are not. Localisation is one of the project's quieter strengths, with forty translation catalogues in the repository, including Polish, Ukrainian, Georgian, Basque, Sanskrit and both Chinese scripts — a benefit of living inside KDE's translation infrastructure rather than of any effort specific to Buho.

Version history and the current state of development

The repository was created in April 2019 and holds roughly seven hundred and twenty commits. Tagged releases run from the 2.x series through 3.0.0 in May 2023, 3.1.0 in February 2024, 4.0.0 in September 2024, 4.0.1 that December and 4.0.2 in May 2025, which is the version published on KDE's download mirrors. Notably, the project's own page on the Maui site still advertises 3.0.1 as current, so the website is roughly two years behind the released code — check the download directory rather than the marketing page.

The more important signal is in the commit log. Every commit since 20 May 2025 has come from KDE's automated localisation daemon syncing translations; the most recent was in August 2026. The last human change was that May 2025 batch, which fixed the Android build and multi-window handling. That makes roughly fifteen months without a functional change. The application is not abandoned in the formal sense — it remains in KDE's release infrastructure and its translations keep updating — but nobody is developing it at present, and the star and fork counts on the KDE forge, two and five respectively, indicate a very small circle of interest. Four likes on the software directory and no written reviews say the same.

Known gaps, taken from the source itself

Two admissions are visible in the code rather than in any release note. The spell checker was removed in May 2025 because it was crashing, with a comment marking the removal as temporary; it has not returned. And the build file contains commented-out dependencies on Tesseract and Leptonica, meaning optical character recognition was scaffolded and then disabled before release. Anyone expecting text extraction from images should not.

Licensing is also less tidy than the catalogue suggests. The listing records LGPL v3, and the repository's licence folder contains only the LGPL 3.0 text, but the header of the main build file carries an SPDX identifier of GPL-3.0-or-later. The discrepancy is unresolved in the public tree, so anyone with a genuine licensing question should raise it on the project's issue tracker rather than rely on either statement.

Who this suits and who it does not

Buho makes sense for someone already inside the Maui or Nitrux world, or for a Plasma Mobile user who wants a note application with a matching design language on both phone and desktop, and who happens to run Nextcloud for synchronisation. It costs nothing, its data sits in plain files with an SQLite index you can open yourself, and the whole thing is small enough to read in an afternoon — a real advantage if you want to know exactly what a program does with your text.

It does not suit anyone building a long-term knowledge base, because linking, search depth and extensibility are absent. It does not suit anyone who needs synchronisation to a service other than Nextcloud. It does not suit anyone who needs assurance of ongoing maintenance, given that functional development paused over a year ago. And it does not suit someone unwilling to deal with the packaging situation, since a stack of MauiKit and KDE Frameworks 6 dependencies is more than a casual user typically wants to install for a sticky-note application.

For completeness: SumizAI does not compete with this at all. It condenses long documents and transcripts and answers questions about them, which is a task a lightweight note keeper never attempts. If Buho is where notes go, a summarising tool is what runs over the material before the notes are written.

Product page: mauikit.org

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 Buho 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.
• Buho is open source, and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for Buho. 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 Buho 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.

Which one to pick