What Canto Notebook is
AlternativeTo files Canto Notebook under Note-taking. It is recorded as Freemium, Proprietary, from International. It ships on Mac.
That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for Canto Notebook — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.
| Price | Freemium |
|---|---|
| Licence | Proprietary |
| Category | Note-taking |
| Origin | International |
| Platforms | Mac |
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
| Side by side | SumizAI | Canto Notebook |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $1/month, one plan, 7-day trial without a card | Freemium |
| Licence | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Platforms | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android | Mac |
| Category | Note-taking — AI chat into Markdown | Note-taking |
| Where notes live | Standard .md files in a folder you choose | AlternativeTo does not say |
| AI model | Seven providers, always on your own API key | Its description mentions AI |
| Origin | Poland, EU | International |
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 Canto Notebook does with the model bill before comparing prices.
- Canto Notebook 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 Canto Notebook does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard
.mdfiles to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them. - AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Canto Notebook. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
Which one to pick
Reasons to pick Canto Notebook
- it already fits how you work
Reasons to pick SumizAI
- the notes you want already exist inside conversations with an AI model
- you want the filing — title, chapter, duplicate check — to happen without you
- you want the result as plain
.mdfiles in a folder you picked - you would rather pay your AI provider directly than have a note app resell the model
Facts about Canto Notebook: AlternativeTo, read 2026-08-16. SumizAI is not affiliated with Canto Notebook, and the name is used only to identify the product being compared.
Taken from the AlternativeTo lists: Obsidian.