What Chat Notes is
AlternativeTo files Chat Notes under Note-taking. It is recorded as Free, Proprietary. It ships on Mac.
That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for Chat Notes — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.
| Price | Free |
|---|---|
| Licence | Proprietary |
| Category | Note-taking |
| Origin | AlternativeTo does not say |
| 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 | Chat Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $1/month, one plan, 7-day trial without a card | Free |
| 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 does not mention AI |
| Origin | Poland, EU | AlternativeTo does not say |
Where they differ
- AlternativeTo's description of Chat 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.
- Chat Notes is free and SumizAI costs a dollar a month after a seven-day trial that takes no card. A dollar is what it costs to run accounts and licences without reselling the model; if free is the requirement, Chat Notes wins that row outright.
- AlternativeTo's description of Chat Notes 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 Chat Notes. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
Which one to pick
Reasons to pick Chat Notes
- it costs nothing
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 Chat Notes: AlternativeTo, read 2026-08-16. SumizAI is not affiliated with Chat Notes, and the name is used only to identify the product being compared.
Taken from the AlternativeTo lists: Obsidian.