SumizAI vs Clearly Markdown

What Clearly Markdown is

What Clearly Markdown is

Clearly Markdown is a native, open-source Markdown editor for macOS, built by developer Josh Pigford (Shpigford/clearly on GitHub). The app deliberately avoids Electron — it runs as a fully native AppKit program, with no subscription and no telemetry sent anywhere beyond the user's own machine. It ships on the App Store as a free app, and its source code is publicly available for review and forking.

Key features

Markdown syntax highlighting pairs with an instant, side-by-side rendered preview with synchronized scrolling between the two panes. The preview supports full GitHub Flavored Markdown, including Mermaid diagrams and KaTeX math — a rarity among editors this simple. A right-click formatting menu plus keyboard shortcuts (Cmd+B, Cmd+I, Cmd+K) speed up writing without reaching for the mouse. The app renders pasted images directly in the preview, supports PDF export with printing, and turns links between Markdown files into clickable links right inside the preview.

Who it's for

Clearly Markdown appeals to macOS users who write heavily in plain Markdown — technical documentation, notes, READMEs — and want a lightweight tool without extra sync layers or cloud accounts. Anyone tired of heavy, Electron-based editors will appreciate the responsiveness of a native AppKit app and not needing to log into anything before writing a word.

Use cases

In practice, the app shines when quickly drafting documentation with Mermaid diagrams embedded directly in the text, without switching to an external renderer. A Quick Look extension integrates with Finder, so previewing a .md file without opening the app itself takes a second. Developers writing READMEs with mathematical notation (KaTeX) will find a rare combination of lightness and support for scientific formulas.

Pricing and business model

The app is entirely free and open source, with no paid tier, no subscription, and no ads. That model works because a single developer maintains the project for their own needs, sharing it with the community afterward — without the monetization pressure typical of larger product teams.

Limitations and what to watch for

Our facts table lists the app under macOS only, though according to the GitHub repository there's also an iOS and iPadOS version — worth verifying directly before downloading if syncing across Apple devices matters to you. The app offers no built-in cloud sync — files live wherever you save them, which is a privacy plus but requires your own solution (iCloud Drive, Dropbox) for working across multiple computers.

AI notes pasted straight into Markdown files

Clearly Markdown has no built-in AI integration, but since all its data storage relies on plain .md files on disk, pasting an ai notes entry from an AI conversation and instantly seeing it formatted with headings or lists takes a moment. Someone building an archive of ai notes from conversations with several different models can keep each as a separate .md file, using wiki-links with autocomplete to connect related entries.

Wiki-links as a bridge to other PKM tools

Support for `[[note name]]` syntax with autocomplete is a feature typical of Obsidian-style personal knowledge management tools, and its presence in such a lightweight, single-developer project is unusual. For someone storing ai notes and wanting to build a web of connections between them, this feature partly makes up for the lack of a dedicated graph view that larger platforms offer.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before downloading, check the current version on GitHub and the changelog at clearly.md to make sure the project is actively maintained — one-person open-source projects sometimes get updated irregularly. It's also worth verifying whether the wiki-link and menubar-scratchpad features are stable yet or still experimental.

Bottom line

Clearly Markdown is a lightweight, native Markdown editor for macOS, built without compromising into Electron, with a surprisingly rich preview (Mermaid, KaTeX) for such a simple project. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land in searchable, portable text files with a nice preview will find a solid tool here for the formatting itself — just without automated saving.

Comparison with SumizAI

Clearly Markdown and SumizAI differ fundamentally in scope. Clearly Markdown is an editor — it renders beautifully whatever you paste into it, but doesn't generate or organize content automatically. SumizAI turns a conversation with an AI model (one of seven providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini, always on your own API key) directly into a Markdown note, which lands in a vault — a plain folder on disk with a `base.md` file, a table of contents, and a `notes/` directory — without manual copying. Anyone who wants to beautifully render hand-written .md files will pick Clearly Markdown; anyone who wants these notes from AI conversations to appear there automatically will find SumizAI built for exactly that workflow, available for $1 a 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 Clearly Markdown — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.

Clearly Markdown in depth

A Swift-native answer to the Electron markdown editor

Clearly is a markdown editor written for one operating system and one only: macOS. Its author, Josh Pigford, states the premise bluntly on the product page — no Electron, no subscriptions, no bloat. That framing matters, because the markdown editor category has for years been dominated by applications that ship an entire embedded browser to render a preview pane. Clearly takes the opposite route. It is built in Swift against Apple's own frameworks, which is why it launches quickly, keeps memory use modest, and behaves like a document-based Mac application rather than a web page in a window.

The consequence of that choice runs through everything else in the product. Because it is not a browser wrapper, it can register itself as a QuickLook provider so that pressing space on a .md file in Finder shows a rendered document instead of raw asterisks. It can install a menu-bar scratchpad reachable through a global hotkey, so a stray thought does not require opening a full window. It can print and export to PDF through the system print pipeline. None of these are exotic features in isolation; the point is that they are the features a native application gets almost for free and a cross-platform shell has to reinvent badly.

What the editor and preview actually do

On the writing side the editor colours markdown syntax as you type, supports the usual formatting shortcuts (Command-B for bold, Command-I for italics, Command-K for links), and handles extensions beyond the core specification — highlight marks, superscript, subscript and emoji shortcodes. A document outline built from the heading structure lets you jump around long files, and find-and-replace accepts regular expressions rather than plain strings only, which is the difference between a usable tool and a toy when you are cleaning up a converted document.

The preview side is where the project has clearly spent its attention. It renders GitHub Flavored Markdown, so tables, task lists and strikethrough behave the way they do on GitHub. It runs KaTeX for mathematical notation and Mermaid for diagrams defined in code fences, meaning flowcharts and sequence diagrams appear without any external service. Code blocks are syntax-highlighted and numbered. Callouts — the admonition blocks familiar from Obsidian and from GitHub's alert syntax — are supported in more than fifteen varieties and can be folded shut. Checkboxes in the preview are clickable, images zoom, footnotes link both ways, and YAML frontmatter is formatted as a block rather than dumped as text. Editing and preview can sit side by side with their scrolling synchronised.

Distribution, price and licensing

Clearly is free and open source. The source lives on GitHub under the account Shpigford, in a repository named clearly, and releases are published there as a signed disk image; the product page links straight to the latest .dmg rather than routing through the Mac App Store. The version advertised at the time of writing is 3.2.0. There is no account to create, no telemetry, no advertising and no paid tier — AlternativeTo records the application under the properties ad-free, no registration required, no tracking and works offline, and nothing on the vendor's own page contradicts that.

The one hard constraint worth checking before you download: the product page states a requirement of macOS Sequoia or later. That is a comparatively aggressive floor and it rules out machines held back on older releases, whether by policy or by hardware. There is no Windows or Linux build and there is no indication one is planned, which follows logically from the decision to build on Swift and Apple's UI frameworks. An iOS companion application is listed on the site, so notes started on a Mac have somewhere to go on a phone, though the desktop application is plainly the centre of the project.

Where the files live

Clearly edits plain markdown files on disk. There is no proprietary container, no vault format to import into and no server component, so the exit cost is effectively zero — stop using the application and your documents are exactly where you left them, readable in any text editor. This is worth stating explicitly because it separates Clearly from note-taking suites that also happen to speak markdown but store it inside a database or a synchronised workspace. Anything you want in terms of backup, versioning or sync you arrange yourself: iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a Git repository, whatever you already use for source files.

The flip side is that Clearly does not attempt to be a knowledge base. There is no backlinking, no graph view, no tagging system, no full-text index across a folder tree, no publishing pipeline. It edits and renders a document. If your workflow depends on links between thousands of notes, this is the wrong tool and the project makes no pretence otherwise.

Project health and community response

The GitHub repository carries roughly 1,114 stars and 77 forks, with 34 issues open, and AlternativeTo dates the most recent activity to late May 2026. For a single-developer Mac utility those numbers indicate a project that found an audience and is being maintained rather than one coasting on an old release; the open-issue count is proportionate to the star count rather than a backlog of years. Josh Pigford is better known for other software ventures, which is relevant mainly in that Clearly reads like a tool built to scratch its author's own itch and then released, not like a product with a revenue plan attached.

Community feedback on AlternativeTo is thin. The entry has collected 22 likes and appears among 71 listed alternatives in the markdown editor space, but there are no written user reviews or comments to draw complaints from. That absence is itself information: there is no accumulated body of criticism to weigh, and equally no independent corroboration of stability beyond the repository's activity and issue tracker. Anyone evaluating it seriously should read the open issues before committing, since that is currently the only public record of what breaks.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

The natural user is someone on a current Mac who writes documentation, README files, technical notes or academic drafts in markdown, wants an accurate preview of what GitHub will render, occasionally needs a formula or a flowchart, and resents paying a monthly fee for a text editor. The QuickLook integration alone is a genuine daily convenience for anyone who keeps a lot of markdown in Finder.

It suits nobody who needs Windows or Linux, nobody stuck below macOS Sequoia, and nobody looking for a networked wiki, collaborative editing or a linked-notes system. Teams that need two people in the same document at once are outside the design entirely. Within the boundaries it sets for itself, though, the trade is unusually clean: a small native binary, open source, no account, no cost, and files that remain yours in a format nobody controls.

Comparing options

Markdown editors, AI assistants and note tools overlap enough that a shortlist is rarely obvious. SumizAI maintains comparison pages of this kind to set products side by side on licensing, platform coverage and data ownership, so that the differences that actually decide a choice are visible before installation rather than after.

Product page: clearly.md

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 Clearly Markdown 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.
• Clearly Markdown is open source, and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for Clearly Markdown. 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.
• Both keep Markdown, which makes moving between them mostly a matter of copying files. In SumizAI a vault is a directory holding base.md — a generated table of contents — and a notes/ folder with one .md file per note.
• Clearly Markdown 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 Clearly Markdown over SumizAI.
• Clearly Markdown offers a visual surface — a canvas, whiteboard or map. SumizAI has no canvas: the structure it maintains is a written table of contents in base.md, up to six levels deep, rebuilt as notes arrive.
• AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Clearly Markdown. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
• Both export. SumizAI exports a whole vault as a PDF — summary or full detail — or as a .pptx deck in table-of-contents order, with fifteen slide themes.

Which one to pick