SumizAI vs Clearly Markdown

What Clearly Markdown is

AlternativeTo files Clearly Markdown under Text Editor. It is recorded as Free, Open Source, from United States. It ships on Mac. The topics its entry raises are Markdown, sync, collaboration, a visual canvas, LaTeX and export.

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.

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

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