--- title: "SumizAI vs Clearly Markdown" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-clearly-markdown.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a Clearly Markdown alternative? SumizAI and Clearly Markdown side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "clearly-markdown", "alternative to Clearly Markdown"] --- # SumizAI vs Clearly Markdown Looking for a Clearly Markdown alternative? SumizAI and Clearly Markdown side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## 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 a 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. **Key facts** - Price: Free - License: Open Source - Origin: United States - Category: Text Editor ## 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. ## 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. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-clearly-markdown.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-clearly-markdown.html)