--- title: "SumizAI vs CryptPad" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-cryptpad.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a CryptPad alternative? SumizAI and CryptPad side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "cryptpad", "alternative to CryptPad"] --- # SumizAI vs CryptPad Looking for a CryptPad alternative? SumizAI and CryptPad side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## What CryptPad is CryptPad is a French, open-source office suite built on a zero-knowledge architecture — all content is encrypted in the browser before it ever reaches the server, so the service provider has no technical way to read a user's documents. The suite covers a text editor, spreadsheets, kanban boards, whiteboards, forms, and Markdown pads — a functional counterpart to Google Workspace, but with encryption as the foundation rather than an add-on. Key features: Despite strong encryption, CryptPad offers full real-time collaboration — multiple users can edit the same document at once, with changes appearing live, just like in unencrypted cloud tools. The app supports comments on documents and a built-in chat for quick communication while working together. Access control lets you share documents as view-only or with full editing rights, depending on the need. The encryption has been independently audited, setting CryptPad apart from many tools that market themselves as "private" without verifiable proof. Who it's for: CryptPad appeals to teams and organizations for whom document confidentiality is a requirement, not just a preference — law firms, NGOs operating in countries with surveillance concerns, companies subject to EU data-protection regulation. Anyone wanting a Google Workspace alternative without handing document content to the service provider will find a functional replacement with a comparable toolset here. Use cases: In practice, CryptPad works well for collaborating on sensitive legal or financial documents, running kanban boards for project management without exposing their content to a cloud provider, or collecting form responses containing personal data in a GDPR-compliant way. An organization with its own infrastructure can self-host CryptPad, keeping full control over where the encrypted data physically resides. Pricing and business model: CryptPad offers a free plan with 1GB of storage, and paid plans start at 5 euros a month for 5GB, scaling up for larger needs. Enterprise plans range from roughly €3,000/year for 50 users and 100GB up to €25,000/year for 1,000 users and 1TB. Organizations can also self-host CryptPad for free, using the AGPL-3.0-licensed open-source code and paying only for their own server infrastructure. Limitations and what to watch for: The zero-knowledge architecture means that if a user forgets their password, CryptPad — by design — has no technical way to help recover access to the encrypted content, since the server never saw the decryption key. The free 1GB limit can feel tight for teams working with a large number of documents or attachments, quickly forcing a move to a paid plan. AI notes the provider can never read: CryptPad has no built-in AI integration, but the Markdown pad in the suite is well suited for pasting a ai notes entry from a conversation with an AI assistant — content is encrypted client-side, so even a ai notes entry containing sensitive information from an AI conversation never reaches the server in a form the provider could read. For teams combining work with AI models and a confidentiality requirement, that's a practical combination — the ai notes entry lands in an encrypted pad instead of a plain, unencrypted text file. Zero-knowledge as a foundation, not a marketing add-on: Many tools market themselves as "private" while technically still being able to read user content on the server. CryptPad differs in that its zero-knowledge architecture physically prevents the provider from accessing unencrypted data — this isn't a policy a company could change by board decision, it's a property of the cryptographic system itself. French origin and GDPR alignment: As a project developed in France, within the EU, CryptPad naturally fits GDPR requirements, which can be a meaningful argument for European organizations looking for an alternative to American cloud giants operating under a different data-protection legal regime. The Markdown pad as a mode of its own: Among CryptPad's six document types, the Markdown pad stands out for not trying to mimic a WYSIWYG editor like the rest of the suite — it's a plain text editor with a formatted preview alongside it, making it a natural place for quick, raw ai notes pasted from a conversation with an assistant, with no risk that an editor's auto-formatting will mangle the text's structure on paste. A team keeping a shared archive of conclusions from AI conversations can hold all such ai notes in one shared Markdown pad, using the same access controls as the suite's other documents. What's worth checking before choosing: Before migrating an entire team, test the free plan's 1GB limit with the team's actual documents to gauge how quickly you'd need to move to a paid plan, and check whether self-hosting on your own infrastructure might be cheaper at larger scale. Bottom line: CryptPad is an office suite with zero-knowledge encryption as its foundation, offering real-time collaboration with no compromise on confidentiality. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land in a pad the provider physically cannot read will find a practical place to store them here. A security audit as verifiable proof, not a claim: Many companies claim "end-to-end" encryption in marketing material without submitting the code to independent verification. CryptPad has gone through an external security audit of its cryptographic implementation, and the results are publicly available — that's the difference between a promise and something that can actually be checked. For legal teams or compliance departments evaluating tools against real risk, the availability of such an audit can be a hard requirement before a tool is approved for sensitive data. Comparison with SumizAI: CryptPad and SumizAI differ in their data-storage model and purpose. CryptPad encrypts documents client-side and stores them on a server (self-hosted or the provider's) in a form unreadable to anyone without the key. SumizAI stores these notes as plain Markdown files in a folder on the user's own disk — the data never reaches any SumizAI server, since the app connects directly to the chosen AI provider's API on the user's own account. Anyone needing encrypted team collaboration on documents will pick CryptPad; anyone who wants AI conversations to turn automatically into these notes stored locally as Markdown files will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool. **Key facts** - Price: Freemium - License: Open Source - Origin: France, EU - Category: Word Processor, Team Collaboration ## 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 CryptPad 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. - CryptPad is open source (AGPL-3.0), and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for CryptPad. 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. - CryptPad 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 CryptPad does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard `.md` files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them. - CryptPad advertises encryption. SumizAI answers the same worry a different way: on the desktop the notes never leave your disk, and the material a question sends to the model is capped at the table of contents plus at most five notes — and the app shows you which five it used. - CryptPad can be self-hosted. SumizAI has nothing to host on the desktop — the vault is a folder on your machine — and if you want the model on your own hardware too, a local Ollama is one of the seven providers it speaks to. - CryptPad runs in the browser. SumizAI is a desktop and mobile application, and on the desktop the vault is a folder on your own disk rather than a document in someone's cloud. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-cryptpad.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-cryptpad.html)