SumizAI vs DeepNotes

What DeepNotes is

What DeepNotes is

DeepNotes is an open-source, visual note-taking app with end-to-end encryption and an infinitely nested canvas — a note can contain another canvas, which can contain another, with no theoretical depth limit. Instead of a linear document, the user gets a space to move through like a mind map, going deeper and deeper into a topic's details.

Key features

Deep page navigation lets you nest notes inside notes without limits, and real-time collaboration lets multiple people work on the same canvas at once. A flexible note system lets you place elements anywhere on the canvas, even inside other notes, which works well for mind maps, diagrams, or kanban boards. End-to-end encryption means note content is unreadable even to the service provider itself.

Who it's for

DeepNotes appeals to visual thinkers who feel boxed in by linear text documents and prefer exploring a topic spatially, branching deeper instead of writing top to bottom. Teams working on complex projects get a shared canvas where every thread can expand into its own nested layer.

Use cases

In practice, DeepNotes works well for planning complex projects with many levels of detail, building mind maps for studying or research, and real-time team brainstorming on one shared canvas. Someone documenting a product with many interconnected threads gets a structure that a flat file list simply can't provide.

Pricing and business model

The basic plan is free forever and includes a limited number of pages, while the Pro plan unlocks unlimited pages and expanded team-collaboration options. The source code is publicly available on GitHub under an open-source license.

Limitations and what to watch for

The visual, spatial model of organizing notes requires a different mindset than a traditional text notebook, so the learning curve can be steep for people used to linear documents. Working on a large, deeply nested canvas can also become hard to keep track of without discipline in naming and organizing layers.

AI notes on a nested canvas

DeepNotes has no built-in AI integration, but pasting a fragment of a conversation with an assistant as a ai notes entry onto one of the nested canvases is simple — you can place it deep inside the relevant thematic structure right next to related material. Building an archive of ai notes this way, though, still requires manually copying every worthwhile answer out of a separate chat window.

Encryption as a foundation, not an add-on

The decision to build end-to-end encryption into the architecture from day one, rather than as an option bolted on later, means even DeepNotes' own creators have no technical way to read users' note content — a fundamentally different stance than most competing visual note-taking tools.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before choosing DeepNotes, check the exact page limit on the free plan, and test whether navigating deeply nested canvases fits how you actually want to work over the long run.

Bottom line

DeepNotes is a unique, spatial approach to notes with a strong emphasis on privacy through end-to-end encryption, at the cost of an unusual learning curve. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land automatically in an organized archive without manually moving them between canvases will find a better-fitting tool elsewhere.

Comparison with SumizAI

DeepNotes and SumizAI differ fundamentally in organizing model and content source. DeepNotes is a spatial, visual canvas for notes written by hand by the user, with a strong emphasis on end-to-end encryption. SumizAI is a notebook built around the conversation with an AI model itself — question, answer, Markdown note landing automatically in a vault on the user's own disk, with a title and a place in the table of contents assigned without manual work, on your own API key to one of seven providers. Anyone who wants a visual, nested canvas for their own notes will pick DeepNotes; anyone who wants these notes from AI conversations to build up automatically will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool.

That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for DeepNotes — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.

DeepNotes in depth

Nested canvases rather than a list of documents

DeepNotes takes a position most note apps avoid: the primary unit is not a document but a canvas, and canvases go inside each other without limit. You double-click empty space to drop a note, then move it, resize it and colour it; put notes inside a container and that container becomes a page you can dive into, which in turn holds its own notes and containers. The result is a tree of spatial pages rather than a folder of files, navigated by descending into structure instead of scrolling a sidebar. The vendor's own tagline is about diving into a note universe, and the mechanic is closer to zooming through nested maps than to opening files.

That structure explains the range of things people build with it. The site lists mind maps, diagrams, kanban and scrum boards, database schema drawings, family trees, flashcard decks, cheat sheets and general study material — and the catalogue tags include family-tree, which is not something most note apps advertise. Inside a note you get a WYSIWYG editor with code blocks and syntax highlighting, LaTeX for mathematics, and hierarchical checklists with subtasks, so an individual card can carry real content rather than just a label.

Encryption described in unusual detail

End-to-end encryption is the second defining choice, and DeepNotes documents it far more thoroughly than the category norm. A published whitepaper spells out the primitives: libsodium for the bulk of cryptographic work, argon2-browser for key derivation in the client, and CryptoJS on the server only for building blind indexes. Symmetric encryption uses XChaCha20-Poly1305, asymmetric uses X25519-XSalsa20-Poly1305, and both password hashing and key derivation run on Argon2id.

The key hierarchy is worth understanding before trusting it with anything important. A master key is derived from the user's password, salted with their e-mail address, and that master key encrypts the user's private and symmetric keys, which are stored on the server in encrypted form. Every group member holds a group key and an internal key, both delivered under asymmetric encryption. The group key is public in public groups and private in private ones; the internal key stays private in both cases, and exists specifically so that a public group does not leak its own private key or the names of its members. Each group also has a content key, encrypted with the group key, which protects everything on the group's pages; in password-protected groups that content key is additionally wrapped with a key derived from the group password using Argon2id salted with the group ID, at eight iterations, 32 MB of memory, one thread and a 96-byte output split into a 32-byte wrapping key and a 64-byte remainder. Individual pages and page snapshots hold their own keys on top of that.

Several details show someone thought about the parts that usually leak. Variable-length values such as group names, page titles and user aliases are padded to eight-byte blocks using ISO/IEC 7816-4 before encryption, so ciphertext length reveals less about the plaintext. Sensitive account fields — e-mail address, password hash, two-factor secret and recovery codes — get a second layer of server-side encryption with keys held only in environment variables, so a stolen database is not immediately a stolen account list, and e-mails stay searchable through an HMAC-SHA256 blind index. Group keys rotate whenever a member is removed. Page keys rotate on the first interaction after seven days have elapsed. Rotation runs through keyrings, with old keys retained at least twenty-four hours so live sessions do not break.

Live collaboration on top of encryption

Real-time editing is built on Yjs, with each page represented as a Yjs document. Updates are encrypted with the page key and a fresh random nonce before they leave the client; the server relays the encrypted deltas to connected members and stores them without being able to read them. That combination — conflict-free collaborative editing where the relay is blind to the content — is the technically interesting part of this project, and it is why the encryption design has to be as involved as it is. Groups can be public or private and can be locked behind a password, with roles controlling what members may do.

Plans, platforms and project health

Pricing is two tiers and both are published. The Basic plan costs nothing and gives you up to fifty pages, end-to-end encryption, the spatial editor, graph-based navigation, syncing between your own devices and two-factor authentication — but it is marked personal use only. Pro is $4.99 a month, discounted twenty percent when billed yearly, and adds unlimited pages, collaborative groups both public and private, password-protected groups, user role management and fourteen days of page history. The catalogue entry rounds this to five dollars, which is close enough. Note what sits behind the paywall: collaboration in any form, and the page limit. Fifty pages sounds generous until you remember every nested container is a page.

Clients exist for Windows, macOS and Linux as well as iOS, iPad and Android tablets, with a web version for anything else; the download page was serving macOS build 1.0.25 at the time of checking. The code is AGPL-3.0 and lives at github.com/DeepNotesApp/DeepNotes, written in TypeScript, with roughly 600 stars, 54 forks and 14 open issues, last touched in June 2026 — a small but demonstrably active project rather than an abandoned one. The AGPL and the public repository mean self-hosting is legally possible, but the site publishes no self-hosting guide, so anyone wanting to run their own server should expect to work it out from source. There is a Discord and a subreddit for support alongside the help pages.

What users actually say

Reception is modestly positive: 53 likes and three written reviews in the catalogue, and a 4.5-star average on Apple's App Store. The praise is consistent about the same thing — one reviewer called it Notion for mind maps and singled out how fluid the controls feel and how far the nesting goes; another valued that it undercuts comparable tools on price while still offering encryption and markdown export.

The criticism is equally specific and deserves weight. One reviewer listed three blockers: basic functionality sitting behind the paid plan, no portable download available, and a dependency on the Microsoft Store for installation on Windows. The first is a fair reading of the free tier's limits. The second and third matter for anyone on a locked-down machine or who prefers not to route desktop software through a vendor's store. Prospective users should check the current download options for their own platform rather than assume this has changed.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

DeepNotes is a good fit for visual thinkers who organise by space and hierarchy rather than by search, for small groups that need shared diagrams and boards without handing readable content to a server, and for anyone whose requirements list literally contains end-to-end encryption. Students building study maps and flashcards are an obvious audience, and the price is low enough that it is not a serious commitment. It is a poor fit for people who want plain markdown files on their own disk, since content lives in an encrypted cloud store rather than as portable text; for anyone who needs offline-first behaviour, which the site does not claim; and for teams needing enterprise administration, audit logs or compliance paperwork, none of which is advertised. There are also no AI features of any kind here, which is either the point or a gap depending on what you came for.

Where SumizAI fits

Since DeepNotes deliberately keeps machine learning out of its encrypted store, the two products barely overlap. SumizAI is useful alongside it rather than instead of it: a place to draft, summarise and question text with several models before the conclusions get placed on a canvas.

Product page: deepnotes.app

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 DeepNotes 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.
• DeepNotes 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 DeepNotes. 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.
• DeepNotes 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 DeepNotes 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.
• DeepNotes 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 DeepNotes over SumizAI.
• DeepNotes 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.
• DeepNotes also does tasks. SumizAI does not — no boards, no due dates, no projects. It files knowledge, not work.

Which one to pick