What FUTO Notes is
AlternativeTo files FUTO Notes under Note-taking. It is recorded as Free, Proprietary, from United States. It ships on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone. The topics its entry raises are Markdown, offline use, encryption, privacy, sync and self-hosting.
That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for FUTO Notes — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.
| Price | Free |
|---|---|
| Licence | Proprietary |
| Category | Note-taking |
| Origin | United States |
| Platforms | Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone |
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
| Side by side | SumizAI | FUTO Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $1/month, one plan, 7-day trial without a card | Free |
| Licence | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Platforms | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android | Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone |
| Category | Note-taking — AI chat into Markdown | Note-taking |
| Where notes live | Standard .md files in a folder you choose | Its description mentions Markdown |
| AI model | Seven providers, always on your own API key | Its description does not mention AI |
| Origin | Poland, EU | United States |
Where they differ
- AlternativeTo's description of FUTO Notes 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.
- FUTO Notes is free and SumizAI costs a dollar a month after a seven-day trial that takes no card. A dollar is what it costs to run accounts and licences without reselling the model; if free is the requirement, FUTO Notes wins that row outright.
- 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 anotes/folder with one.mdfile per note. - FUTO Notes 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.
- FUTO Notes 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.
Which one to pick
Reasons to pick FUTO Notes
- it costs nothing
- end-to-end encryption is a requirement
- you would rather host it yourself
Reasons to pick SumizAI
- the notes you want already exist inside conversations with an AI model
- you want the filing — title, chapter, duplicate check — to happen without you
- you want the result as plain
.mdfiles in a folder you picked - you would rather pay your AI provider directly than have a note app resell the model
Facts about FUTO Notes: AlternativeTo, read 2026-08-16. SumizAI is not affiliated with FUTO Notes, and the name is used only to identify the product being compared.
Taken from the AlternativeTo lists: Obsidian.