SumizAI vs itsnotes

What itsnotes is

itsnotes is a self-hosted, open-source note-taking app that keeps the sticky-note feel familiar from Google Keep while adding features missing from simple tools of that kind - folders, a timeline view, and support for importing existing notes. The project originates from Romania, within the European Union, and is distributed free of charge under the MIT license; deployment happens through a Docker container, which makes self-hosted installation relatively simple even for people without extensive administration experience.

Key features and functionality

The itsnotes interface relies on a sticky-note visual metaphor - every entry looks like a separate card that can be colored and freely moved around the board, which for many users switching from Google Keep means an immediate sense of familiarity with the tool. Unlike its original inspiration, itsnotes adds a folder structure that lets related notes be grouped thematically, instead of relying solely on colors and labels. The timeline view presents all entries chronologically, making it easier to find a note based on an approximate creation date even when the user doesn't remember the exact content. An import feature lets existing notes be brought over from other tools, lowering the migration barrier for people leaving commercial cloud services in favor of a self-hosted solution. Because the app is fully open source, the community can submit fixes and new features directly through the code repository.

Who it's for

itsnotes is aimed primarily at former Google Keep users looking for an alternative that gives full control over data without losing the convenience of a visual sticky-note interface. Self-hosting enthusiasts who already run home servers with other services in Docker containers appreciate being able to quickly add another service to their existing infrastructure. People concerned about the privacy of their everyday notes - shopping lists, ideas, reminders - choose itsnotes over commercial note-taking apps precisely because the data never leaves their own server. Small technical teams that want a simple tool for sharing short notes without deploying a full-blown knowledge management system find itsnotes a lightweight alternative.

Use cases

In everyday use, itsnotes works as a place for quick jottings - shopping lists, reminders, loose ideas that don't require an elaborate structure, just fast access and visual organization by color. People migrating from Google Keep use the import feature to bring over their entire archive in one go, keeping continuity of their notes despite switching tools. The timeline view comes in handy when trying to find a note from several months ago, when the user remembers only roughly when it was created rather than its exact content or title. Home server administrators add itsnotes as another service in their self-hosted stack, alongside tools like Nextcloud or a password manager, building a complete, private digital ecosystem this way.

Pricing and business model

itsnotes is entirely free and open source under the MIT license, with no licensing fees for the software itself. The only cost on the user's side remains the infrastructure needed to run the Docker container - a personal VPS, a home NAS, or another machine capable of hosting containerized services. The open-source model lets the project grow through community contribution, without needing to maintain a sales department or a paid subscription tier, which is typical of smaller, niche self-hosted tools aimed at technically capable audiences.

Comparison with SumizAI

itsnotes and SumizAI occupy entirely different areas of digital work. itsnotes is a simple tool for storing short notes on the user's own server, with no integration with AI models. SumizAI, in contrast, aggregates answers from multiple AI providers in a single conversation, running as a cloud service unrelated to storing a user's private notes. Someone running their own home server might use itsnotes for daily, quick notes, and turn to SumizAI when they need deeper analysis of a topic or a comparison of answers from different AI models - the two applications serve different, complementary functions.

AI notes in a sticky-note archive

People running a self-hosted server often treat itsnotes as the first place to capture loose ai notes produced during conversations with language models - a quick thought or a fragment of a response lands first on a card in itsnotes, before possibly being moved to a more elaborate knowledge system. Thanks to the timeline view, an archive of such ai notes stays easy to search even after months of accumulating material, which sets itsnotes apart from a plain text notebook lacking chronological structure. Because everything runs locally, ai notes history never reaches an external provider's servers, which matters to users working with sensitive topics.

Technical teams using locally hosted AI models often pair them with a simple tool like itsnotes precisely for this reason, saving experiment results as individual ai notes pinned by color to a specific project - this lightweight, visual organization system works better than a full knowledge base when the number of entries stays relatively small and fast access is the priority. Periodically browsing through such a colorful ai notes archive also helps refresh ideas in memory that seemed secondary at the moment they were written down but turn out, in hindsight, worth developing further.

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 itsnotes 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.
• itsnotes is open source (MIT), and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for itsnotes. 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.
• AlternativeTo's description of itsnotes 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.
• itsnotes 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.
• AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of itsnotes. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
• Both are run from the EU: SumizAI's operator is registered in Poland and the servers are in Germany.

Which one to pick