--- title: "SumizAI vs Lockbook" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-lockbook.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a Lockbook alternative? SumizAI and Lockbook side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "lockbook", "alternative to Lockbook"] --- # SumizAI vs Lockbook Looking for a Lockbook alternative? SumizAI and Lockbook side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## What Lockbook is Lockbook is an end-to-end encrypted notebook where encryption keys are generated on the user's own device and never leave it in plain form. The app is fully open source, and its publicly available code on GitHub lets anyone verify its stated security guarantees rather than take them on faith. Neither the infrastructure provider nor the Lockbook team itself has any technical way to read stored notes. Key features: Sync works across every supported platform — Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, iPad — and creating an account requires no email address, phone number, or password, keeping the personal-data footprint at zero. Lockbook also offers a native CLI client that fits right into a typical Unix command pipeline: notes can be searched with fzf, edited in vim, and automatically backed up via cron. Beyond plain text, the app also supports hand-drawn sketches and file storage, not just text. Who it's for: Lockbook appeals primarily to developers and technical users who value command-line tools and want to plug a notebook straight into an existing terminal workflow. It equally suits anyone who prioritizes privacy and is looking for an alternative to notebooks that require an identity-linked account. Use cases: In practice, Lockbook works well for keeping a technical journal straight from the terminal, syncing notes between a Linux laptop and an Android phone without a cloud provider that can read the content, and building automated backups through cron scripts with no manual intervention. Someone writing documentation in vim gets an encrypted store without changing their editing habits at all. Pricing and business model: A free account gives 25MB of space, enough for a fair amount of plain text but little room for files. The Premium plan costs $2.99 a month and raises the limit to 30GB. The app's code itself is released under the Unlicense — effectively public domain — so you only pay for space in the sync cloud, not for access to the software. Limitations and what to watch for: The free 25MB limit is quite modest compared to competitors offering gigabytes for free, so anyone planning to store images or larger files will hit the paid plan quickly. No email-linked account also means no standard password recovery — losing your local key can mean losing access to your notes. AI notes saved through the CLI: Lockbook has no direct integration with any AI model, but its command-line client means piping an assistant's answer straight into a new, encrypted ai notes entry is a one-liner in a shell script. For someone building an automated workflow around a language model's API, saving ai notes from every session without manual copying becomes a matter of a few minutes of setup. The zero-knowledge philosophy in everyday practice: A zero-knowledge model, where the service provider is physically unable to read your data, sounds like marketing until it meets a real recovery scenario — with no company-side key backup, full responsibility for safely storing the local key falls on the user, which is a deliberate tradeoff rather than an oversight. What's worth checking before choosing: Before committing to Lockbook, check carefully the procedure for creating and storing a backup of your encryption key, since it's the only way to recover your notes if you lose your device. Bottom line: Lockbook is an encrypted, developer-oriented notebook with a native CLI and zero personal-data footprint, at the cost of a modest free tier and no traditional account recovery. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land automatically in an organized archive without manually piping them through scripts will find a better-fitting tool elsewhere. Comparison with SumizAI: Lockbook and SumizAI differ in where note content comes from and in their privacy model. Lockbook is an encrypted store for notes written by hand by the user, with keys generated locally and zero knowledge on the server side. SumizAI generates ai notes directly from a conversation with an AI model — question, answer, Markdown file in a vault the user owns, with a title and a place in the table of contents assigned automatically. SumizAI doesn't offer Lockbook-grade end-to-end encryption, but the AI model is part of the workflow itself rather than something bolted on from outside. Anyone who wants maximum privacy for hand-written notes will pick Lockbook; anyone who wants these notes from AI conversations to build up automatically will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool. **Key facts** - Price: Freemium - License: Open Source - Origin: United States - Category: Note-taking ## 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 Lockbook 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. - Lockbook is open source (Unlicense), and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for Lockbook. 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. - Lockbook 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 Lockbook 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. - Lockbook 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. - Lockbook 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. - Lockbook supports handwriting or drawing. SumizAI is typed text only. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-lockbook.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-lockbook.html)