SumizAI vs Marknote

What Marknote is

Marknote is a free, open-source (GPL-2.0) note-taking app built in Germany that focuses on rich-text notes organized into notebooks. Instead of a flat list of files, Marknote lets each notebook get its own icon and accent color, so users can instantly recognize, at a glance, where to look for notes from a given area of life or work, without reading file names one by one. The app is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and on Linux it reaches users through Flathub, Flatpak, and Snapcraft — three parallel distribution channels, which shows the developers' attention to availability across different distributions, from Ubuntu to Fedora.

Key features

Rich-text notes mean users get bold text, lists, headings, and other formatting elements familiar from word processors like Word, without having to learn Markdown syntax and memorize special characters. The notebook system with icons and accent colors works as a visual filing system — one glance at the sidebar is enough to tell a "Work" notebook apart from a "Personal Projects" notebook. The app is lightweight and fast, typical of open-source tools focused on one job rather than a sprawling plugin ecosystem and external integrations. Cross-platform support (Mac, Windows, Linux) and presence in three Linux package stores mean Marknote is available practically regardless of which operating system a person uses at home or at work. The GPL-2.0 licence guarantees the source code stays open, and the community can submit fixes and new features directly through the GitHub repository instead of waiting on a single company's decision.

Who it's for

Marknote appeals to people who want simple formatted notes without the weight of a full document editor like LibreOffice, while still valuing aesthetics and visual organization over flat file lists. It's a good fit for students sorting notes from different subjects, freelancers keeping a separate notebook per client, and anyone who simply prefers colorful icons over a flat list of text files in a system file explorer. The open-source code also draws in users who value independence from a vendor and the ability to audit an app before trusting it with personal or professional data.

Use cases

In practice, Marknote works well as a place for meeting notes, where formatting — bullet lists, bold key decisions — improves readability when reviewing before the next meeting. Students can set up a separate notebook with a unique icon for each subject, making it easy to switch quickly between study contexts without getting lost in files. Freelancers managing several clients at once get a clear structure — one notebook per client, color coded by project priority, so no deadline slips through the cracks. Thanks to availability on three operating systems, the same person can write notes on a work Windows machine and continue them in the evening on a personal Mac or Linux box at home without losing formatting.

Pricing and business model

Marknote is entirely free and open source under the GPL-2.0 licence — there are no paid plans or hidden fees for unlocking extra features. Development relies on a developer community and voluntary contributions, and presence in official Linux repositories (Flathub, Snapcraft) means updates reach users through standard, trusted distribution channels without needing to manually download files from unknown or third-party sources.

Limitations and what to watch for

Marknote has no mobile app — availability is limited to Mac, Windows, and Linux, so accessing notes from a phone during the day requires a different solution or waiting until getting back to a computer. The rich-text format, while visually convenient, is less portable than plain Markdown — files are harder to open in any text editor or process with a script, which could matter to people who want full control over their data format down the line. The available information doesn't mention a full-text search feature spanning all notebooks at once, which, with a large number of notes, can make it harder to quickly find a specific fragment from months ago. The app also has no artificial intelligence element — no summaries, no tag suggestions, no content generation — so ai notes functionality stays entirely outside the product's scope. For anyone counting on syncing notes across devices without their own setup, it's worth checking the project's documentation, since it isn't clear whether such a feature is built in or requires an external solution like Syncthing or a shared folder.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before installing Marknote, check the GitHub repository for how often new releases land and whether reported bugs get actively fixed — that's the best health indicator for a small open-source project with no dedicated support team. If you're planning to migrate from another note app, verify the available import formats, since rich text can be harder to move than plain text. Anyone counting on a future ai notes feature should keep in mind that Marknote remains a purely manual tool with no announced plans to add language-model support.

Bottom line

Marknote remains one of the better choices for someone who wants a free, good-looking notepad with colorful notebooks across three major desktop systems. If the eventual goal is combining notes with ai notes functionality — automatic summaries or suggestions — it's worth assuming upfront that Marknote won't offer that, and treating it as a purely manual writing tool rather than an AI platform.

Comparison with SumizAI

Marknote and SumizAI both deal in notes, but from very different angles. Marknote is a classic, manual notebook focused on formatting and visual organization — there's no artificial intelligence element, so any ai notes feature would need to be added externally, as a separate tool running alongside it. SumizAI reverses that order: the starting point is a conversation with an AI model, and only the answers worth remembering become Markdown files in the user's personal vault, ready for further editing. Anyone who values colorful notebooks and manually writing formatted notes will find a solid, free tool for any operating system in Marknote; anyone who wants their ai notes to be generated automatically from a dialogue with a language model, instead of writing everything from scratch, will benefit more from SumizAI's approach.

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 Marknote 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.
• Marknote is open source (GPL-2.0), and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for Marknote. 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 Marknote 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.
• AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Marknote. 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