--- title: "SumizAI vs Onyka" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-onyka.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a Onyka alternative? SumizAI and Onyka side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "onyka", "alternative to Onyka"] --- # SumizAI vs Onyka Looking for a Onyka alternative? SumizAI and Onyka side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## What Onyka is Onyka is a self-hosted notes app that directly pushes back against the dominant market trend — instead of piling on more features sideways (databases, kanban boards, plugins, AI assistants), it grows inward, deepening what it already has rather than expanding its scope. It's a French open source project under the AGPL-3.0 license, deployed via Docker on your own infrastructure, aimed at teams that want full control over their data without handing it to an external cloud provider. Key features: The "grow inward" philosophy means in practice a focus on refining the core note-taking experience — speed, stability, interface clarity — rather than bolting on features most users will never touch. Self-hosting via Docker gives full control over data, including server location, which matters for EU companies in the context of GDPR and requirements around keeping personal data within the EU. Open source code under the AGPL-3.0 license guarantees that any modification distributed publicly must remain open, protecting the community from the project being acquired and closed off by a commercial buyer down the line. Team collaboration features let multiple people work on the same set of notes without conflicts. Who it's for: Onyka appeals to teams and organizations for whom self-hosting data is a requirement, not an option — companies in regulated industries, public institutions in France and other EU countries, or simply technical teams committed to the principle that company data should stay on their own servers. People tired of bloated, feature-heavy notebooks trying to be everything at once will find relief in Onyka's deliberately limited scope. Use cases: In practice, Onyka works well as a central documentation hub for a technical team, hosted on the same server as the rest of the internal infrastructure, with no dependence on an external cloud. A public institution required to store citizens' data exclusively within the country can deploy Onyka on its own infrastructure with confidence in local regulatory compliance. A small startup team wary of large SaaS platforms may choose Onyka as a way to avoid dependence on a single external vendor for a tool critical to daily work. Pricing and business model: Onyka is entirely free and open source, released under the AGPL-3.0 license. That means no licensing fees for the software itself — the only cost to the user is the infrastructure needed for self-hosting, namely a server and its associated operational expenses. That model is typical for tools aimed at technically competent teams willing to manage deployment themselves in exchange for full control and no dependence on an external vendor. Limitations and what to watch for: Self-hosting means full responsibility for backups, security updates, and service availability rests with the team deploying Onyka, with no cloud vendor guaranteeing uptime. The functional minimalism philosophy, while a plus for many, also means missing some conveniences found in more elaborate tools — like advanced databases or native AI model integration. Digital sovereignty as a recurring theme: Onyka's French origin isn't incidental — the country has spent years actively promoting the idea of digital sovereignty, meaning independence of technology infrastructure from non-European vendors. Onyka fits into that movement, offering an alternative to American SaaS platforms, which raise questions about data jurisdiction and the possibility of foreign authorities accessing that data under local laws. Fewer features, but polished ones: At a time when most productivity tools race to add features, Onyka deliberately swims against the current — its creators assume that fewer, well-polished features deliver a better daily experience than hundreds of options most of a team will never touch. That philosophy echoes the approach taken by some developer tools, where interface simplicity is treated as a feature in its own right rather than an absence of one. AI notes in a self-hosted setup: Technical teams using Onyka who also want to keep ai notes from conversations with AI assistants can paste such fragments manually into the relevant documents in Onyka, treating them like any other text content — the tool itself has no built-in integration with language models, consistent with its functional-minimalism philosophy. AGPL-3.0 as community protection: Choosing AGPL-3.0 rather than a more permissive license like MIT or Apache is a deliberate decision — this specific license requires that anyone who modifies Onyka and offers the modified version as a network service must publish the source code of those changes. That protects the project against a scenario where a large company takes the open code, adds proprietary features, and offers it as a closed commercial product without giving anything back to the community. Technical documentation as the main use case: Teams using Onyka most often keep technical documentation in it — deployment guides, architecture notes, incident runbooks. That documentation often gets supplemented with ai notes from AI-assisted debugging sessions, manually pasted into the relevant pages, building over time a coherent team knowledge base that's fully independent of external platforms and accessible even without an internet connection, as long as the Onyka server runs on the same local network as the team. What's worth checking before choosing: Before deploying Onyka, it's worth honestly assessing the team's technical ability to manage Docker infrastructure, backups, and updates on their own, since without that capability the benefits of self-hosting can be overshadowed by operational risk. Bottom line: Onyka is a deliberately modest but consistent alternative to feature-bloated notebooks, built around self-hosting and minimalism. Anyone who needs built-in AI integration for generating ai notes directly within the tool should consider a product designed specifically around that workflow. Comparison with SumizAI: Onyka and SumizAI represent different approaches to data ownership. Onyka requires self-hosting on your own infrastructure for maximum control, at the cost of time spent on administration. SumizAI generates ai notes directly from a conversation with an AI model, saving them as Markdown files in a vault the user owns, with no need to run your own server. A technical team with resources for self-hosting and regulatory requirements will choose Onyka; someone wanting a simple way to build ai notes from AI conversations without administering infrastructure will find SumizAI the more direct tool. **Key facts** - Price: Free - License: Open Source - Origin: France, EU - Category: Note-taking, Team Collaboration ## 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 - Both mention AI. The difference is whose key it runs on: SumizAI never resells inference — you connect one of seven providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server) with your own API key and pay that provider directly. Check what Onyka does with the model bill before comparing prices. - Onyka 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 Onyka. 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 Onyka 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. - Onyka 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. - Onyka is extensible through plugins. SumizAI is not, and that is a genuine trade: you cannot bend it into something else, but there is also no plugin to keep working after the next release. What it does instead is fixed and small — a chat, a filing rule and a folder of Markdown. - Onyka also does tasks. SumizAI does not — no boards, no due dates, no projects. It files knowledge, not work. - AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Onyka. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-onyka.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-onyka.html)