--- title: "SumizAI vs Reor" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-reor-1.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a Reor alternative? SumizAI and Reor side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "reor-1", "alternative to Reor"] --- # SumizAI vs Reor Looking for a Reor alternative? SumizAI and Reor side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## What Reor is Reor is an AI-powered desktop note-taking app that automatically links related ideas, answers questions about your notes, and offers semantic search instead of plain keyword matching. Everything is stored locally, and editing happens in an Obsidian-like Markdown editor. The project is open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, giving full code transparency to anyone who wants to verify exactly how its AI features work. Worth knowing: the project is marked discontinued — the developers have stopped actively developing it, though the existing code remains available. Key features: Automatic linking of related notes works from semantic analysis of the content rather than only manually inserted links — the system suggests connections a user might not have noticed on their own. Semantic search finds a note based on the meaning of a query rather than an exact word match, useful when you don't remember the exact phrasing. Answering questions about your own notes works like a local chat with a knowledge base — the user asks, and the system searches the collected notes to produce an answer. An Obsidian-style Markdown editor provides a familiar writing environment for people used to that format. Local storage of all data means no note leaves the user's computer without their knowledge. Who it's for: Reor appealed to people who value privacy and want AI features running locally, without sending notes to external servers. Developers and open-source enthusiasts who wanted to understand or modify how the AI features worked appreciated having the source code available. Obsidian users looking for built-in semantic features without installing extra AI plugins found a natural alternative in Reor. Use cases: In practice, Reor worked well for searching a large body of research notes for a concept whose exact name the user couldn't remember — semantic search found relevant results despite differences in phrasing. Someone keeping a project journal could ask the system about earlier decisions on a specific topic and get an answer grounded in their own saved notes. Automatic linking surfaced connections between notes from different periods that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Pricing and business model: Reor was entirely free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no subscription model or fees for AI features, since processing happened locally on the user's own computer with no external API costs. Limitations and what to watch for: The most important limitation is the project's status — it's marked discontinued, meaning no further updates, bug fixes, or support for future operating system versions. Anyone considering Reor today should be aware they're using a frozen, no-longer-developed tool, which can lead to compatibility issues over time. AI notes with local processing: Thanks to its built-in AI features, Reor could partially automate working with ai notes from AI conversations, searching and semantically linking them to the rest of the notebook without manual tagging. Even so, importing a ready ai notes entry from an external chat still required manually pasting the text — Reor's AI features covered analyzing already-saved notes, not automatically capturing conversations from other assistants. Semantics instead of keywords: Classic text search fails when you remember the gist of a note but not the exact words used in it — Reor's semantic search handled that problem by comparing the meaning of a query to the meaning of saved notes, rather than a literal string match. That approach, though frozen in development today, was one of the earliest such solutions readily available in an open-source desktop notebook. The legacy of an open-source project: Even after active development ended, Reor's source code remains available to anyone who wants to study it, modify it, or extend it in their own fork — one advantage of the AGPL-3.0 license, unlike closed projects that become entirely dead and unavailable for further community work once support stops. What's worth checking before choosing: Before choosing Reor, check the project's current status and whether an active community fork is continuing development — the "discontinued" status carries the risk that the tool will stop working correctly with future system updates. The risk of depending on a frozen project: Choosing a tool marked "discontinued" is always a trade-off between unique features found nowhere else and the risk that one day the app simply stops working after an operating system update. Anyone building a large, multi-year archive of notes on Reor should have a fallback plan — regularly exporting data to plain Markdown files, for instance, which is already the app's underlying storage format anyway. A lesson from Reor's story: Reor's story — a promising open-source project that gained attention for its local AI features and was later abandoned — is an instructive example of the risk of relying on small, niche tools developed by a narrow group of enthusiasts. For the open-source community, it's also a reminder that code stays alive for as long as someone is willing to keep developing it in their own fork. That lesson matters especially for anyone considering basing their daily workflow on a niche tool with no large company or foundation standing behind its long-term upkeep. Bottom line: Reor offered a unique combination of local AI processing and a Markdown notebook, but its discontinued status makes it a risky long-term choice today. Anyone looking for an actively maintained tool where ai notes from AI conversations land automatically in a searchable archive should consider an alternative that's still being updated. Lessons for future tools: Reor's approach — local AI processing, semantic search, full privacy — showed that this kind of feature set is technically achievable outside large, commercial platforms too. Later, actively developed tools in this category draw inspiration today from exactly these kinds of early, open-source experiments. Comparison with SumizAI: Reor and SumizAI both combine notes with AI capabilities, but in different ways. Reor analyzed already-existing notes locally, offering semantic search and linking, though the project is discontinued today. SumizAI generates ai notes directly from a conversation with an AI model, turning valuable answers into Markdown files in a vault the user owns, and is actively developed. Anyone looking for a still-supported tool to turn AI conversations into lasting ai notes will find SumizAI a more stable choice than Reor's discontinued project. **Key facts** - Price: Free - License: Open Source - Origin: International - Category: Note-taking - Status: discontinued ## 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 flags Reor as no longer developed. Whatever you put into it, you will eventually have to get back out — which is an argument for keeping notes in a format that outlives the application, and the reason SumizAI writes plain `.md` files into a folder you already own. - 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 Reor does with the model bill before comparing prices. - Reor 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 Reor. 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. - 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 a `notes/` folder with one `.md` file per note. - AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Reor. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. - Both search. SumizAI's search reads the whole note — title, summary, body and the original question and answer — rather than titles alone. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-reor-1.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-reor-1.html)