SumizAI vs Yank Note

What Yank Note is

AlternativeTo files Yank Note under Note-taking. It is recorded as Freemium, Open Source — AGPL-3.0, from China. It ships on Windows, Mac, Linux. The topics its entry raises are Markdown, encryption, plugins, a visual canvas and code.

That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for Yank Note — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.

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.

Side by side

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 Yank Note does with the model bill before comparing prices.
• Yank Note 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 Yank Note. 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.
• Yank Note 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.
• 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.
• Yank Note 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.
• Yank Note 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.
• Yank Note offers a visual surface — a canvas, whiteboard or map. SumizAI has no canvas: the structure it maintains is a written table of contents in base.md, up to six levels deep, rebuilt as notes arrive.

Which one to pick