Notesnook

On the page where Notesnook compares itself with Standard Notes, there is a sentence you rarely read from a software company. Standard Notes has had a security audit done, Notesnook has not. The company itself calls that the fairest criticism it gets. That openness says a lot about this app, for better and for worse.

Notesnook comes from Streetwriters, a small company from Khushab in Pakistan. The idea came about in 2019, and the first version appeared in April 2021. The team page lists four people. The company says it lives purely on subscriptions, without investors. According to its own site, more than 300,000 people use the app.

The premise is simple. Everything you write is encrypted on your device before it goes to the server. That applies to the text, but also to titles, notebooks, tags and attachments. Notesnook uses XChaCha20-Poly1305 with Argon2, through the well-known libsodium library. Your password never leaves your device.

Since August 2022 the data has been stored in Germany, at Hetzner. Attachments are in Germany too. Before that, everything was in Singapore.

Zero-knowledge has a downside. Notesnook cannot recover your password. If you lose your password and your recovery key, your notes are gone. That is not a bug but the result of a design in which the maker can read nothing.

If you want to check for yourself that your notes really are encrypted, you can do that with Vericrypt, a tool made by Notesnook. The app also makes automatic encrypted backups on your own device, daily, weekly or monthly.

The lack of an independent audit remains an issue. The encryption uses common, proven building blocks and the code is open source, so anyone can look. But there is no external review of the whole system yet. It is on the roadmap. For everyday notes that matters less. If you store sensitive professional data, it does matter.

Notesnook feels more like a regular notes app than a security tool. The editor handles tables, code, formulas and task lists. You link notes together and see which notes refer to each other. There are reminders and a version history per note.

For sensitive notes there is a vault with a second password, also on the free plan. With Monographs you publish a note as a web page, optionally with a password. There is a Web Clipper, and since version 3.4.0 from June 2026 an Inbox API that lets other apps, such as Zapier and IFTTT, add notes.

Switching over is well handled. Notesnook imports from Evernote, Google Keep, Joplin, Obsidian, Simplenote and UpNote, among others. Leaving is possible too: on every plan you can export to Markdown, HTML, PDF and plain text.

There is one quirk with sync. If you edit the same note on two devices more than 60 seconds apart, Notesnook doesn't merge the text. You then choose which version to keep.

Notesnook charges a flat fee, not per user. From the Netherlands, the pricing page shows euros, including VAT. What you are mainly buying is room for attachments. Text doesn't count.

Free gives you unlimited notes on unlimited devices, with 50 MB of attachments per month and files up to 10 MB. Essential costs € 2.12 per month, or € 1.77 per month billed yearly (€ 21.24 per year), for 1 GB per month. With it you get task lists, recurring reminders and all attachments offline.

Pro costs € 7.43 per month, or € 6.20 per month billed yearly (€ 74.34 per year). Then you get 10 GB per month, files up to 1 GB and app lock. Believer costs € 9.55 per month, or € 7.97 per month billed yearly, with 25 GB. That plan exists mainly to support development.

You can try the plans for 14 days, but you do have to enter a payment method. A lifetime license doesn't exist. You can, however, prepay five years of Pro for € 318.67 and of Believer for € 424.89, without a trial. If you cancel, you drop back to Free and your notes stay accessible.

The Notesnook sync server is open source under the AGPLv3 license, the apps under GPLv3. You can run the server yourself with Docker, and the apps can connect to your own server. Notesnook doesn't offer support for this yet and the self-hosting guide has yet to be published. For now, it's for people who know what they are doing.

Joplin is also open source with end-to-end encryption, but lets you sync through your own storage, such as Dropbox or your own server. Choose Joplin if you want that control over storage.

NotesnookFrom € 1.77/moFree planJoplinFrom € 2.39/moFree plan

UpNote is a simple notes app without end-to-end encryption. Evernote does more for documents and tasks, but everything lives in the maker's cloud. Notesnook is the logical choice if you want ordinary notes, encrypted, without having to set anything up yourself.

Yes. The free plan has unlimited notes, sync on unlimited devices and end-to-end encryption. You get 50 MB per month for attachments.

Notesnook encrypts everything on your device with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2, and the code is open source. There is no independent security audit yet; it is on the roadmap.

Yes, Notesnook imports from Evernote, and also from Google Keep, Joplin, Obsidian, Simplenote and UpNote.

The encrypted data is on servers in Germany, at Hetzner. The attachments are in Germany too.