Jotura vs Notesnook: plain markdown files or an encrypted note store?

Notesnook encrypts your notes on your device and keeps them in its own encrypted store, whether or not you pay. Jotura keeps your notes as ordinary .md files in an ordinary folder, with no encryption on disk, and encrypts them only when Jotura Sync pushes them to a server. If you want your notes unreadable to anyone who picks up your laptop, Notesnook does that out of the box, and Jotura leaves the job to full-disk encryption.

That difference decides most of this choice. Pick Notesnook if you want an open source app, an iPhone or iPad client, encryption at rest, and encrypted sync at no cost. Pick Jotura if you want your notes to stay plain markdown you can grep, script, and hand to an AI coding agent. You will pay for sync, and you will do without an iPhone app. If you need both an iPhone and plain files on disk, neither one is a clean fit.

The short comparison

	Jotura	Notesnook
Notes on disk	Plain .md files, not encrypted	Encrypted local store
Platforms	Mac, Windows, Linux, Android	Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, web
Open source	No	Yes, GPLv3
Self-hosted server	No	Yes, sync server self-hosting in alpha
Encrypted sync	Paid: £4/month or £40/year, no free trial	Included free on unlimited devices
Encryption	Argon2id keys, per-file keys, HMAC path ids	XChaCha20-Poly1305 with Argon2id
Editor	WYSIWYG with a markdown source toggle	Rich text with markdown support
Command line tool	Yes, first-party jotura CLI	No official CLI

Where Notesnook is the better answer

Notesnook is open source under the GPLv3, and that covers the sync server as well as the apps. Anyone can read the code, audit the cryptography, and build it themselves. Jotura is closed source. If you will not trust an encrypted notes app you cannot inspect, that is a fair line to draw, and Notesnook sits on the right side of it.

You can also run Notesnook’s sync server yourself. Self-hosting is still marked alpha, but the Docker stack is published and people run it today. Jotura has no equivalent at any price: if you sync, you sync through our servers.

Notesnook ships iOS, iPadOS, and web clients too. Jotura has no iOS app. If your phone is an iPhone, that ends the comparison.

Then there is cost. Notesnook’s free plan includes end-to-end encrypted sync across unlimited devices, app lock, and full offline use. The free limits are modest but real: 50MB of attachment storage a month, a 10MB file size cap, 50 notebooks, 50 tags, and 100 stored note versions. Pro lifts those ceilings, and it listed at £6.19 a month or £62.04 a year when this was written. Check notesnook.com before you commit, because those numbers move.

Where Jotura is the better answer

A Jotura vault is a folder. Open it in Finder or Explorer and you see the file names and the markdown you wrote. Back it up with anything, search it with ripgrep, edit it in Vim over SSH, or put it in a git repository. Nothing has to be exported first, because nothing was ever imported.

One rule keeps it that way, and we treat it as load-bearing: open a file, save it without editing, and you get a byte-identical file back. Your formatting survives. Jotura also opens an existing Obsidian vault as it stands, so moving in means pointing the app at the folder.

On top of plain files, Jotura adds what is awkward to build over loose markdown. You get wikilinks with backlinks, daily notes, and a real table editor. Checklists anywhere in the vault roll up into one task view. Dropped-in PDFs, Word files, and spreadsheets get searchable markdown mirrors.

Search runs in a Rust core inside Tauri 2. A keyword search across 10,000 notes takes about 8 milliseconds in a release build. Semantic search runs on-device: you turn it on in desktop Settings and the app downloads a local embedding model once. You never supply an API key, and no text leaves the computer.

Where Jotura pulls ahead: the CLI and AI agents

Jotura ships a first-party command line tool called jotura inside the app. Notesnook has no official command line tool, and its local store is encrypted, so driving a Notesnook vault from a script or an agent means working from export files rather than the live notes.

The CLI exists because Adam Richardson built Jotura as his own private notes app, then found that an AI agent was doing most of the writing in his vault. The agent layer came after, on foundations that already existed for a fast, private, shareable notes app.

Its job is to let an agent edit your notes safely rather than blindly. The CLI checks a hash before it writes, so an edit fails loudly if the file changed since the agent read it. A replacement must match exactly one place unless you say otherwise. Writes land atomically, and a body edit never touches frontmatter.

jotura read "Projects/Payments/Decisions.md" --json
jotura edit "Projects/Payments/Decisions.md" --if-hash "$HASH" --replace "old text" --with "new text"

Agents also get a memory surface, so a decision made on Monday is still there on Thursday in a fresh session.

jotura memory log --kind decision --title "Chose Postgres over SQLite for payments"
jotura memory recall "payments database"
jotura context "add refund handling to the payments service"

Agent configuration lives in an Agents/ folder inside the vault. You edit one copy there and run jotura agents sync. That writes it out to wherever each tool looks for it: CLAUDE.md and skills for Claude Code, AGENTS.md for Codex, GEMINI.md for Gemini, and instruction files for Copilot. The CLI reference covers the rest.

How the two sync models compare

Both apps encrypt on your device before anything leaves it. Notesnook syncs free across unlimited devices, and its paid tier mostly buys storage and higher limits. Jotura Sync is a subscription with no free trial, so on price alone Notesnook wins for a reader who just wants two devices in step.

Jotura derives your key with Argon2id, encrypts each file with its own key, and hashes file paths so the server stores no readable filenames. Recovery runs through a BIP39 phrase. Lose every device and lose the phrase, and the encrypted data is unrecoverable, including by us. The encrypted notes page sets out the threat model.

Sharing is where Jotura Sync genuinely pulls ahead. You can share a folder or a single note with another person, with editor and viewer roles, automatic merging when two people edit at once, and three years of version history with attribution. Both people need a subscription, and /sync lists what is included. Notesnook has no multi-user shared editing. It publishes single notes as links instead, which is a different feature for a different job.

Honest limitations on the Jotura side

Jotura has no iOS app, no plugin system, no graph view, no canvas, and no publish-to-web. It is closed source, you cannot self-host the sync server, and Sync costs money with no free trial. Your notes also sit unencrypted on disk, so protecting a stolen laptop is FileVault’s or BitLocker’s job rather than the app’s. Notesnook clears every one of those bars.

Which one to pick

If encryption at rest, source you can read, an iPhone, or a server you run yourself matters to you, Notesnook is the better app. If you want notes that stay ordinary files, that any tool can open, and that an AI agent can edit safely, that is what Jotura is for. The Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android apps are on the download page.

Common questions

Can I move from one to the other? Notesnook exports markdown from all its apps, so you can point Jotura at the exported folder. Going the other way, you import your markdown into Notesnook. Neither direction is a live two-way link, so pick one as home.

Can an AI agent work with my Notesnook notes? Not directly. There is no official CLI, and the local store is encrypted, so an agent can read markdown you exported but cannot write back into the app.

Does Jotura work offline? Yes. Reading, writing, and search all run locally. Sync is optional, and when it is unavailable the app keeps working on your files.