Is Notion Encrypted? What Privacy-Conscious Users Actually Need to Know (2026)

Quick answer: Notion encrypts your data at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.2 or higher, but it is not end-to-end encrypted, and Notion holds the keys. That means your pages are unreadable to a random attacker who steals a hard drive from a data center, but they are readable to Notion itself: its key management service can decrypt your content, support staff can access it under policy, and the company can hand it over in response to a valid legal request. If your threat model is "a hacker on the internet," Notion's encryption is fine. If your threat model includes "the company hosting my notes," "a rogue employee," or "a subpoena I never hear about," Notion is not encrypted in the way you probably mean. This guide explains the difference in plain language, and shows what a genuinely private, local-first alternative like Filarr does differently.

The word "encrypted" does an enormous amount of quiet lying in software marketing. When a company says its product is encrypted, most people hear "nobody but me can read my stuff." What the company usually means is something much narrower and much less reassuring: "the bytes are scrambled while they sit on our disks, using keys that we also keep, so that if someone breaks into our building or intercepts the wire, they get noise instead of your diary." Both of these statements can be true at once, and Notion is the perfect case study in how far apart they are. Notion is, genuinely and verifiably, encrypted. Notion is also, genuinely and verifiably, readable by Notion. Holding both of those facts in your head at the same time is the entire skill of evaluating privacy claims, and once you have it, you will never read a security page the same way again.

I want to be fair to Notion here, because it is a genuinely great product and this is not a hit piece. I built Filarr, an encrypted local-first workspace, so I have an obvious bias and you should weight everything I say accordingly. But I also spend my days reading other people's threat models, and the single most common mistake I see is smart people assuming that "encrypted at rest" means "private from the vendor." It does not. It has never meant that. The gap between those two ideas is where almost every real-world privacy disappointment lives, and Notion sits squarely inside that gap by design, for reasons that are actually pretty defensible once you understand what they were optimizing for.

This matters more in 2026 than it did five years ago for a boring, concrete reason: your Notion workspace is no longer just meeting notes. People run their entire lives inside it now. Client contracts, therapy journals, salary spreadsheets, half-finished startup ideas, passwords they swore they would move to a real password manager, medical records for aging parents, the messy first drafts of resignation letters. The stakes of "who can read this" climbed steadily while the mental model most users carry stayed frozen at "it's a note-taking app, who cares." Add Notion AI into the mix, which by mid-2026 is bundled into the paid business tiers and routes your content through additional processing, and the question of who touches your words stops being academic. So let us actually answer it, carefully, and then talk about what you can do if the answer bothers you.

Where Notion and Filarr came from, and why their origins still shape them

Notion started in 2013, nearly died, got rebuilt almost from scratch by co-founders Ivan Zhao and Simon Last after they ran out of money and moved to Kyoto to cut costs, and relaunched into something like its modern form around 2016. The founding obsession was never privacy. It was malleability: the dream of software you could reshape like Lego, where a note, a database, a wiki, and a project board were all just arrangements of the same underlying blocks. That vision is genuinely beautiful and it is why Notion feels the way it does. But it carries an architectural consequence that most users never think about. To make blocks reference each other instantly across devices, across teammates, across shared links, the server has to understand the blocks. It has to be able to read them, index them, render them, and reason about their relationships. A server that only sees encrypted noise cannot do any of that. So the cloud-that-understands-your-content was baked into Notion's DNA from the first working prototype, and every feature since has been built on top of that assumption. Real-time collaboration, full-text search across your workspace, AI that answers questions about your pages, public sharing with a click: all of these require the server to see your plaintext, and Notion built its entire moat out of features that require exactly that.

Filarr came from the opposite frustration, and much more recently. I wanted a single app for my files, my notes, and the graph that connects them, and I wanted it encrypted by default, with no account required and no cloud in the loop unless I asked for one. Nothing existed that did all three, so I built it. If you want the longer version of that story, I wrote up why I built Filarr separately, but the short version is that I kept watching people pour their lives into cloud apps whose privacy pages, when you actually read them, said "we can read your stuff, please trust us." The starting assumption for Filarr is inverted: the disk on your machine is the source of truth, everything is encrypted before it is written, and the cloud is a dumb optional pipe that only ever sees ciphertext. That single inversion cascades into every other difference between the two products, and it is why a feature-by-feature comparison misses the point. They are not two apps solving the same problem slightly differently. They are two different answers to the question of who your computer works for.

That difference in origin story is not trivia. It explains why Notion cannot simply "add end-to-end encryption" as a checkbox next quarter, no matter how many users ask. Their most beloved features are the ones that structurally require reading your data. Turning on true E2EE would break server-side search, collaborative editing as they implement it, the AI features they are betting the company on, and public page sharing. It would, in a real sense, break Notion. And it explains why Filarr cannot simply "add Notion's collaboration" as a checkbox either, because doing it Notion's way would mean shipping your plaintext to my servers, which is the exact thing the product exists to refuse. Neither of us is being lazy. We made opposite bets at the foundation, and you are choosing between the bets, not the feature lists.

The fracture underneath: who does your computer actually work for

Here is a scenario that makes the abstract concrete. Imagine you keep a running document about a difficult situation at work: a manager behaving badly, dates, quotes, the emotional toll, notes you are keeping in case you ever need to escalate to HR or a lawyer. This is exactly the kind of thing people keep in a notes app, because it is private, unstructured, and evolving. Now walk the same document through both products and watch what the server sees.

In Notion, the moment you type a sentence, it travels over TLS to Notion's servers, gets decrypted at the edge, and is written into Notion's databases where it lives as readable text, encrypted at rest with keys Notion manages. It is indexed so you can search it. If you turn on the AI features, it can be processed to answer questions. If Notion receives a valid legal demand naming your account, the content is technically available to produce. If a Notion employee with sufficient access and bad intentions goes looking, the cryptography does not stop them; only policy, logging, and their fear of getting fired do. None of this means Notion is doing anything wrong. It means the document about your manager is sitting on a company's servers in a form that company can read, and your privacy rests on that company's promises and internal controls rather than on math.

In Filarr, the same document is encrypted on your machine before it is ever written to disk, using a key derived from a password only you know. If you never enable cloud sync, the document never leaves your laptop at all, and there is no server anywhere that could produce it because there is no server that ever had it. If you do enable sync, what leaves your machine is an opaque encrypted blob, and the server stores that blob without ever seeing the key. A subpoena served on the sync provider produces ciphertext that is useless without your password. A rogue employee at the storage provider sees the same useless ciphertext. This is not a promise that we will not look. It is an architecture in which there is nothing to look at. That distinction, promise versus architecture, is the whole ballgame, and it is worth understanding precisely, which is why I wrote a plain-language explainer on end-to-end versus zero-knowledge encryption that goes deeper than I can here.

The fracture is philosophical before it is technical. Notion's model asks: what is the most powerful, collaborative, intelligent workspace we can build if we assume the cloud can see everything? Filarr's model asks: what is the most useful workspace we can build if we assume the cloud can see nothing? Both are legitimate questions. But you should know which one you are answering when you pick a tool to hold your life in, because the answer determines who your computer ultimately works for. In one model, your data lives on infrastructure owned by a company whose interests are aligned with yours most of the time. In the other, your data lives on hardware you own, and the alignment is guaranteed by the fact that nobody else holds a key.

What each tool is actually for, so you compare the right things

A lot of "Notion versus X" writing is dishonest because it pretends the two tools do the same job. They do not, and pretending otherwise leads people to switch and then feel betrayed when the new tool is missing the thing they actually loved. So let me be blunt about what each one is genuinely for.

Notion is, at its heart, a collaborative database that wears the costume of a document editor. Its superpower is that a page can also be a row in a database, a database can have twelve different views, and a team of thirty people can all be editing, filtering, and rolling up the same underlying data in real time. If your work involves other humans coordinating around shared structured information, a content calendar the whole marketing team touches, a CRM your sales people update, a wiki your company references, Notion is close to unbeatable and I will not pretend otherwise. It is a tool built for teams working out loud together, and the fact that the server can read everything is precisely what makes that magic possible. The visibility is a feature, not a bug, for that use case.

Filarr is a workspace built for a single person's private universe: your notes, your files, and a graph view that shows how they connect, all living encrypted on your own machine. It is for the client contracts you should not be storing on someone else's server, the journal you would not want an employee to browse, the fifty-one-plus file formats you want to keep and link and search without uploading them anywhere. It is designed around the assumption that the most important data in your life is the data you would never willingly put in a form a company can read, and it treats organizing that data, linking a PDF to a note, searching inside your documents, seeing the whole web of your knowledge, as the actual product, with encryption as the quiet layer underneath that makes it safe rather than the headline feature you are supposed to admire. If you have ever felt the specific dread of realizing your entire second brain lives on infrastructure you do not control, that feeling is the thing Filarr was built to remove. I wrote about that broader ambition in a piece on organizing your whole digital life in one private workspace if you want the day-to-day picture rather than the security one.

The honest takeaway is that these tools overlap in appearance and diverge in purpose. Notion is a team's shared brain that happens to also hold your personal notes. Filarr is your private brain that happens to also handle your files. If your center of gravity is real-time collaboration with other people around structured data, the encryption question is probably secondary for you and Notion is likely the right pick. If your center of gravity is a large body of personal, sensitive material that you want to own and keep private, then the encryption question is the whole question, and it is worth understanding exactly what Notion's encryption does and does not protect.

Encryption in depth: what Notion protects, and against whom

Let us get specific, because "is it encrypted" is the wrong question and "encrypted against which threat" is the right one. Encryption is not a single property a product either has or lacks. It is a set of defenses, each aimed at a specific attacker, and the interesting information is always in which attackers a given design defends against and which it quietly does not.

Notion's public security documentation states that customer data is encrypted at rest using AES-256, that data in transit is protected with TLS 1.2 or greater, and that a third-party key management service handles key generation, storage, rotation, and access control, with keys rotated yearly and access granted on a least-privilege basis. Notion holds SOC 2 Type II, several ISO certifications including 27001, and offers HIPAA compliance for enterprise customers who sign a business associate agreement. This is a serious, competent security program. I want to say that clearly, because "Notion is not E2EE" sometimes gets flattened into "Notion is insecure," and that is false. Notion is well secured against the attackers its architecture is designed to stop. The question is which attackers those are. AES-256-GCM is the right cipher and I have written a whole explainer on what AES-256-GCM actually is and why it matters, so the issue is never the algorithm. The issue is always who holds the key.

Walk through four concrete threat models and watch the pattern. First, the malicious external hacker who breaches a data center and copies disks. Against this attacker, encryption at rest works beautifully: the disks contain AES-256 ciphertext, and without the keys, the attacker gets noise. Notion defends well here, and so does Filarr, and so does essentially every credible product. This is table stakes. Second, the network eavesdropper sitting between you and the server. TLS defeats them for both products. Also table stakes. It is the third and fourth threat models where the architectures split violently. Third, the malicious or compelled insider: an employee at the vendor who abuses access, or the vendor itself responding to a legal order. In Notion, the keys and the plaintext both live in Notion's control, so this attacker succeeds, gated only by policy, logging, and law rather than by mathematics. In Filarr's zero-knowledge design, this attacker gets the same opaque blob the external hacker got, because the key never reached the server in the first place. Fourth, the stolen or seized laptop. On a Notion machine, your workspace may be cached locally and is protected mainly by your operating system login and full-disk encryption if you enabled it; the Notion app itself does not add a separate cryptographic lock tied to a passphrase only you know. In Filarr, every file is individually encrypted at rest with its own key, so even someone with your unlocked disk faces ciphertext without your Filarr password.

The mechanism that makes the third and fourth cases go differently is worth naming precisely, because it is the technical heart of the whole comparison. Filarr encrypts each file individually with its own file encryption key, and that per-file key is itself wrapped by a key encryption key derived from your password. This two-layer design, a unique key per file wrapped by a master key you control, is not something I invented; it is the same pattern used by Signal, by Apple's file protection, by BitLocker, and by every serious encrypted system, and I explained why it matters so much in a dedicated piece on the KEK and FEK key hierarchy and why per-file encryption matters. The key is derived from your password using PBKDF2-SHA512 at 600,000 iterations, which follows the OWASP 2024 guidance, with Argon2id available as an option for people who want memory-hard derivation. The practical consequence is that your password, and only your password, unlocks your data, and because it never leaves your machine in a form anyone else can use, there is no server-side key for an insider to abuse or a court to demand. Notion's design makes a different and entirely reasonable trade: it keeps the keys server-side precisely so that it can offer search, collaboration, recovery, and AI, all of which require the server to read your plaintext. Neither is cheating. But if your reason for asking "is Notion encrypted" is any of threat models three or four, the honest answer is that Notion's encryption is not aimed at those threats, and it never claimed to be.

Sync and multi-device: what actually happens to your bytes

How a product moves your data between your phone and your laptop tells you almost everything about its privacy posture, because sync is the moment your data is most exposed and the design choices are least hidden. In Notion, sync is not really sync in the peer-to-peer sense; it is a consequence of the fact that your data lives on Notion's servers in the first place. Your devices are windows onto a canonical cloud copy. Open Notion on a new phone, log in, and everything appears, because everything was always on the server and your phone is just rendering it. This is genuinely convenient and it is why Notion feels effortless across devices. The cost is that the canonical copy is readable by Notion, permanently, and your devices are essentially thin clients over a database you do not own. When you are offline, Notion's ability to function is limited and historically imperfect, because the model assumes the server is the truth and the client is a view; extended offline work and offline-created content have long been the rough edges of that design.

Filarr inverts this completely, and the inversion is the point. The truth lives on your disk, fully functional, one hundred percent offline, with no account required and no network dependency whatsoever. You can install Filarr, never create an account, never touch the internet, and have a complete encrypted workspace. Sync is an optional layer you can bolt on if you want your encrypted data available on another machine. When you enable it, files are encrypted on your device first, and only the resulting opaque blobs travel to the storage backend, which by default is built on Cloudflare R2, with the option to bring your own S3-compatible bucket if you would rather not use ours at all. The server stores ciphertext it cannot read, because your key never reaches it in cleartext. I documented exactly how this works, with references to the actual code, in a walkthrough of how Filarr's optional cloud sync stays zero-knowledge, and the reason I published the code path rather than just asserting the property is that "trust us, it's zero-knowledge" is exactly the kind of claim you should not take on faith from anyone, including me.

The difference shows up sharply in the failure cases, which is where architecture reveals its true character. What happens when the server goes down? In Notion, an extended outage means degraded or lost access to your workspace, because the workspace is the server. In Filarr, a sync outage means your local workspace keeps working exactly as before and simply stops syncing until the server returns, because the server was never the truth. What happens if the company disappears, gets acquired, or shuts down the product? With a cloud-first tool, the death of the company is potentially the death of your access, and you are dependent on export tools working before the lights go out. With a local-first tool, your data is already sitting on your disk in a form you control, and the company evaporating changes nothing about your ability to open your files tomorrow morning. What happens when you stop paying? Filarr's local workspace is free forever and does not depend on a subscription, so cancelling sync costs you sync, not your data. This resilience is not a bonus feature; it is the direct, mechanical result of deciding that the disk you own is the source of truth rather than a cache of someone else's database. If the whole idea of local-first is new to you, I wrote a longer primer on what local-first software actually is, including which popular apps qualify and which, like Notion, do not.

Recovery and losing access: the uncomfortable trade nobody escapes

Here is where I have to be scrupulously honest, because this is the one area where Notion's model is genuinely more forgiving, and pretending otherwise would make everything else I have said less trustworthy. When a company holds your keys, it can also rescue you. Forget your Notion password and you click a reset link, prove control of your email, and you are back in, with all your data intact, because Notion could always read it and can therefore always give it back to you. That is a real, valuable property. Most people forget passwords, lose devices, and generally live messier digital lives than security purists like to admit, and a system that can save you from your own mistakes has genuine humane value. The exact same key custody that makes Notion readable to Notion is what makes Notion able to recover your account, and you cannot have one without the other. This is not a flaw in Notion; it is the honest consequence of its bet, and for a lot of people it is the right consequence.

Zero-knowledge systems cannot do this, because the whole point is that nobody but you can decrypt your data, which means nobody but you can rescue it. If the vendor could reset your way back in, the vendor could also read your data, and then it would not be zero-knowledge at all. So systems like Filarr have to solve recovery differently, and the tool for that is a recovery phrase. Filarr generates a 24-word BIP-39 recovery phrase, the same standard used by cryptocurrency wallets, and that phrase is a human-writable form of the key material that can reconstruct your access. Write it on paper, store it somewhere safe, and you have a recovery path that does not depend on any company being alive or cooperative. Lose both your password and your recovery phrase, and your data is genuinely, permanently gone, and no support ticket in the world can bring it back. This is uncomfortable, and it should be, because it is the true cost of real privacy. The math that stops a subpoena also stops a favor. There is no design that gives you both "nobody can access my data without my consent" and "the vendor can restore my access when I mess up," because those two properties are logical opposites. Notion picks recoverability. Filarr picks privacy and hands you a recovery phrase as the escape hatch. You should pick the one whose failure mode you can actually live with, and be honest with yourself about which kind of person you are, because a recovery phrase you lose is worse than no recovery phrase at all.

The comparison at a glance

Before the table, one caveat: a table flattens nuance, and the prose above and below matters more than the grid. But a side-by-side is useful for orientation, so here it is, followed by the analysis that keeps it honest.

	Notion	Filarr
Encryption at rest	Yes, AES-256, keys held by Notion	Yes, AES-256-GCM, per-file keys derived from your password
Encryption in transit	Yes, TLS 1.2+	Yes, plus payload is already encrypted before upload
End-to-end / zero-knowledge	No, server reads plaintext	Yes, server stores opaque blobs only
Who holds the keys	Notion (third-party KMS)	You (derived from your password)
Works fully offline	Limited	Yes, 100% offline, no account needed
Account required	Yes	No, optional for sync only
Real-time team collaboration	Yes, excellent	No, single-user focus
Server-side search / AI	Yes	No, by design (server sees ciphertext)
Recovery if you forget password	Yes, email reset	Only via 24-word recovery phrase
Files and note-graph in one app	Notes and databases; files are attachments	Notes, 51+ file formats, and graph view together
Pricing	Free tier; paid from about $10/user/mo	Free forever locally; sync from 4 EUR/mo
Open source	No	Desktop client is open source (BSL 1.1)

Read across the rows and the shape of the trade jumps out. Notion wins decisively on collaboration, server-side intelligence, and forgiving recovery, and those wins are all downstream of the same decision to keep your data readable in the cloud. Filarr wins on key custody, offline resilience, and the specific combination of notes plus files plus graph on your own hardware, and those wins are all downstream of the opposite decision. There is no row where one product is simply better at being the other product; every advantage is the visible face of a foundational bet. The table cannot tell you which bet is right for you. Only your actual threat model and your actual workflow can, which is why the personas later in this piece matter more than any grid.

Where Notion genuinely wins

I would be doing you a disservice if I let the privacy framing convince you that Notion is a bad product. It is not. It is one of the best pieces of software of its generation, and there are large categories of user for whom it is unambiguously the correct choice, encryption question and all. Collaboration is the obvious one. If your work is fundamentally about people building shared understanding together, a team wiki, a project tracker everyone updates, a knowledge base your whole company references, Notion's real-time multiplayer editing and its database model are extraordinary, and the fact that the server can read the data is exactly what enables the seamless, instant, everyone-sees-the-same-thing experience. Trying to do that with true end-to-end encryption is a genuinely hard computer science problem, and the products that attempt it tend to feel clunky by comparison. Notion made the trade that lets collaboration feel effortless, and for teams, effortless collaboration is often worth more than cryptographic privacy.

The second area where Notion wins is the sheer power and polish of its database model. The ability to make a page also be a database row, to build linked relations between tables, to create rollups and formulas and a dozen views of the same data, is a level of structured flexibility that a file-and-note workspace simply does not match and does not try to. If your work involves modeling information as interconnected structured records, a content pipeline, a personal CRM, an editorial calendar with statuses and assignees, Notion gives you a spreadsheet-database-document hybrid that is genuinely hard to replicate anywhere else. That is real engineering value, and it is fair to want it.

The third area is the ecosystem and the network effects, which are enormous and which no amount of technical superiority elsewhere can quickly overcome. There are thousands of Notion templates, a huge community, integrations with seemingly every other tool, a mature API, and a workforce of people who already know how to use it. When you hire someone, there is a good chance they already know Notion. When you want a template for a specific workflow, someone has probably already built and shared it. That gravitational mass is a genuine advantage, and it is the kind of advantage that a younger product like Filarr, honestly, does not have yet. The fourth win, which I already covered but which belongs here too, is recovery: the ability to get back into your account after forgetting your password is a real safety net that zero-knowledge products structurally cannot offer. If you know yourself to be the kind of person who will lose a recovery phrase, that safety net may matter more to you than any threat model, and there is no shame in choosing the tool that protects you from yourself.

Where Filarr genuinely wins

Now the other side, argued just as seriously. Filarr's first and most important win is the one this whole article is about: your keys are yours, and your privacy rests on mathematics rather than on a company's promises. When your data is encrypted with a key derived from your password before it ever leaves your machine, the entire category of "trust the vendor not to look" simply dissolves. A breach at the storage provider exposes ciphertext. A rogue employee sees ciphertext. A legal demand served on the sync backend produces ciphertext. You are not trusting me to be a good person, which is exactly the position you should want to be in, because I am a stranger on the internet and so is every other vendor. For anyone holding sensitive material, journalists, lawyers, therapists, activists, or just private people who believe their notes are nobody's business, this is not a nice-to-have. It is the whole reason to switch, and it is a difference of kind, not degree.

The second win is the unification of notes and files in one encrypted place. Notion is a database that can attach files; Filarr is a workspace where your notes and your actual documents, across fifty-one-plus formats, live together, linked, searchable, and encrypted with equal seriousness. You can link a PDF contract to a note about the deal, search inside your documents, and see the whole web of connections in the graph view, all without any of it touching a server that can read it. If you have ever felt the frustration of your notes living in one app and your files scattered across a downloads folder and three cloud drives, this consolidation is quietly transformative, and I wrote about the everyday version of it in a piece on stopping the slow bleed of losing files across apps. The graph and the file handling are not privacy features; they are productivity features that happen to be private, which is exactly the order of priorities I think a workspace should have.

The third win is local-first resilience, which I covered above but which deserves restating as an advantage in its own right. Your workspace works offline, forever, with no account, and it does not stop working because a server is down, a company folded, or a subscription lapsed. The free-forever local tier means the core product is not hostage to your credit card. And the fourth win is transparency: Filarr's desktop client is open source under the Business Source License 1.1, which means the encryption claims I make are not marketing you have to take on faith but code you or an expert you trust can actually read. In privacy software, the ability to verify is not a bonus; it is the difference between a claim and a fact, and I think it is the single most underrated reason to prefer an auditable tool over a closed one.

Migrating from Notion without losing your work

If the privacy argument lands and you want to move, the honest news is that migration takes some effort but is entirely doable, and the friction is worth understanding before you start so you are not surprised. Notion lets you export your workspace, and the most portable format is Markdown plus the attached files, which gives you your pages as text files and your uploads as actual files on your disk. The good part of this is that Markdown is a durable, open format that will outlive any single app, so exporting to it is a privacy win in itself, regardless of where you land. The rough part is that Notion's exports do not perfectly preserve everything: complex database views, relations, rollups, and some formatting do not survive as cleanly as you would like, because those are Notion-specific constructs that do not have exact equivalents in a plain file format. This is the real cost of Notion's power. The more you leaned on its database features, the more of that structure you will have to rebuild or rethink when you leave, which is worth knowing before you build your entire life inside proprietary database relations.

What you gain in the move is that once your pages and files are sitting in Filarr, they are encrypted at rest immediately and automatically, with no separate encryption step and no checkbox to remember. The moment content enters your workspace, it is written to disk as AES-256-GCM ciphertext with its own key. Your Markdown notes become encrypted notes, your exported attachments become encrypted files, and you can start linking them together and searching across them right away. The graph view will begin surfacing connections you forgot you had. I wrote a detailed, step-by-step walkthrough of exactly this process, including the export settings that lose the least and how to verify nothing went missing, in a guide on moving your Notion workspace to a private, encrypted app without losing a single page. The one piece of advice I will repeat here is to migrate deliberately rather than in a panic: export cleanly, import in sections, verify each section opens and searches correctly, and only then delete the Notion original. Migration is a good time to prune as well; most people discover half of what they were storing was noise, and moving is a natural moment to leave the noise behind.

Pricing, decoded with real numbers

Privacy conversations often skip money, which is a mistake, because the pricing models reveal the business models, and the business models reveal the incentives. Notion offers a capable free tier, and its paid plans in 2026 run roughly from about $10 per user per month for the Plus plan billed annually, up to around $18 to $20 per user per month for Business, with Enterprise priced on request. As of mid-2026, the full Notion AI suite is bundled into the Business and Enterprise tiers rather than sold separately, which nudges the effective price of "Notion with AI" toward the Business tier for many buyers. The per-user structure is the thing to watch: Notion's cost scales with headcount, which is perfectly logical for a collaboration tool and can get expensive fast for a growing team.

Filarr's model is deliberately different because the product is deliberately different. The local workspace is free forever, not free-for-now or free-with-limits-that-annoy-you-into-upgrading, but genuinely free, because the core product does not cost me server money to run when it lives entirely on your machine. Cloud sync, the optional part, starts at 4 EUR per month. Let me run three concrete scenarios so the abstract numbers mean something. Scenario one, the solo private user who never wants cloud sync at all: on Notion, a personal-but-serious setup pushes you toward a paid tier over time as you hit limits or want features, so call it roughly $120 or more per year; on Filarr, this person pays zero, forever, and gets full encryption locally. Scenario two, the solo user who wants their encrypted workspace on a laptop and a desktop with sync: Notion Plus is around $120 per year, Filarr sync is 4 EUR per month or roughly 48 EUR per year, and Filarr is both cheaper and zero-knowledge. Scenario three, a small three-person team that genuinely needs real-time collaboration: here Notion's per-user Business pricing lands somewhere around $54 to $60 per month for the three seats, and this is a case where Notion may simply be the better fit, because Filarr is not built for that collaboration workflow and I would rather tell you that than sell you the wrong tool. The pattern is clear: for private individuals, Filarr is dramatically cheaper and more private; for collaborating teams, Notion's pricing buys collaboration that Filarr does not offer. Match the tool to the job and the money follows sensibly.

Open source and licensing: what it actually means for you

The word "open source" gets thrown around loosely, so let me be precise about what is and is not open here, because precision is part of the point. Notion is closed-source proprietary software. You cannot read its code, you cannot verify its security claims independently, and you are trusting the combination of its published documentation, its third-party audits like SOC 2, and its reputation. That is a normal and defensible position for a commercial SaaS product, and the SOC 2 and ISO certifications are real, meaningful signals that competent auditors have examined its controls. But it is trust based on attestation, not on verification you can perform yourself.

Filarr's desktop client is open source under the Business Source License 1.1, and this matters concretely for a privacy tool in a way it might not for other software. When I claim that files are encrypted before they leave your machine and that the server only ever sees opaque blobs, you do not have to take my word for it. The code that does the encryption is published, and you, or a security researcher you trust, or a curious skeptic with time on their hands, can read it and confirm that it does what I say. For encryption software specifically, this is close to essential, because the entire value of the product is a claim about what the code does with your keys, and an unverifiable claim about key handling is worth very little. I explained the reasoning behind the license choice, including what BSL 1.1 does and does not permit, in the announcement that Filarr's desktop client went open source. One important clarification I always make: the desktop client is under BSL 1.1, while the Filarr website is a separate repository under AGPL-3.0, and it is worth keeping those distinct rather than lumping them into one vague "it's open source" claim, because being sloppy about your own facts is exactly the kind of thing that should make you distrust a security vendor. BSL is not a classic OSI-approved open-source license; it restricts certain commercial uses for a period before converting to a fully open license, which is a nuance an honest comparison should name rather than gloss over.

Which one should you actually pick? Four honest personas

General advice is useless, so here are four specific people and a real recommendation for each.

If you are a member of a team that lives and breathes collaboration, a startup running its wiki, roadmap, and docs together, or a marketing team coordinating a content calendar, then choose Notion and do not agonize about the encryption. Your data is collaborative by nature, the value is in everyone seeing and editing the same thing instantly, and Notion's readable-cloud model is precisely what makes that work. The privacy trade is real but it is probably the right trade for genuinely shared operational data, and fighting it would cost you the collaboration you actually need. Pick Notion, enable the strongest access controls and SSO your plan allows, and be thoughtful about what genuinely sensitive personal material you keep in there, because a shared team workspace is not the place for your therapy journal regardless of the vendor.

If you are a privacy-conscious individual, a developer, a knowledge worker, or simply someone who believes their notes and files are nobody else's business, and your work is mostly solo, then choose Filarr. This is the exact person the product was built for. You get your notes, your files, and your graph in one place, encrypted with keys only you hold, working offline, free locally, with optional zero-knowledge sync when you want it. The recovery-phrase responsibility is the price of admission, so write those 24 words down and store them safely, and then enjoy actually owning your data. If you want to see how you stack up against the broader field before committing, I keep an honest roundup of encrypted Notion alternatives that includes tools other than mine.

If you are a professional with a legal or ethical duty of confidentiality, a lawyer, a therapist, a journalist protecting sources, a doctor keeping private notes, then the calculus is not close, and you should treat Notion's readable-cloud model as disqualifying for your most sensitive material specifically because it exposes you to insider access and legal compulsion of your clients' or sources' data. Zero-knowledge is not a preference for you; it is closer to a professional obligation, and Filarr's architecture, where a subpoena on the sync provider yields useless ciphertext, is the property you actually need. Use Filarr for the confidential material and, if you also need team collaboration for non-sensitive operational work, keep that in a separate tool rather than mixing the two.

And if you are a person who honestly knows you will lose a recovery phrase, who has reset every password you have ever owned and would be genuinely devastated to lose your data to your own forgetfulness, then be honest with yourself: the forgiving recovery of a key-holding service like Notion may protect you better in practice than the cryptographic purity of a zero-knowledge tool you will accidentally lock yourself out of. Privacy that ends with you sobbing over permanently lost data is not a win. Pick the tool whose failure mode you can survive, and if that is Notion, choose it clear-eyed, minimize the truly sensitive material you store, and sleep fine.

The bottom line

So, is Notion encrypted? Yes, and also no, and the gap between those two words is the entire point. Notion encrypts your data at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS, which defends you well against hackers breaching data centers and eavesdroppers on the wire. But it is not end-to-end encrypted, it holds the keys, and that means your data is readable by Notion, its authorized employees, and anyone Notion is legally compelled to help. For collaborative team data, that is a perfectly reasonable trade and Notion remains one of the best tools on earth for that job. For your private, sensitive, personal universe of notes and files, it means your privacy rests on a company's promises rather than on math, and if that bothers you, it should, because it is a genuine limitation and not a paranoid fantasy.

The alternative is not to give up features you love but to be deliberate about where different kinds of data live. Collaborative operational work can stay in the readable cloud where collaboration is easy. Your private life, the journal, the contracts, the medical records, the drafts you are not ready to show anyone, belongs somewhere the vendor cannot read it, encrypted with keys only you hold, on hardware you own, with the cloud reduced to an optional pipe that only ever sees noise. That somewhere is what I built Filarr to be, and whether you choose it or one of the other honest encrypted tools out there, the important thing is that you make the choice knowing exactly what "encrypted" does and does not mean. Now you do.

FAQ

Is Notion end-to-end encrypted? No. Notion encrypts your data at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.2 or higher, but it does not use end-to-end encryption. Notion holds the keys through a managed key service, which means Notion can technically read your content, its staff can access it under policy for support or recovery, and it can be produced in response to a valid legal request. If you need your data to be unreadable to the vendor itself, Notion's model does not provide that.

Can Notion employees read my pages? Technically yes, under Notion's stated policies. Notion's documentation says staff may access customer content to troubleshoot problems or recover content on your behalf, and its support flow can involve granting access to your workspace. Access is policy-gated, logged, and least-privilege, but it is enforced by internal controls and law rather than by cryptography, so the protection is a promise rather than a mathematical guarantee.

Does encryption at rest mean my data is private from Notion? No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. Encryption at rest protects your data against someone who steals the physical disks, because they get ciphertext without the keys. But because Notion holds the keys, encryption at rest does nothing to prevent Notion itself, its employees, or a legal demand from accessing your plaintext. "Encrypted at rest" and "private from the vendor" are completely different properties, and only end-to-end or zero-knowledge encryption delivers the second one.

How is Filarr's encryption different from Notion's? Filarr encrypts every file individually with its own key before it is written to disk, and that per-file key is wrapped by a key derived from your password using PBKDF2-SHA512 at 600,000 iterations, with Argon2id optional. The key never leaves your machine in usable form, so optional cloud sync only ever stores opaque encrypted blobs. The result is zero-knowledge: unlike Notion, the server that holds your synced data cannot read it, even if compelled.

What happens if I forget my password in each app? In Notion, you reset your password through your email and regain full access, because Notion holds the keys and can decrypt your data for you. In Filarr, there is no such reset, because zero-knowledge means nobody but you can decrypt your data; instead you recover using a 24-word BIP-39 recovery phrase generated when you set up. If you lose both your password and that phrase, your data is permanently unrecoverable, which is the true cost of real privacy.

Should I trust Notion's security certifications? Yes, as far as they go. Notion holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and related certifications, and offers HIPAA compliance for enterprise customers, which are meaningful signals that competent auditors examined its controls. But certifications attest that a company follows good practices with data it can read; they do not change the fact that Notion can read your data. They reduce the risk of the vendor being careless, not the risk of the vendor, or a court, accessing your content.

Is Filarr a good Notion replacement for teams? Usually not, and I would rather say so plainly. Filarr is built for a single person's private workspace, so it does not offer Notion's real-time multiplayer collaboration or its powerful shared database model. If your core need is a team editing structured data together, Notion or a similar collaborative tool is the better fit. Filarr shines when the priority is private, owned, encrypted notes and files for one person, not shared operational data for a group.

Can I move my Notion data into an encrypted app easily? Mostly yes, with some friction. Notion exports to Markdown plus your attached files, which imports cleanly into Filarr and is encrypted automatically on arrival. The catch is that Notion-specific constructs like complex database views, relations, and rollups do not survive export perfectly, so the more you relied on those, the more restructuring you will do. Export deliberately, import in sections, verify each part, and only then delete the originals.