Notesnook vs Filarr: Two Encrypted Workspaces, Two Very Different Bets
Notesnook vs Filarr compared: encryption, sync, pricing, mobile and open source. Which encrypted notes or workspace app fits your files, notes and privacy needs.
Mathis Belouar-Pruvot
Quick Answer
Notesnook and Filarr both encrypt your data so that nobody but you can read it, but they solve different problems. Notesnook is a mature, fully open-source (GPL-3.0) end-to-end encrypted notes app built to replace Evernote, with polished mobile apps, an audited XChaCha20-Poly1305 crypto stack, and a self-hostable sync server. Filarr is a local-first encrypted workspace that treats notes and actual files as first-class citizens, ties them together with a graph view, and stores everything as per-file AES-256-GCM blobs on your own disk with cloud sync as an optional extra. Choose Notesnook if you want a proven, notes-only writing app with excellent mobile support. Choose Filarr if you need to organize documents, PDFs, images and notes together, want per-file key isolation, and prefer a tool that works fully offline first and only touches the cloud if you ask it to.
The comparison nobody frames honestly
Most "encrypted notes app" roundups line up eight products, slap a checkmark grid on them, and call it a day. That grid lies to you. It makes Notesnook and Filarr look like two brands of the same soda, when they are actually built on different beliefs about what you are trying to protect and how you live with your data day to day. I built Filarr, so I have skin in this game, and I am going to try to earn your trust by telling you where Notesnook is genuinely better rather than pretending it is a strawman. If you finish this and pick Notesnook, that is a good outcome. Picking the wrong tool for your brain is more expensive than any subscription.
Here is the tension worth naming up front. You have decided you no longer want your private thoughts, your journal, your client notes, your half-finished ideas and your tax PDFs sitting in plaintext on someone else's server. That decision alone puts you ahead of ninety-five percent of people, who cheerfully hand Notion and Google Docs a readable copy of their entire inner life. But the moment you go looking for an encrypted alternative, you hit a fork. One path leads to apps that encrypt notes beautifully and stop there. The other leads to apps that try to encrypt your whole working life, files included, and accept some rough edges as the price. Notesnook is the best-in-class example of the first path. Filarr is a deliberate bet on the second.
The reason this matters right now, in 2026, is that both categories finally got good enough to trust with real work. Notesnook shipped a rewritten editor, real search filters, and a self-hostable server. Filarr crossed the line from "encryption demo" to a workspace people actually run their week out of. So the question is no longer "is encrypted good enough yet." It is "which shape of encrypted tool fits the way I actually think, write, and store things." That is a much more interesting question, and the answer depends entirely on you, not on a feature count.
Where each one comes from
Notesnook is built by Streetwriters, and it grew up as an unapologetic Evernote replacement for people who were tired of watching a beloved notes app slowly enshittify while also storing everything in the clear. The team leaned hard into open source and end-to-end encryption from early on, released clients across web, desktop and mobile, and kept the whole thing under GPL-3.0. That license choice is not a marketing detail. It means the apps, and eventually the sync server, are copyleft open source, so anyone can read the code, verify the crypto, fork it, or run their own copy. Over the years Notesnook accumulated the things a serious notes app needs: notebooks and tags, a rich text editor, a vault for locking especially sensitive notes behind a second password, monographs for publishing a single note as a shareable encrypted or public page, and full import from Evernote and friends. By 2025 and into 2026 it had grown into one of the most complete privacy-first notes products you can install, with a genuine multi-year track record.
Filarr comes from a different itch. I kept running into the same wall with every notes app I tried, Notesnook included: they are wonderful for text and useless for everything else. My actual work is not just notes. It is a note about a contract sitting next to the contract PDF, a research summary next to the twelve papers it summarizes, a project brief next to the design files it describes. Notes apps make me shove all of that into a separate cloud drive that is usually not encrypted at all, which quietly defeats the entire point of encrypting the notes. So Filarr started as a local-first, encrypted workspace where notes and files live together as equals, each file encrypted individually on your own disk, connected by a graph so you can see how a note relates to a document relates to another note. The desktop app is built on Electron and React, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and is open source under BSL 1.1. The website is separate and lives under AGPL-3.0, which is worth keeping straight because people conflate the two. Mobile is still in progress, and I will be blunt about that later because it is the single biggest gap versus Notesnook.
The origin stories matter because they predict the tradeoffs. Notesnook optimized for the notes experience across every device for years, so its mobile apps and its editor are deep and refined. Filarr optimized for encrypting a heterogeneous pile of real files and making sense of them together, so its file handling and graph are its strength and its mobile story is younger. Neither team woke up one day and randomly picked features. They picked a problem and followed it, and you are choosing which problem you have.
The philosophical fault line
Strip away the feature lists and you find the real disagreement: what is the center of gravity, the cloud or your disk. Notesnook is end-to-end encrypted, which is a strong and honest promise, but its architecture is fundamentally sync-centric. The mental model is that your notes live in an encrypted account, and your devices are windows onto that account. You can use it offline, and it caches locally, but the product is designed around the idea of an encrypted cloud you log into. That is exactly the right design for a notes app you want identical on your phone, your laptop and the web with zero friction, and Notesnook nails that experience. The tradeoff is that the account is the thing, and the account implies a server relationship, even if that server is Notesnook's or one you self-host.
Filarr flips the default. The center of gravity is a folder of encrypted files on your local disk. That is the source of truth. Cloud sync exists, and plenty of people use it, but it is optional and it "just follows" the local state. Turn off your network, cancel your subscription, let the company disappear, and you still have a complete, fully functional, fully encrypted workspace sitting on your machine that opens and works exactly as before. Nothing degrades to read-only, nothing phones home to unlock, nothing holds your data hostage. That is the local-first bet: the cloud is a convenience layered on top of local ownership, not the foundation everything rests on.
Let me make this concrete with a scenario, because abstractions are easy to nod along to and hard to feel. Imagine it is a Saturday, you are on a train with no signal, and you need to pull up a note from three years ago that references a scanned document, edit both, and reorganize a project folder. With Notesnook, the note experience is smooth as long as that note synced to your device, and the editor works fully offline, so you are fine for the text. But the scanned document, if you kept it anywhere, is probably in some other app or drive, and the notion of reorganizing a folder of real files does not map onto a notes app at all. With Filarr, the entire thing, note and document and folder structure, is local files on your disk, so you edit, reorganize, re-link in the graph, and none of it cares that the train went through a tunnel. When you get signal again, if you have sync on, it catches up. If you do not, nothing was lost because nothing depended on the network in the first place. That is the fault line, and it decides more than any checkbox.
What each tool is actually for
Be honest with yourself about what you are storing, because this is where most people mis-choose. Notesnook is a notes app, and I mean that as high praise, not a limitation. If ninety percent of what you want to protect is writing, journaling, meeting notes, research prose, snippets, task lists, and the occasional attached image or small file, Notesnook is built precisely for you and does it with years of polish. The editor is rich and pleasant, the notebook-and-tag organization is mature, search is good and got better with recent filter work, and the cross-device story is genuinely excellent. Monographs let you publish a note as a page when you want to share one. The whole thing is shaped around the act of writing and retrieving text, and that shape is coherent and refined.
Filarr is for people whose "stuff" is not mostly text. It is a workspace, which is a deliberately broader word than notes app. It supports something like fifty-one or more file formats, so your PDFs, images, spreadsheets, code, and documents are not second-class attachments bolted onto a note, they are files you organize, preview, and encrypt directly. Notes are there too, and they are good, but the defining move is that a note and a file sit side by side and can be linked in a graph view, so you can navigate your knowledge the way it actually connects rather than the way a folder tree forces it. Multi-profile workspaces let you keep, say, work and personal life fully separated, each its own encrypted world. If you have ever wanted a single encrypted place for the note AND the document the note is about, that is the entire reason Filarr exists.
Here is the trap to avoid. Do not try to use Notesnook as a file manager, because it is not one, and you will end up leaking your files into an unencrypted drive to compensate. And do not try to use Filarr as a pure phone-first journaling app today, because its mobile support is not yet at Notesnook's level. Match the tool to the true center of your data, not to the feature you are most excited about in a demo.
Encryption, actually in depth
Both apps clear the bar that most of the market fails: your data is encrypted such that the server operator cannot read it. But the mechanisms differ, and the differences have real consequences under real threats. Notesnook encrypts on the client using XChaCha20-Poly1305, a modern authenticated stream cipher, with Argon2 for deriving the key from your password. Argon2 is a memory-hard key derivation function, which is the current gold standard for resisting brute-force attacks on passwords because it is expensive to parallelize on GPUs. This is a genuinely strong, modern, well-regarded stack, and Notesnook has had it examined by security researchers, which adds real credibility. Everything syncs as ciphertext, so the account holds encrypted blobs the server cannot decrypt.
Filarr takes a per-file approach. Each file gets its own File Encryption Key, and the content is encrypted with AES-256-GCM, an authenticated cipher that is the workhorse of modern encryption and is hardware-accelerated on essentially every device you own. Each per-file key is then wrapped by a Key Encryption Key derived from your password. Key derivation uses PBKDF2-SHA512 at 600,000 iterations, which follows the OWASP 2024 guidance, with Argon2id available as an option. The architectural point of per-file keys is isolation: compromising the key material for one file does not hand an attacker the rest, and it maps cleanly onto a world of many independent files rather than one big note database. When files sync to the cloud, the backend, which runs on Cloudflare R2, only ever sees opaque encrypted blobs, and the sync code is written to be zero-knowledge. You can also bring your own S3-compatible bucket if you would rather not use Filarr's storage at all.
Now let me be genuinely honest about a nuance most comparisons skip, because credibility matters more than winning. On key derivation defaults, Argon2 as Notesnook's default is arguably the stronger choice against a determined offline attacker with GPUs, because memory-hardness is exactly what defeats that attack. Filarr's default of PBKDF2-SHA512 at 600k iterations is OWASP-compliant and perfectly respectable, and Argon2id is available, but if you are the kind of person who wants the most brute-force-resistant default out of the box, Notesnook has the edge there and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Where Filarr's design shines is per-file key isolation and the fact that your encrypted files are plain blobs on your own disk that you can back up, inspect, and move with ordinary tools. Different strengths, both real.
Threat models make this less abstract. Consider a malicious or compromised server. Both apps win here: server sees ciphertext only, so a breach of Notesnook's servers or Filarr's R2 backend exposes encrypted blobs, not your content. Consider a stolen laptop that is powered off or locked, where the attacker gets your disk. Both apps protect you because the data is encrypted at rest and the key derives from your password, so the attacker must brute-force it, and here Argon2 gives Notesnook a slight defensive edge on defaults while Filarr's per-file keys mean the attacker faces many wrapped keys rather than one master unlock. Consider a weak password, which is the ugliest threat because it undermines everyone: no cipher saves a password of "summer2024," and this is where Argon2's memory-hardness buys you the most time, so Notesnook's default is more forgiving of a mediocre password than PBKDF2 is, though the honest answer for both is use a long passphrase. Consider legal compulsion, where an authority demands your data from the company: both apps can only hand over ciphertext they cannot decrypt, which is the entire value of end-to-end and zero-knowledge design, and Filarr's local-first posture adds that in the fully offline case there may be no cloud copy to demand at all. The takeaway is that both are serious, and your password strength matters more than the delta between them.
Sync and multi-device, mechanically
Sync is where the philosophical fault line becomes plumbing you can feel. Notesnook's sync is the beating heart of the product and it is excellent. Your encrypted notes propagate across web, desktop and mobile with the kind of low-friction reliability that only comes from years of iteration. Because the account is central, adding a new device is a matter of logging in and letting encrypted data flow down, and you get a consistent experience everywhere. Offline, the apps keep working on cached data and the editor is fully functional, then reconcile when you reconnect. If Notesnook's servers had an outage, your local cache keeps you working and sync resumes later. And because the sync server itself is now self-hostable, albeit described as alpha and unsupported, a determined user can run the whole backend on their own infrastructure with .NET, MongoDB and an S3-compatible store like Minio, which is a serious privacy win if you are willing to operate it.
Filarr's sync is deliberately less central, which is both its charm and its constraint. The local disk is authoritative, and sync is an optional layer that mirrors your encrypted blobs to Cloudflare R2, or to your own S3 bucket if you bring one. Offline is not a degraded mode, it is the normal mode, because the app was designed to run entirely from local files with no network at all. Server outage on Filarr's side is close to a non-event for your daily work, because you are editing local files and sync will catch up whenever it can. Cancel your subscription and you do not lose access to anything, because the cloud was only ever a copy, and the originals are your files. The tradeoff, and it is a real one, is that a notes app whose whole identity is seamless multi-device sync, like Notesnook, will feel more instantly magical across three devices today, especially once phones are in the mix, precisely because it optimized for that from day one while Filarr optimized for local ownership first.
So the mechanical question is: do you want the network to be the thing that makes your data feel present everywhere, or do you want your disk to be the thing that makes your data feel owned, with the network as a bonus. Notesnook is the former done extremely well. Filarr is the latter done deliberately.
Recovery and losing access
Encryption that truly locks out the company also locks out you if you lose your key, and how each app handles that human reality tells you a lot. This is the terrifying flip side of zero-knowledge: there is no "forgot password" email that magically restores your data, because if there were, the company could read your data, and then it would not be zero-knowledge. Both apps live inside this constraint honestly, and both give you a recovery mechanism, but you have to actually use it.
Filarr gives you a 24-word BIP-39 recovery phrase, the same standard used by cryptocurrency wallets. That phrase is your lifeline: if you forget your password, the phrase lets you regain access to your encrypted data. Write it down, on paper, and store it somewhere safe and separate from your devices, because if you lose both your password and your phrase, your data is mathematically unrecoverable, and that is not a bug, it is the guarantee working as designed. It is worth sitting with that for a second before you commit, because it is a real responsibility that cloud users are not used to carrying. The upside is enormous: nobody, not Filarr, not a subpoena, not a hacker who breaches the server, can get into your files. The downside is that the person most likely to lock you out is you, so treat that recovery phrase like the key to a safe deposit box.
Notesnook similarly provides account recovery keys and encryption keys that you are strongly encouraged to save, and the same iron law applies: if you lose your password and your recovery material, your encrypted content cannot be restored by the company, because they never had the ability to decrypt it. Consider the concrete scenario of account death, where someone passes away and the family wants the notes. With a plaintext cloud service, the family can sometimes petition the provider. With Notesnook or Filarr, the only path is the password or the recovery phrase, full stop. This is a genuine consideration for anyone storing things loved ones might one day need, and the honest advice for both apps is identical: document your recovery material somewhere your estate can reach it if that matters to you. The encryption does not care about your feelings, which is exactly why it protects you from everyone else's.
The one comparison table
The table below is a summary, not the argument. Read the prose around it, because a grid flattens nuance that actually decides your choice, and both of these tools have strengths a checkmark cannot capture.
| Dimension | Notesnook | Filarr |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Encrypted notes app (Evernote alternative) | Encrypted local-first workspace: notes + files + graph |
| Cipher | XChaCha20-Poly1305 | AES-256-GCM, per-file key |
| Key derivation | Argon2 | PBKDF2-SHA512 600k (Argon2id optional) |
| Center of gravity | Sync-centric encrypted account | Local disk, cloud sync optional |
| File management | Attachments to notes | First-class, 51+ formats |
| Graph view | No | Yes |
| Recovery | Recovery/encryption keys | 24-word BIP-39 phrase |
| Mobile | Mature (iOS + Android) | In progress |
| License | GPL-3.0 (fully open source) | Desktop BSL 1.1 (site AGPL-3.0) |
| Self-hostable server | Yes (sync server, alpha) | BYOS S3-compatible bucket |
| Free tier | Generous notes free tier | Free forever, fully local |
| Paid entry | Essential $1.99/mo | Cloud sync from 4 EUR/mo |
| Security audit | Yes, examined by researchers | Open code (BSL), younger project |
What the table cannot show is the feel. Notesnook feels like a finished, trustworthy, everywhere-at-once notes product with a longer track record and an audit behind it. Filarr feels like a different category of tool entirely, one that finally puts your files and notes under the same encrypted roof, at the cost of a younger ecosystem. If your eyes went straight to "mobile" and "audit," you are probably a Notesnook person. If they went to "file management" and "graph view," you are probably a Filarr person. Both reactions are correct.
Where Notesnook genuinely wins
I will not soften this, because a comparison where the competitor loses every round is a comparison you should not trust. Notesnook beats Filarr in several ways that matter enormously depending on who you are, and pretending otherwise would insult you.
First and biggest: mobile. Notesnook has mature, polished native-feeling apps on iOS and Android built on React Native, refined over years. If your life happens on your phone, if you capture notes in line at the grocery store and on the bus and in bed, Notesnook is ready for you today and Filarr is not yet. Filarr's mobile is in progress, and "in progress" is not "shipped," so if phone-first capture is core to how you work, this alone can and should decide it. I would rather you choose Notesnook and be happy than choose Filarr and be frustrated waiting for a phone app.
Second: it is fully open source under GPL-3.0, clients and now the self-hostable sync server. That is a cleaner open-source story than Filarr's, whose desktop app is BSL 1.1 (source-available with a delayed transition to open, not the same as GPL) while the website is AGPL-3.0. For people whose privacy stance is rooted in software freedom, the ability to read, fork, and fully self-host the entire GPL stack is a real and principled advantage. If "can I run the whole thing myself, forever, with no company in the loop" is your non-negotiable, Notesnook currently answers that more completely.
Third: maturity and the audit. Notesnook has been around long enough to accumulate trust, and its crypto has been examined by security researchers, which is worth a great deal when you are deciding who guards your journal. Filarr's code is open for inspection but the project is younger, dating to this era rather than half a decade ago, with a smaller community and less battle-testing. Fourth: the writing experience itself. If your work is overwhelmingly text, Notesnook's editor, notebooks, tags, vault, and monograph publishing represent years of focused refinement on the act of writing, and a workspace that also juggles files will, by definition, spread its attention wider. Fifth: the free tier for pure note-takers is generous and the paid entry point at $1.99 a month is lower than Filarr's cloud sync starting at 4 EUR a month. If you are a text-only user on a budget, Notesnook is both cheaper and more focused.
Where Filarr genuinely wins
Now the other side, argued just as honestly. Filarr wins decisively for a specific and, I would argue, very common kind of person: someone whose digital life is not just prose.
The headline is files as first-class citizens. Notesnook encrypts notes and lets you attach things; Filarr encrypts your actual files, dozens of formats, as the main event, and organizes them alongside notes in one encrypted workspace. This is not a small delta. It is the difference between encrypting your diary and encrypting your diary, your scanned passport, your contracts, your project PDFs, and your photos, all under one roof with one password, instead of scattering the non-note stuff into some other, probably-unencrypted, cloud drive. If you have ever felt the absurdity of carefully encrypting your notes while your sensitive documents sit naked in Google Drive, Filarr closes that gap and Notesnook structurally cannot.
Second: the graph view. Connecting a note to a file to another note and seeing the shape of it is a genuinely different way to navigate knowledge than notebooks and tags, and Notesnook does not offer it. Third: local-first as the default, not a fallback. Filarr's data is authoritative on your disk, works fully offline as the normal mode, and survives subscription cancellation, company disappearance, and server outages without losing a single feature, because the cloud was only ever optional. Notesnook is excellent but architecturally more account-and-sync centric. Fourth: per-file key isolation and plain encrypted blobs you can back up and move with ordinary tools, plus bring-your-own-storage so you can point sync at your own S3 bucket. Fifth: multi-profile workspaces, so work and personal are fully separated encrypted worlds rather than folders in one account. And sixth, quietly important: free forever, fully local, with no account required to get the entire encrypted workspace working. You can run Filarr for years, encrypt everything, and never pay a cent unless you want the convenience of cloud sync.
Migrating between them
Moving from Notesnook to Filarr, or the reverse, is not push-button, and I would be lying if I said friction did not exist. From Notesnook, your data lives as encrypted notes in an account, and Notesnook lets you export your notes, typically to formats like Markdown, HTML or its own format. Those exported notes drop naturally into Filarr, since Filarr handles Markdown and many file formats directly, and once they are in, you gain the ability to sit them next to the actual files they reference and wire up the graph, which is the whole reason you would move. What you lose in that direction is Notesnook-specific niceties like monographs and, for now, the mobile parity. What you gain is a home for everything that was never a note in the first place.
Going the other way, from Filarr to Notesnook, your notes are already local files, so exporting or copying the text content into Notesnook is straightforward, but your non-note files have no real destination in a notes app, so you would either leave them as attachments or, more likely, keep them elsewhere, which reintroduces the exact scattering problem you may have left Notesnook to escape. The honest friction in both directions is the same friction that defines the whole comparison: notes port cleanly, files do not port into a notes-only world. Whichever way you go, budget an afternoon, keep your original until you have verified the migration, and remember that with encrypted apps you are moving decrypted exports between two encrypted homes, so do that work on a trusted machine and clean up any plaintext intermediate files when you are done.
Pricing, decoded
Headline numbers hide the real cost, so let me run scenarios. Notesnook has a generous free tier for note-takers, then Essential at $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year for a gigabyte of monthly storage, Pro at $6.99 a month or roughly $69.99 a year for ten gigabytes and larger file support, and Believer at $8.99 a month or about $89.99 a year for twenty-five gigabytes, with multi-year options on the higher tiers. Filarr is free forever if you only use it locally, with cloud sync starting at 4 EUR a month, and there is no legacy 9.99 or 29.99 tier despite what some stale listings claim.
Scenario one, the pure text-only minimalist: you write notes, attach almost nothing, and want it on your phone. Notesnook free might cover you entirely, and if you outgrow it, $1.99 a month Essential is the cheapest serious option on the board. Filarr is free locally but you would be paying 4 EUR a month for sync you may not even need if you are single-device, and you would be waiting on mobile, so for this person Notesnook simply wins on cost and fit. Scenario two, the document-heavy knowledge worker: you have gigabytes of PDFs, scans, and images you want encrypted alongside notes. On Notesnook you are pushed toward Pro at $6.99 a month for ten gigabytes and larger files, and even then those files are attachments in a notes app, not a real file workspace. On Filarr you get the whole file-plus-notes-plus-graph workspace free locally, and 4 EUR a month if you want it synced, and crucially you can point sync at your own S3 bucket to control storage costs directly. For this person Filarr is both cheaper for what it does and structurally the right shape.
Scenario three, the privacy maximalist who self-hosts: you want zero dependence on a vendor's servers. Notesnook lets you self-host the entire GPL sync server, alpha and unsupported, but fully yours, so your ongoing cost is your own infrastructure and your own labor, which for a homelab person is close to free in dollars and real in time. Filarr lets you bring your own S3-compatible bucket for sync while keeping the authoritative copy local, so you pay your storage provider directly and skip Filarr's hosted plan. Both serve this person well, and the choice comes back to notes-only versus notes-plus-files rather than to price. The meta-lesson: the cheapest option is not a number, it is the tool whose shape matches your data, because the expensive outcome is paying for a tool you fight against.
Open source and licensing, in practice
Licensing sounds like lawyer noise until it decides whether you can trust and control your own tools. Notesnook is GPL-3.0 across the board, a strong copyleft open-source license, which means you can read every line, verify the encryption claims yourself or trust that others have, fork it if the company ever goes a direction you hate, and self-host the now-available sync server. For a privacy tool, this is close to ideal, because the entire pitch of end-to-end encryption rests on "trust the math, not the marketing," and open source is what lets independent people check the math. This is a genuine and principled strength, and it is one of the strongest reasons to pick Notesnook if software freedom is central to your values.
Filarr's licensing is split and you should understand it precisely rather than fuzzily. The desktop app is BSL 1.1, the Business Source License, which is source-available: you can read the code and inspect the crypto, but it carries usage restrictions and typically converts to a fully open license after a delay, so it is not GPL-equivalent freedom today. The Filarr website, a separate repository, is AGPL-3.0. In practice, what this means for you as a user is that you can still inspect Filarr's client code to verify the encryption behaves as claimed, which is the thing that matters most for trust, but you do not get the full fork-and-do-anything rights that GPL grants, and you cannot self-host a Filarr sync server the way you can Notesnook's, though you can bring your own S3 bucket. If your bar is "I must be able to read the code that encrypts my data," both clear it. If your bar is "it must be fully open source under a classic copyleft license and I must be able to run the whole server stack myself," Notesnook clears it and Filarr, honestly, does not yet.
Which one is for you
Let me get specific, because "it depends" is a cop-out and you came here for a decision.
If you are a phone-first note-taker, someone who captures thoughts on the go, journals in bed, and wants an identical polished experience on iOS, Android, desktop and web today, choose Notesnook. Its mobile maturity and years of editor refinement are exactly what you need, and Filarr's in-progress mobile would frustrate you daily. You will be happy, and you will pay little or nothing.
If you are a privacy-maximalist self-hoster who wants to own the entire stack, read every line, and run your own server with no company in the loop, choose Notesnook. Its full GPL-3.0 licensing and self-hostable sync server give you a level of end-to-end control that Filarr's BSL client and BYOS-only model do not match today. This is your tool, and it is a principled choice.
If you are a document-heavy knowledge worker, researcher, freelancer, or anyone whose sensitive data is a messy mix of notes AND files, PDFs, scans, images, contracts, choose Filarr. This is the case Filarr was built for and the case Notesnook structurally cannot serve without leaking your files into some other, likely-unencrypted, drive. The graph view and per-file encryption of your actual documents will change how safe and organized you feel, and you can run it free locally to find out before paying anything.
And if you are the local-first believer who wants your data to live on your own disk first, work fully offline as the default, survive any company's death or any subscription lapse without losing a feature, and treat the cloud as an optional convenience rather than the foundation, choose Filarr. That is its deepest design principle, and no amount of Notesnook's excellent sync changes the fact that Notesnook's center of gravity is the account, while Filarr's is your disk.
Conclusion
Here is my actual position, competitor and all. Notesnook is a superb encrypted notes app, more mature than Filarr, better on mobile, cleaner on open-source licensing, audited, and cheaper for pure text users, and if your data is mostly words and your life is mostly on your phone, you should probably use it and feel good about the choice. I mean that. Building Filarr did not blind me to the fact that Notesnook does the notes-app job better than Filarr does today, because Notesnook has spent years doing exactly that one job well.
But Filarr is not trying to be a better notes app. It is trying to be the encrypted home for everything a notes app leaves out, your files, alongside your notes, connected by a graph, owned locally first, with the cloud reduced to an optional follower rather than the master. If you have ever felt the quiet hypocrisy of encrypting your notes while your documents sit exposed, that gap is the whole reason Filarr exists, and Notesnook, by design, cannot close it. So the choice is not which app is better in the abstract. It is which shape of encrypted tool fits the true center of your data. Pick the notes app if you live in text. Pick the workspace if you live in files and notes together. Either way, you are encrypting your life instead of renting it out in plaintext, and that is the decision that actually mattered.
FAQ
Is Notesnook or Filarr more secure? Both are seriously designed and both encrypt data so the server cannot read it. Notesnook uses XChaCha20-Poly1305 with Argon2 key derivation and has been examined by security researchers, which gives it an edge in default brute-force resistance and outside validation. Filarr uses AES-256-GCM with per-file keys and PBKDF2-SHA512 at 600k iterations, with Argon2id optional, plus the local-first advantage that a fully offline setup may have no cloud copy to attack at all. For almost everyone, your password strength matters more than the difference between them.
Can Notesnook manage files and documents like Filarr? Not really. Notesnook is a notes app that supports attachments, so files ride along inside notes. Filarr treats files as first-class citizens across 51+ formats and organizes them alongside notes in one encrypted workspace with a graph view. If your data is mostly documents rather than prose, that difference is the whole story.
What happens if the company shuts down or I cancel? With Filarr, your data is authoritative on your local disk, so cancellation or company disappearance costs you no features; the cloud was only ever an optional copy. With Notesnook, your local cache keeps working and you can export your notes, and because the sync server is self-hostable you can run your own backend, though the product is more account-centric by design.
What if I forget my password? Both apps are zero-knowledge, so there is no magic reset. Filarr gives you a 24-word BIP-39 recovery phrase; Notesnook gives you recovery and encryption keys. Save that material on paper, stored separately from your devices, because if you lose both your password and your recovery material, the data is mathematically unrecoverable, which is the guarantee working correctly.
Is Filarr open source like Notesnook? Partly. Notesnook is fully GPL-3.0 across clients and its self-hostable sync server. Filarr's desktop app is BSL 1.1, which is source-available with a delayed transition to open, and the Filarr website is separately AGPL-3.0. You can inspect Filarr's client code to verify its encryption, but you do not get GPL's full fork-and-self-host-the-server rights today.
Which is cheaper? For pure text users, Notesnook is cheaper, with a generous free tier and Essential at $1.99 a month. Filarr is free forever if used locally, with cloud sync from 4 EUR a month, and it can point sync at your own S3 bucket to control costs. For document-heavy users, Filarr is often cheaper for what it actually does, since Notesnook would push you to a $6.99 Pro tier and still only store files as attachments.
Does Filarr have a mobile app like Notesnook? Not yet at the same level. Notesnook has mature iOS and Android apps refined over years. Filarr's desktop runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and mobile is in progress. If phone-first capture is central to how you work, this is the single strongest reason to choose Notesnook today.
Can I self-host either one? Notesnook offers a self-hostable sync server, currently described as alpha and unsupported, built on .NET with MongoDB and S3-compatible storage like Minio, so you can run the whole stack yourself. Filarr does not offer a self-hostable server, but it lets you bring your own S3-compatible bucket for sync while keeping the authoritative copy on your local disk.