Standard Notes vs Filarr: Two Honest Approaches to Encrypted Notes, Compared in Depth
Standard Notes vs Filarr compared in depth: encryption, threat models, sync, recovery, pricing and licensing of two honest encrypted notes approaches.
Mathis Belouar-Pruvot
Quick Answer
Standard Notes and Filarr are both built for people who refuse to leave their notes sitting unencrypted on someone else's server, but they solve the problem from opposite ends. Standard Notes is a cloud-first, end-to-end encrypted notes app: your data lives encrypted on Proton-owned servers, sync is the product, and on the free plan you get plain text only. Filarr is a local-first encrypted workspace where your notes, your files, and a graph that links them live encrypted on your own disk first, with cloud sync as an optional extra. Pick Standard Notes if you want a mature, audited, mobile-ready note-taking app with a long track record and you mostly write text. Pick Filarr if you want encryption that includes real files in 51+ formats, a graph view, and data that physically stays on your machine by default. The deepest difference isn't the cipher — it's where the bytes live and what counts as "your stuff."
Why this comparison matters right now
There's a particular kind of person who reads the privacy policy before they sign up. They've been burned before — by Evernote changing its terms, by a free service that quietly started training on user content, by the slow realization that "the cloud" is just a computer in a building they'll never see, owned by a company whose incentives may not survive the next funding round. If that's you, you've probably already found Standard Notes. It's been the default answer to "encrypted notes app" for the better part of a decade, and for good reason. But the landscape shifted in 2024, and the question of who actually controls your notes got more complicated, not less.
When Proton acquired Standard Notes in April 2024, a lot of privacy-conscious users felt two things at once: relief that a beloved tool had a sustainable home, and a faint unease that the independent scrappiness which made Standard Notes appealing had been folded into a much larger Swiss company. Both reactions are reasonable. And in the same window, a quieter trend has been building underneath the whole notes-app category: people are tired of the distinction between "my notes" and "my files." They have a PDF lease agreement, a folder of tax documents, a few hundred photos they'd rather not hand to Google, and a pile of markdown notes — and they want one place that treats all of it with the same seriousness about encryption. That's the gap I kept running into when I built Filarr, and it's the reason this comparison isn't just "two notes apps, fight."
I'll be upfront about my bias, because pretending otherwise would insult you. I build Filarr. I think local-first encryption is the right default, and I'll spend a good chunk of this essay arguing for it. But I also think Standard Notes is a genuinely excellent piece of software made by people who care, and I'm going to tell you plainly where it beats Filarr — including places where it isn't close. A comparison where the author's product wins every category is marketing pretending to be analysis, and you can smell it from a mile away. So this is the honest version: where each tool came from, how each one actually encrypts your data down to the cipher and the key-derivation function, what happens when your laptop gets stolen or your password is weak or a court comes knocking, and which one fits which kind of person.
Where these two products came from
Standard Notes has the longer story, and it's a good one. Mo Bitar founded it in 2016 out of Chicago, and the origin was almost a protest. Evernote — the giant of the era — had been making moves that spooked privacy-minded users, and Bitar's response was to build a note app whose entire architecture assumed the server should never be able to read your notes. That principle, zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption, wasn't bolted on later; it was the foundation stone. Standard Notes deliberately rejected venture capital for years, grew through community and word of mouth, and leaned hard into open source. It built a reputation as the boring-in-a-good-way option: it wasn't flashy, it wasn't trying to be your second brain or your project manager, it was trying to be a text editor you could trust with a decade of your private thoughts. That focus is a feature, and the app's longevity proves the bet was sound.
The encryption protocol matured over several versions, eventually settling on XChaCha20-Poly1305 as the cipher and Argon2 for key derivation — a genuinely modern, well-respected stack that I'll dig into later. The app went cross-platform early and stayed there: Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, all real, all maintained. Over the years it accumulated more than 300,000 users, a paid tier ecosystem of editors and themes, and eventually encrypted file storage. Then in April 2024, Proton AG — the Geneva company behind Proton Mail and Proton Drive — acquired it. The framing from both sides was a "marriage of values": two companies that had refused VC, embraced open source, and committed to zero-knowledge encryption joining forces. Standard Notes kept its brand and team and continues as a distinct product. It's worth noting, for completeness and honesty, that founder Mo Bitar later left Proton, which is the kind of detail that matters if you care about who's steering a product you depend on. None of this makes Standard Notes worse — Proton's resources are real and its privacy commitments are among the most credible in the industry — but it does mean the "scrappy independent" story has a new chapter.
Filarr is younger, and I won't pretend otherwise — that youth is both its honesty problem and its design advantage. I built Filarr because I wanted something Standard Notes wasn't trying to be: not a notes app with file attachments tacked on, but a workspace where encrypted files were first-class citizens alongside notes, connected by a graph. The architecture started from a different axiom than Standard Notes did. Where Standard Notes asked "how do we make sure the server can't read your notes," Filarr asks "why is the server involved at all?" Your data is encrypted on your own disk, file by file, and the cloud is something you can switch on if you want sync — not the place your life lives by default. The desktop app is built on Electron and React, runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux today, and a mobile app is in progress. It supports more than 51 file formats, ships a graph view, and offers multiple workspace profiles. It's open source under the Business Source License 1.1 (the website is separately AGPL-3.0). It is, in 2026, the newer and less battle-tested of the two, and I'll come back to what that costs you.
The philosophical fracture: cloud-first encryption vs local-first encryption
Here is the fork in the road, and almost everything else flows from it. Standard Notes and Filarr both believe your notes should be unreadable to anyone but you. They disagree, fundamentally, about where your notes should live. Standard Notes is cloud-first: the canonical home of your data is a server, your data is encrypted before it leaves your device so the server only ever holds ciphertext, and your local apps are clients that sync down a copy. This is end-to-end encryption done properly — the server genuinely can't read your notes — and it's a model with enormous benefits. Filarr is local-first: the canonical home of your data is the encrypted files on your own disk, the app works fully offline with no account at all, and the cloud is an optional sync layer that, in the code, treats your data as opaque encrypted blobs. The server doesn't "hold your notes that you also have a copy of"; you hold your notes, and the server holds an encrypted echo if and only if you ask it to.
Let me make this concrete with a scenario, because abstractions like "local-first" mean nothing until you live them. Imagine it's a Saturday and your home internet is down — a router died, the ISP is having a bad day, whatever. With Standard Notes, the desktop and mobile apps cache your notes locally and you can keep working offline; this works well for text. But the cloud is still the source of truth, and certain things — file access in particular — have historically had offline gaps, especially on mobile, where "offline file access" has been advertised in ways that didn't fully match the implementation. With Filarr, the internet being down is a non-event, because the internet was never in the loop. Your encrypted files were always on your disk; the app reads and writes them locally; sync is just a thing that would have happened in the background if there were a connection, and its absence changes nothing about your ability to work. That's the felt difference between cloud-first and local-first: not "can I work offline" — both can, to varying degrees — but "what is the default, and what is the exception."
The philosophical fracture has a second edge that's easy to miss: what happens to your access if the company changes. With a cloud-first model, your ongoing ability to use the full product is entangled with the provider's continued existence and goodwill. Standard Notes mitigates this beautifully — it's open source, it offers data export, and Proton is about as trustworthy a steward as exists — but the structural fact remains that the server is in the critical path. With local-first, the company could vanish tomorrow and your encrypted files would still be sitting on your disk, openable by the desktop app you already have, decryptable with the password and recovery phrase you already hold. I don't say this to fearmonger about Standard Notes specifically; I say it because the two architectures distribute risk differently, and a privacy-conscious person should choose which distribution they prefer with eyes open. Cloud-first concentrates convenience and centralizes a dependency. Local-first distributes resilience and pushes responsibility onto you. Neither is morally superior. They're different bets about where you want your single point of failure to be.
What each tool is actually for
It would be a mistake to treat these as interchangeable, because they're optimized for different center-of-mass use cases. Standard Notes is, at its heart, a writing tool. It's built for the person who lives in text — journal entries, meeting notes, research snippets, passwords and secure notes, the long-running personal log. Its free tier is deliberately plain text, and that constraint is almost a philosophy: a note should be durable, portable, and uncomplicated, and the fancier editors (rich text, markdown, spreadsheets, code) are paid upgrades layered on top of that plain-text core. When you use Standard Notes the way it wants to be used, you get a calm, focused, distraction-free environment that's been refined over years, with thoughtful touches like note history, tags, and a tag-based organization model. It is not trying to be your file manager or your knowledge graph. It's trying to be the most trustworthy text box you've ever typed into, and it largely succeeds.
Filarr is built for a messier reality. Most people's private data isn't just notes — it's notes plus the documents the notes refer to, plus the photos and PDFs and spreadsheets that don't fit in a text box. Filarr's central use case is the person who wants one encrypted home for all of it: write a note about a contract, drop the actual signed PDF next to it, link them in the graph, and have both encrypted with the same per-file AES-256-GCM treatment. The graph view is the connective tissue — it lets you see how notes and files relate, which is closer to how an Obsidian user thinks than how a Standard Notes user thinks. Filarr also leans into workspace profiles, so you can keep a work vault and a personal vault genuinely separate. The trade-off is honesty: a workspace that does notes-and-files-and-graph is inherently doing more than a tool that does notes superbly, and "does more" and "does one thing flawlessly" are in permanent tension. If all you'll ever type is text, Filarr's file and graph capabilities are weight you're carrying for no reason, and Standard Notes' focus is a virtue you should value.
Encryption, in real depth, with the threat models that matter
This is the section that should decide things for a privacy-conscious reader, so let's slow down and be precise, because "military-grade encryption" marketing is worthless and the details are everything. Standard Notes encrypts your notes, tags, and other data with XChaCha20-Poly1305, an authenticated stream cipher that is genuinely excellent — it's the extended-nonce variant of ChaCha20-Poly1305, widely respected, and recommended by the likes of Cloudflare and Google as a modern alternative to AES. For key derivation it uses Argon2, the memory-hard, GPU-resistant function that won the Password Hashing Competition and is the current best-practice choice for turning a human password into a cryptographic key. Your encryption keys are generated from your account password, the server only ever sees ciphertext, and the whole thing is end-to-end encrypted. This is a serious, modern, well-chosen cryptographic stack, and anyone who tells you XChaCha20-Poly1305 with Argon2 is weak doesn't know what they're talking about.
Filarr makes different but equally defensible choices, and the architecture reflects its local-first, file-centric design. Filarr encrypts each file with AES-256-GCM, and crucially it uses a per-file key: every file gets its own File Encryption Key (FEK), and that FEK is wrapped by a Key Encryption Key (KEK) derived from your password. For key derivation, Filarr uses PBKDF2-SHA512 at 600,000 iterations — the OWASP 2024 recommended figure — with Argon2id available as an option (configured with 64 MB of memory, 3 iterations, and a parallelism of 4, producing a 256-bit key). The per-file key design is the architecturally interesting part: because every file has its own isolated key wrapped by your master key, compromising one file's key doesn't hand an attacker the rest, and the design maps naturally onto a world where you have thousands of individual files rather than one big synced note database. Cipher-wise, AES-256-GCM and XChaCha20-Poly1305 are both authenticated, both at the 256-bit security level, and the choice between them is closer to a matter of engineering taste than a meaningful security gap. On key derivation, the honest comparison is that Argon2 (Standard Notes' default) is memory-hard in a way PBKDF2 is not, which is a point in Standard Notes' favor for its default — though Filarr offers Argon2id as an option and its PBKDF2 iteration count is at the current recommended level.
Now let's run the threat models, because that's where these choices either pay off or don't. Threat model one: a malicious or compromised server. Suppose the company's servers are breached, or an insider goes rogue, or a hosting provider is subpoenaed and hands over everything. For Standard Notes, this is the threat the whole architecture is built to neutralize — the server holds only ciphertext encrypted with keys it never sees, so a breach yields encrypted blobs and nothing more. For Filarr, this threat is even more contained, because by default there may be nothing on a server at all — if you haven't enabled cloud sync, the server isn't holding anything; and if you have, the sync code (sync.ts) treats your data as opaque encrypted blobs in Cloudflare R2, a zero-knowledge design where the storage holds ciphertext it cannot read. Both pass this test. The difference is that Filarr lets you opt out of the server entirely, while Standard Notes' model assumes the server is present.
Threat model two: the stolen laptop. Someone takes your physical machine. For both apps, the answer comes down to your password, because that's what protects the local data at rest. Filarr's files on disk are AES-256-GCM encrypted with keys wrapped by your password-derived KEK, so a thief with your disk has ciphertext and needs your password to do anything with it. Standard Notes' local cache is similarly protected by your account password. In both cases, the strength of your protection collapses to the strength of your password and the cost of guessing it — which brings us to threat model three. Threat model three: the weak password. If your password is "summer2024," no cipher on earth saves you; the attacker doesn't break AES or XChaCha20, they guess the password and derive the key the same way you do. This is exactly what key-derivation hardening is for, and it's the one place the defaults differ in a way you should care about. Standard Notes' Argon2 is memory-hard, meaning each guess costs the attacker real RAM, which kneecaps GPU and ASIC cracking rigs. Filarr's default PBKDF2-SHA512 at 600,000 iterations makes each guess computationally expensive but not memory-hard, so a well-funded attacker with GPUs has an easier time at the margins — which is precisely why Filarr offers Argon2id as an option, and why, if you're choosing Filarr and you worry about this threat, you should turn it on. The deeper lesson is the same for both apps: use a strong, high-entropy password, because that's the load-bearing wall.
Threat model four: legal compulsion. A court orders the company to produce your data. For Standard Notes, the company can produce the ciphertext it holds, but cannot produce your plaintext or your keys, because it never had them — that's the entire point of zero-knowledge E2EE, and it's a genuine, meaningful protection. For Filarr, if you've never enabled sync, there is simply nothing to compel from the company — your data was never on its servers; a court would have to come to your physical device. If you have enabled sync, the situation mirrors Standard Notes: opaque encrypted blobs the company can't decrypt. Both architectures resist legal compulsion well; Filarr's local-first default gives you the additional option of not being in the company's database at all, which is a different and in some ways stronger position.
Sync and multi-device, mechanically explained
Sync is where cloud-first and local-first feel most different in daily use, so it's worth being mechanical about it. With Standard Notes, sync is the spine of the product. You sign in on every device, and each device encrypts locally and syncs ciphertext through the server, which acts as the coordination point and the source of truth. The upside is that this is mature, well-understood, and just works: edit on your phone, see it on your laptop, with conflict handling and note history that have been refined over years. The model also means your devices don't need to be on at the same time — the server holds the latest encrypted state and any device can catch up whenever it connects. This is the single biggest practical advantage of cloud-first, and it's not a small one: effortless, reliable, asynchronous multi-device sync is genuinely hard to build, and Standard Notes has had a long time to get it right.
Filarr inverts the relationship. The source of truth is the encrypted files on your disk, and sync — when you enable it — is a layer that pushes encrypted blobs to Cloudflare R2 (or, if you use Bring Your Own Storage, to any S3-compatible bucket you control) and pulls them down to your other devices. Mechanically, when sync is on, changes to your local files get encrypted and uploaded as opaque blobs; other devices download and decrypt them. When sync is off — or when you simply have no internet — the app keeps working against local files with zero degradation, because local is the default, not a fallback. What happens if Filarr's servers go down? If you're on the default cloud sync, sync pauses and your local work continues uninterrupted; nothing you do locally is blocked. What happens if you cancel your subscription? Your data was never trapped in the cloud — it's on your disk, openable by the app you have. And the BYOS option means you can route sync through storage you own outright, so even the sync layer doesn't have to involve Filarr's infrastructure at all. The trade-off, in fairness, is that local-first sync with opt-in cloud is a younger, less battle-tested system than Standard Notes' years-hardened sync, and multi-device conflict resolution is exactly the kind of thing that benefits from age. Standard Notes has the maturity edge here, clearly.
Recovery and losing access — the scenarios nobody plans for
Encryption's dark twin is recovery, because the same math that stops an attacker from reading your notes stops you from reading them if you lose your key. This is where a lot of people get hurt, and both apps deserve scrutiny. The brutal truth of zero-knowledge systems is that if the provider genuinely can't read your data, the provider genuinely can't recover it for you either — "we can't read it" and "we can reset your access" are mutually exclusive promises, and any service offering both is lying about one of them. So the question isn't "can I recover if I forget my password" in the easy sense; it's "what mechanism does each app give me to recover myself."
Standard Notes ties your encryption to your account password, and the honest framing is that if you forget that password and have no other recovery mechanism set up, your encrypted data is unrecoverable — that's the cost of true E2EE, and Standard Notes is upfront that it can't reverse it. The mitigation is good password hygiene, keeping your password in a password manager, and maintaining your own decrypted backups (Standard Notes supports data export). Filarr addresses the same problem with an explicit recovery mechanism baked into the design: a 24-word BIP-39 recovery phrase, generated at setup, carrying 264 bits of entropy. This is the same standard the cryptocurrency world uses for wallet recovery, and the logic is identical — the phrase is an out-of-band key that can restore access independent of your password. Concretely, if you forget your Filarr password, the 24-word phrase is your lifeline; if you lose both the password and the phrase, your encrypted files are mathematically unrecoverable, by design, because anything else would mean the encryption was theater. The practical implication is the same as it always is with serious encryption: write the recovery phrase down, store it somewhere safe and offline, and treat it like the master key it is.
The account-death scenario is worth a moment too, because it's the one nobody plans for and everybody eventually faces. If something happens to you, what happens to your encrypted notes? For both apps, the answer is that your data is only as accessible as the credentials you've left behind. With Standard Notes, an heir needs your password (and any backups). With Filarr, an heir needs your password or your 24-word recovery phrase, and because the files are local, they need access to the device or a backup of those files. In both cases, the responsible move is the same and slightly morbid: if you want someone to inherit your encrypted data, you need to make arrangements for them to receive the credentials, because no zero-knowledge provider can or will hand your data to anyone, including grieving family. This isn't a flaw in either app; it's the unavoidable cost of encryption that actually works.
The comparison table, with the analysis that makes it honest
A table is useful for orientation and dangerous for understanding, because it flattens nuance into checkmarks. Read the prose around it, not just the grid.
| Dimension | Standard Notes | Filarr |
|---|---|---|
| Core model | Cloud-first, end-to-end encrypted notes | Local-first encrypted workspace (notes + files + graph) |
| Cipher | XChaCha20-Poly1305 | AES-256-GCM, per-file key (FEK wrapped by KEK) |
| Key derivation | Argon2 (memory-hard) | PBKDF2-SHA512 600k iterations; Argon2id optional |
| Where data lives | Encrypted on provider servers; local cache | Encrypted on your disk; cloud sync optional |
| Recovery | Account password (+ your own backups) | 24-word BIP-39 recovery phrase |
| Files | Encrypted file storage on paid tiers | 51+ file formats, encrypted, included |
| Graph view | No | Yes |
| Workspaces/profiles | Tag-based organization | Multiple workspace profiles |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android | Windows, macOS, Linux; mobile in progress |
| Free tier | Plain text notes, unlimited, all devices | Everything, locally, free forever |
| Paid | Productivity ~$90/yr, Professional ~$120/yr | Cloud sync from €4/month |
| Self-hosting / BYOS | Self-hostable server (open source) | BYOS: any S3-compatible bucket |
| License | Open source | Desktop BSL 1.1 (website AGPL-3.0) |
| Maturity | Since 2016, 300k+ users, Proton-backed | Younger (2026), smaller ecosystem |
What the table can't show is that several of these rows aren't apples-to-apples. "Files: yes/included" hides that Standard Notes' file storage is a genuinely good, encrypted, established feature that happens to sit behind a paid tier, while Filarr's file handling is the center of its design rather than an add-on. "Cipher" makes AES-256-GCM and XChaCha20-Poly1305 look like a meaningful choice when they're both excellent and the practical security difference is negligible. "Maturity" is a single word doing enormous work — it encodes years of audits, bug fixes, sync edge cases handled, and a community that has stress-tested the product in ways a younger app simply hasn't experienced yet. And "platforms" hides the most important asymmetry of all: Standard Notes has real, shipping mobile apps on iOS and Android, and Filarr's mobile is still in progress. If you live on your phone, that row alone may end the discussion. Use the table to get oriented, then let the prose correct it.
Where Standard Notes genuinely wins
Let me be unambiguous, because hedging here would be dishonest: there are areas where Standard Notes is simply the better choice, and some aren't close. The first is maturity and trust earned over time. Standard Notes has been encrypting people's notes since 2016, has more than 300,000 users, has had its protocol scrutinized and refined across multiple versions, and is now backed by Proton — a company whose entire business is built on credible privacy. That track record is not something a younger app can conjure; it's accumulated through years of real-world use, and for data as sensitive as a decade of private notes, a long, boring history of not screwing up is itself a feature. When I tell you Filarr is newer, I'm telling you it hasn't yet earned that particular kind of trust, and you should weight that heavily.
The second is mobile, and this one is decisive for a lot of people. Standard Notes has mature, maintained iOS and Android apps with offline note access, so your encrypted notes are genuinely in your pocket and syncing across every device you own. Filarr's mobile app is in progress, which means that today, if your note-taking happens primarily on a phone, Standard Notes is the only one of these two that actually serves you. I'm not going to spin that. A notes tool you can't use on your phone is, for many people, not a notes tool at all, and Standard Notes wins that battle by default until Filarr ships mobile.
The third is the sync and multi-device experience, which Standard Notes has spent years hardening. Effortless, asynchronous, conflict-aware sync across many devices is one of the hardest things to build correctly in this category, and Standard Notes' cloud-first model has had a long time to get the edge cases right. Filarr's optional sync is younger and inherently less proven. The fourth is focus: if you want a calm, distraction-free, text-first writing environment with a refined editor lineup and a long-considered organization model, Standard Notes' single-minded dedication to notes is a strength that Filarr's broader scope can't match — doing one thing beautifully beats doing three things well when the one thing is all you need. And the fifth is the ecosystem and community: more users, more documentation, more accumulated answers to the weird question you'll eventually have, plus the institutional backing of Proton. None of these are small. Taken together, they make Standard Notes the safer, more obvious recommendation for a large set of people, and I'd send a phone-centric, text-only, maturity-prioritizing user to it without hesitation.
Where Filarr genuinely wins
Now the other side, argued just as honestly. The first place Filarr wins is the scope of what gets encrypted. Standard Notes is a notes app that can also store files on paid tiers; Filarr is a workspace where files in 51+ formats are first-class citizens, encrypted with the same per-file AES-256-GCM treatment as everything else, with a graph view tying notes and files together. If your private data is more than text — and for most people it is, between PDFs, images, spreadsheets, and documents — Filarr treats the whole mess as one encrypted estate rather than a notes app with an attachment feature. That's not a marginal difference; it's a different conception of what "my encrypted stuff" means.
The second is the local-first default itself. With Filarr, your data physically lives encrypted on your disk, the app works fully offline with no account required, and the cloud is something you opt into rather than something you're enrolled in. This is the deepest expression of data ownership available in this comparison: not "the server can't read my data" (Standard Notes achieves that too) but "the server doesn't have to be involved at all." If you've internalized that the cloud is just someone else's computer, Filarr lets you keep your computer's data on your computer. The third, closely related, is Bring Your Own Storage — if you do want sync, you can route it through any S3-compatible bucket you control, so even the sync layer doesn't require trusting Filarr's infrastructure. That's a level of architectural control Standard Notes' model doesn't offer in the same way.
The fourth is the free tier's honesty about capability. Standard Notes' free plan is deliberately plain text — a fine philosophy, but it means rich features and file storage are paywalled. Filarr is free forever for everything done locally; you get the full encrypted-workspace experience, files and graph included, without paying, and you only pay (from €4/month) if you want cloud sync. For a user who's happy keeping their data local, that's a complete, capable, free product. The fifth is the per-file key architecture, which isolates each file's encryption key behind your master key — a design that fits a file-heavy world and limits blast radius in ways a single-database model doesn't. And the sixth is the graph view and multi-workspace profiles, which serve the Obsidian-minded user who thinks in connections and wants genuinely separate vaults for work and personal life. These aren't "Filarr does everything better" claims — they're specific, real advantages that matter to a specific, real kind of user: the one whose data is files-plus-notes, who wants local-first ownership, and who's fine on desktop for now.
Migrating between them, with the friction named
If you're considering a move in either direction, you deserve a realistic picture of the friction, not a frictionless fantasy. Moving from Standard Notes to Filarr starts with export: Standard Notes lets you export your data (including a decrypted backup), which gives you your notes in a portable form you can bring into Filarr and re-encrypt locally. The clean part is that your text comes with you. The friction is that organizational metadata doesn't always map one-to-one — Standard Notes' tag-based model and Filarr's graph-and-workspace model are different mental shapes, so you'll spend some time re-organizing rather than getting a pixel-perfect transplant. And if you relied on Standard Notes' editors (rich text, spreadsheets), expect to reconcile formatting. The upside you gain is that you can now bring your actual files into the same encrypted home as your notes, which Standard Notes kept in a more notes-centric world.
Moving from Filarr to Standard Notes is the mirror image, and I'll name its friction too because pretending switching costs only run one way is a salesman's trick. You'd export your Filarr notes and import them into Standard Notes, gaining mature mobile apps and a longer track record — but you'd be moving from a files-and-notes-and-graph workspace into a notes-first tool, which means your files no longer share the same first-class encrypted home and the graph relationships don't carry over. In both directions, the genuinely good news is that neither app locks your data in a proprietary cage: both are export-friendly and both are built by people who believe you should be able to leave. That's a rare and admirable thing in software, and it means the real cost of switching is your time re-organizing, not your data being held hostage. Whichever way you go, do a full export first, verify it opens, and keep it until you're sure the migration took.
Price, decoded with real scenarios
Headline numbers mislead, so let's run actual situations. Standard Notes offers a free Standard plan (plain text, unlimited notes, all devices, end-to-end encrypted), a Productivity plan at roughly $90/year, and a Professional plan at roughly $120/year, with monthly options around $9.99 and $19.99 and a 30% student discount. Filarr is free forever for local use and charges for cloud sync starting at €4/month.
Scenario one: the text-only minimalist who's happy keeping notes in the cloud and never needs rich editors or file storage. Standard Notes' free plan costs them nothing, and it's a great fit — unlimited encrypted notes across all devices for $0. Filarr's free local tier also costs nothing and gives them the full app, but if this person specifically wants cloud sync, that's €4/month with Filarr versus $0 with Standard Notes' free plan. For the pure text-in-the-cloud minimalist, Standard Notes free is unbeatable on price. Scenario two: the files-and-notes power user who wants rich features and file storage with sync. On Standard Notes, that means the Professional plan at roughly $120/year (about $10/month) to unlock files, advanced editors, and the larger storage. On Filarr, the full files-and-notes-and-graph experience is free locally, and cloud sync is €4/month (roughly $50–55/year depending on exchange rates) — meaningfully cheaper for the synced case, with the option to use BYOS. For this user, Filarr is the cheaper path to an encrypted files-and-notes setup.
Scenario three: the local-only privacy maximalist who refuses cloud entirely. Standard Notes can be self-hosted (it's open source), which is free in licensing but costs you the time and competence to run a server. Filarr's local-first free tier needs no server at all — you simply use the app on your disk, $0, no infrastructure. For the person who wants zero cloud and zero server administration, Filarr's free local mode is the lowest-effort, lowest-cost option in the entire comparison. The pattern across all three: Standard Notes wins on price for free cloud-synced plain text, while Filarr wins on price for anyone who wants files, graph, and local-first ownership, and ties or beats it for the no-cloud user. Pick the scenario that's actually you, not the one the headline number flatters.
Open source and licensing, in plain terms
Licensing sounds like lawyer noise until it affects what you can actually do, so here's the practical version. Standard Notes is open source, which has concrete benefits: the encryption code can be audited by anyone, you can self-host the server, and the community can verify that the privacy promises match the implementation. For a privacy-conscious user, auditable code is close to a requirement — "trust us" is not a security model, and Standard Notes' openness lets you (or someone you trust) check the work. This is a real and durable advantage of the Standard Notes ecosystem, reinforced by Proton's own open-source commitments.
Filarr is also open source, but with a distinction worth stating precisely because muddying it would be dishonest: the desktop application is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1, while the website (a separate repository) is under AGPL-3.0. The BSL is a source-available license that lets you read, audit, and verify the code — which is the property you care about most as a privacy-conscious user, since you can confirm the encryption does what it claims — while placing some restrictions on commercial reuse that a permissive license like MIT wouldn't. In plain terms: you can inspect Filarr's crypto, you can verify the per-file AES-256-GCM and the key handling, and that auditability is intact; what BSL limits is largely about competitors repackaging the product, not about your ability to use or scrutinize it. If your priority is "can I or a security researcher read this code and confirm it's honest," both apps satisfy you. If your priority is "is this under a classic OSI-approved open-source license with no commercial-use strings," Standard Notes is the cleaner fit, and I won't pretend BSL is the same thing as a fully permissive license. Distinguishing the client (BSL) from the site (AGPL) matters, and now you know the difference.
Which one is for you — four honest personas
If you are a phone-first, text-only note-taker who wants something proven, choose Standard Notes, and don't overthink it. You'll get mature iOS and Android apps, free unlimited encrypted notes, a decade of track record, and Proton's backing. Filarr's mobile isn't ready for you yet, and your needs don't touch the file-and-graph capabilities that are Filarr's reason to exist. The mature, focused, mobile-ready text tool is exactly what you want, and Standard Notes is the better answer with no asterisks.
If you are a privacy-conscious knowledge worker whose data is files plus notes — the contracts, the PDFs, the images, the documents alongside your writing — and you mostly work on a desktop, choose Filarr. It encrypts the whole estate with per-file AES-256-GCM, ties it together with a graph, gives you the full experience free locally, and keeps your data physically on your disk by default. Standard Notes would make you paywall file storage and would still treat files as guests rather than residents. Filarr is built for precisely your mess.
If you are a local-first purist who wants the cloud out of the loop entirely, choose Filarr's free local mode and optionally use Bring Your Own Storage if you ever want sync. You get zero-cloud operation with no server to administer and no account required, which is the lowest-friction expression of "my data stays on my machine" available here. Standard Notes can be self-hosted, which is admirable, but it asks you to run a server; Filarr asks you to run nothing. If you want ownership without sysadmin work, Filarr fits your principles with less overhead.
And if you are someone for whom proven maturity, the largest community, and a fully OSI-permissive open-source license are non-negotiable, choose Standard Notes, especially now that it's under Proton. Filarr is younger, its ecosystem is smaller, and its desktop license is BSL rather than a classic open-source license. If those factors sit at the top of your list, Standard Notes is the more conservative, better-established choice, and choosing it over my own product is, in that case, the right call.
Conclusion: pick the architecture that matches your life
The honest takeaway is that this isn't a fight one app wins; it's a choice between two coherent philosophies, each excellent at being what it is. Standard Notes is the mature, focused, mobile-ready, cloud-first encrypted notes app — a calm text tool with a long track record, a strong cipher in XChaCha20-Poly1305, memory-hard Argon2 key derivation, real apps on every platform including your phone, and the institutional backing of Proton. If you write text, live on your phone, and value a decade of not screwing up, it's the better tool, and I'll say so plainly even though I build the competitor. Filarr is the local-first encrypted workspace for people whose data is files-plus-notes-plus-connections, who want their bytes on their own disk by default, who'll happily work on a desktop while mobile matures, and who want the full encrypted experience free locally with cheap, optional, BYOS-capable sync. The cipher choices are both fine; the key-derivation defaults slightly favor Standard Notes' Argon2, though Filarr offers Argon2id too; the recovery models differ (account password vs 24-word BIP-39 phrase) but both are real. What actually separates them is where your data lives and what you consider "your stuff." Decide that question first — cloud-first or local-first, notes-only or notes-and-files — and the right tool falls out of the answer. Then, whichever you pick, set a strong password, save your recovery method somewhere safe, and keep a backup, because the best encryption in the world only protects the people who use it carefully.
FAQ
Is Standard Notes more secure than Filarr? Not in a way that matters at the cipher level — both use authenticated 256-bit-class encryption (XChaCha20-Poly1305 for Standard Notes, AES-256-GCM with per-file keys for Filarr) and both are zero-knowledge on the cloud. Standard Notes' default Argon2 key derivation is memory-hard, which is a slight edge over Filarr's default PBKDF2-SHA512 at 600,000 iterations, but Filarr offers Argon2id as an option. The bigger difference is architectural: Filarr can keep your data off any server entirely, while Standard Notes assumes a server holding ciphertext.
Does Standard Notes or Filarr keep my notes on the company's servers? Standard Notes keeps your encrypted data on its servers as the source of truth (you also have a local cache). Filarr keeps your encrypted data on your own disk as the source of truth, and only stores anything on a server (Cloudflare R2 or your own S3 bucket) if you enable optional cloud sync. In both cases the company can only ever see ciphertext, never your plaintext.
Can I use Filarr on my phone like Standard Notes? Not fully yet. Standard Notes has mature iOS and Android apps; Filarr's mobile app is in progress as of 2026 and the desktop apps (Windows, macOS, Linux) are the primary experience. If phone use is essential to you today, Standard Notes is the better fit.
What happens if I forget my password? With Standard Notes, if you forget your account password and have no backup, your data is unrecoverable — that's the cost of true end-to-end encryption. Filarr provides a 24-word BIP-39 recovery phrase generated at setup that can restore access if you lose your password; if you lose both the password and the phrase, the data is unrecoverable by design. Store your recovery method offline and safely.
Is Filarr free, and how does its price compare to Standard Notes? Filarr is free forever for local use, including files and the graph view, with cloud sync starting at €4/month. Standard Notes has a free plain-text plan, a Productivity plan around $90/year, and a Professional plan around $120/year. For free cloud-synced plain text, Standard Notes wins; for an encrypted files-and-notes setup with sync, Filarr is generally cheaper.
Are both apps open source? Yes, both are source-available and auditable, but the licenses differ. Standard Notes is open source under a classic open-source license and can be self-hosted. Filarr's desktop app is under the Business Source License 1.1 (the website is separately AGPL-3.0); you can read and audit the code, but BSL places some restrictions on commercial reuse that a permissive license doesn't.
Does Filarr handle files better than Standard Notes? They take different approaches. Standard Notes offers encrypted file storage on paid tiers, treating files as attachments to a notes-centric product. Filarr treats files in 51+ formats as first-class citizens encrypted with per-file keys and connected to notes through a graph view, with file handling included in the free local tier. If your data is heavily file-based, Filarr is designed around that case.
Did Proton buying Standard Notes change anything for users? Proton acquired Standard Notes in April 2024, and the product continues with its own brand and team, now backed by Proton's resources and aligned with Proton's strong privacy reputation. Founder Mo Bitar later left Proton. For most users the day-to-day experience is unchanged, but if you care about who steers a product long-term, the ownership change is worth knowing.