Open Source Bear Alternatives

Short thoughts rarely survive the ceremony of a full note-taking app, where a title, a folder and a template stand between you and the idea. Memos deletes that step and drops whatever you write into a chronological Markdown timeline, on infrastructure you run yourself.

It is deliberately smaller than an all-in-one workspace. A single Docker container with a mounted data directory is the entire deployment, and other install routes are covered in the deployment guide.

The daily loop stays narrow on purpose.

• Quick capture: write Markdown and attach media without naming or filing anything first.
• Light organization: the timeline, search, tags and pins are how you find things again.
• Selective sharing: memos stay private unless you publish the ones you choose to.
• Web clipper: a Chrome and Firefox extension saves pages and selections as source-linked Markdown.
• Data ownership: the project ships zero telemetry and MIT-licensed source you can audit.

A live demo runs for anyone who wants to try before installing, and help arrives through the documentation, Discord and GitHub Discussions. It suits people who want a fast personal log rather than a knowledge base with a hierarchy to keep tidy.

Joplin handles a large number of notes organized into notebooks, all held as Markdown. Notes can be searched, copied, tagged and modified either from the applications themselves or from your own text editor, which keeps the material usable even when Joplin is not the thing opening it.

The app is offline first, so the whole collection lives on your phone or computer and stays reachable with or without a connection. Synchronization is optional and runs through Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive or the project's own paid service, protected end to end by encryption.

Several features exist for moving material in and out.

• Evernote import: formatted content converts to Markdown, and resources and metadata such as geolocation and timestamps come across intact.
• Plain Markdown import: existing Markdown files can be brought in directly.
• Web Clipper: a Firefox and Chrome extension saves pages and screenshots straight into a notebook.
• Full text search: available on every platform the applications run on.
• Plugins and themes: the interface can be customized, and writing your own extension is documented.

Applications exist for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS. Development is funded by donations, which cover the code signing certificates, app store fees and hosting that keep releases shipping, and the project maintains a warrant canary signing key alongside its documentation for anyone who wants to watch for compelled changes.

Tolaria manages markdown knowledge bases on macOS, Windows and Linux. Notes are plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter, so there is no export step and nothing to rescue if you leave. People run second brains in it, organize company docs as context for AI, and store assistant memory and procedures.

Every vault is a git repository, which brings full version history and any git remote you like with no Tolaria server in the path. There are no accounts and no subscriptions, the vault works offline, and the app itself is built with Tauri, React and TypeScript.

The stated principles show up directly in the product.

• Files first: your notes stay portable markdown, readable by any editor and any standard tool.
• Types as lenses: types are navigation aids rather than schemas, with no required fields and no validation to fight.
• Keyboard first: the editor and the command palette are designed for people who would rather not reach for the mouse.
• AI friendly, not AI only: setup paths exist for Claude Code, Codex CLI and Gemini CLI, and an AGENTS file explains the vault to any agent.
• Built from real use: the author keeps a personal vault of more than 10,000 notes in it every day.

Install through Homebrew on macOS or download a release for any of the three platforms, with Windows installers Authenticode signed. First launch offers to clone a getting started vault that walks through the app. Building from source needs Node 20, pnpm 8, stable Rust, and WebKit2GTK with GTK 3 on Linux.

Notesnook is a note-taking app built to prove that privacy does not have to cost convenience. Everything is encrypted on the device before it leaves, using XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2, which keeps the service itself unable to read a single note. Going fully open source was, in the authors' words, the crucial step toward earning that trust.

This repository is a monorepo holding every client, so the web app, the desktop build and the Android and iOS apps all sit here with the packages they share. A single core carries the logic common to all platforms, with separate packages for cryptography, the editor, the web clipper, a streaming file system over IndexedDB, logging and theming.

The stack is deliberately small and consistent.

• TypeScript and JavaScript: newer code is TypeScript, and the older JavaScript is being ported over gradually.
• React: the front end on every platform.
• React Native: the Android and iOS clients.
• Electron: the desktop client.
• npm: the package manager across every project, with no Yarn or pnpm anywhere.

An importer covers migration from other apps, and Vericrypt exists so the encryption claims can be verified rather than taken on faith. Contribution guidelines, style rules and commit conventions are documented, and each project inside the monorepo carries its own architecture notes for anyone going deeper.

Standard Notes keeps notes, files and long-running work in one encrypted place. Sync is end-to-end encrypted, so whoever stores the data cannot read it, which removes the usual trade-off between having your notes everywhere and trusting the service that holds them.

Clients exist for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android alongside the web app, and cross-platform sync is free on an unlimited number of devices. The project puts explicit weight on longevity and sustainability, meaning notes written today should still open years from now.

This repository holds the app itself, and it is meant to be run by anyone who wants to.

• Self-hosting: the web app compiles to static HTML, JavaScript and CSS files served behind any web server.
• Custom sync server: an environment variable points login and registration at a backend of your own.
• Development mode: a yarn install and build pair serves the app locally while you change it.
• Extensions: developers can create and publish plugins, with a documentation hub covering the work.
• Listed: a companion publishing platform turns notes into an online publication with email newsletters.

Getting started needs no installation at all. Register in the web app, download the clients you want, and encrypted sync is on from the first note. For anyone uneasy about a vendor holding even encrypted material, the same account model works against a server you host in a few documented steps.

Beaver Notes is a notes app that starts from a different bargain than most: your notes stay on your device, unindexed and unreadable by anyone else, and you never create an account to write the first one. What makes it worth switching to is mostly an absence of things, no telemetry in the editor, no monthly fee to keep your own writing accessible.

Version 5 is a rewrite rather than an update. The app moved from Electron to Tauri for smaller binaries and better native behavior, and mobile stopped being a separate product when Beaver Pocket was folded back into the main app. It targets macOS, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS.

The core is deliberately ordinary, which is the point.

• Markdown native: notes are plain markdown files, organized with folders, tags and note linking.
• Locked notes: sensitive notes can be locked individually.
• Sync your way: use your own cloud storage, a self-hosted server, or the forthcoming BeaverSync, with no lock-in in any direction.
• Coming in v5: real-time collaboration, version history, backlinks and a plugin system, all of which the old architecture made difficult.
• Community driven: contributors handle translations, documentation and packaging for platforms the maintainers would otherwise miss.

Stable installers are published for every platform, with Linux available as a tarball, an AppImage or a Flathub Flatpak. The v5 beta is built from the tauri branch with yarn and will have rough edges, so bug reports are welcome. The public roadmap takes pushback on priorities.

Zen is a notes app for people who want their writing to stay in plain markdown files on hardware they control. It replaces the rigid folder tree most tools impose with flexible tags, and it keeps the whole thing small enough to forget about once it is running.

The app is a single Go binary or a Docker Compose stack, backed by a local SQLite database, with a minimal dependency footprint and low resource usage. Full-text search is ranked with BM25.

The feature list stays close to what a notes app actually needs day to day.

• Tags over folders: notes are organized by flexible tags rather than a fixed hierarchy.
• Markdown depth: tables, code blocks, task lists, highlights and the rest of the standard syntax.
• Internal links: linked notes open in a side panel preview instead of pulling you away.
• Housekeeping: templates, pinned notes, archive and soft delete, and bulk archive and delete.
• Portability: import and export with your data intact, with companion projects covering automated backups and imports from other services.
• Experimental additions: a canvas for spatial organization stored as JSON Canvas, semantic search for notes and images, and an MCP server for searching, listing and reading notes.

Installation is a make build from source. Be aware of the maintainer's own framing before you depend on it: this is a personal project built for personal use, the codebase is there to fork and modify, and pull requests or issues may not get a reply.

Darkwrite is a note-taking application that stays out of the way and stays on your machine. Notes are stored locally, none of your data is collected, and there is no server to depend on, so an outage somewhere else never leaves you without your writing.

The editor is the center of it. Formatting, headings, todo lists, numbered lists, links, images and tables are all supported, and a cover image can be added to any note. The application is distributed as a desktop build from the releases page.

Customization goes further than most note apps allow.

• Themes: a set of themes ships with the app and you can write your own instead of choosing between light and dark.
• Fonts: the default note font can be changed, overridden for a single note, or set for the interface with everything else following.
• Export: every note exports as HTML and works elsewhere, so there is no lock-in.
• Backups: a one-click archive captures your notes and restores them later.
• No assistant: the app is built to work without an AI bot attached to it.

Darkwrite is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later, with build and development documentation in the repository and a Simplified Chinese translation contributed by the community. It suits someone who wants a private notebook on one machine rather than a shared workspace.