Beaver Notes

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.