Harbor ·Comparison
Harbor vs Notesnook
Every price and limit below re-checked on September 23, 2026
We make Harbor. So this is a company comparing itself to a competitor, and you should read it that way. Every Notesnook figure below came off Notesnook’s own pricing, download and roadmap pages, or their GitHub, on the date at the top. We’ve given Notesnook its own section, and it’s a long one.
Notesnook is a good app made by a small team that ships constantly. We like it. It’s also built for a different job than ours.
Notesnook is built so nobody can read what you write. Harbor is built so you can find anything you’ve ever kept, including the text inside a scan, a PDF or a handwritten page. Most of the differences below come from that one choice.
What each one costs
| Free | Paid, per year | |
|---|---|---|
| Notesnook | Unlimited notes, unlimited devices, 50 MB uploads a month, 10 MB file cap | Essential $19.99 · Pro $69.99 · Believer $89.99 · 5-year prepay from $299.99 |
| Harbor | A usage allowance, enough to try it and import a notebook or two | $99, or $9.99 a month. One plan, everything in it |
Notesnook is cheaper. That’s the headline and there’s no spinning it.
What the entry price buys is worth knowing, though. Notesnook’s plans differ mostly by how much you can upload:
| Uploads a month | Largest file | |
|---|---|---|
| Notesnook Free | 50 MB | 10 MB |
| Notesnook Essential, $19.99 | 1 GB | 100 MB |
| Notesnook Pro, $69.99 | 10 GB | 1 GB |
| Notesnook Believer, $89.99 | 25 GB | 5 GB |
For a notes library that’s mostly writing, Free or Essential is plenty and you should take the deal. For an Evernote archive full of scans, PDFs and photos, Pro is the realistic tier. Pro against Harbor is $69.99 against $99. A real gap, but about $29 a year, not $79.
Where Notesnook beats us
Plenty, and we’d rather you hear it from us.
It’s encrypted by default, on everything. Every note is end-to-end encrypted before it leaves your device, and there’s no switch to forget. Harbor’s encryption is optional and per note or notebook. If you want encryption as the default rather than a choice, Notesnook is the better app. We’re not going to argue with that.
It’s open source. Apps and sync server, GPLv3, about 14,600 stars on GitHub. Anyone can read the code, and Notesnook built Vericrypt so you can check the encryption on your own notes. You can run your own sync server, too. Harbor is proprietary. You can export everything any time, but you can’t audit us the same way.
The free plan is real. Unlimited notes on unlimited devices, no clock, no card. Ours is an allowance while we settle the numbers, and a vague limit is worse than a stingy one.
Stopping paying costs you less. Cancel Notesnook and you drop to Free, where you can still read, edit and export. Cancel Harbor and your account goes read-only. You keep every note and can export it all, but you can’t edit until you come back. On this one, their approach is kinder than ours.
Linux, properly. Notesnook has Linux desktop apps and is on F-Droid for Android. Harbor on Linux means our web app or our CLI. There’s no Linux desktop app.
The editor has more in it. Two-way note links with backlinks, maths and formulas, outlines, a second-password vault for your most private notes, and published notes behind an optional password. If you write long, connected notes, you’ll feel the difference.
It’s cheaper, and there’s a 5-year prepay. Covered above. It’s true and it matters.
Where we beat Notesnook
We read your scans. Notesnook doesn’t, at any price. Harbor runs OCR over every image and PDF you add, including handwriting. A photographed receipt, a scanned lease, a recipe card in your grandmother’s writing: all searchable like typed text. Notesnook has no OCR and no search inside images or PDFs on any plan. People have asked for it on their GitHub since 2024, and it isn’t on their public roadmap.
For some people this is the whole comparison. If your notes are mostly paper you’ve photographed, an archive you can’t search is a drawer.
Native apps on every platform. Harbor’s Mac app is SwiftUI, iPhone and iPad share one universal Swift app, Android is Kotlin, and Windows is native with x64 and ARM64 builds. Notesnook’s own README says its desktop app is Electron and its mobile apps are React Native. That’s a fair engineering choice, and it’s how three people ship to six platforms. Native apps feel more at home on each system. We’ll publish measurements on memory and launch time rather than ask you to take that on faith.
Your AI can get at your notes. Harbor has a documented REST API, a harbor CLI and an MCP server, so Claude or ChatGPT can search and write in your notes. All of it is on the one plan. Notesnook declined an MCP server in April 2026 and has said it plans a CLI instead. It does have an Inbox API that lets Zapier, IFTTT or a script drop notes in, which is useful, but it only goes one way.
That’s also where encryption bites back. An AI can’t search what nobody can read, and that’s as true in Harbor as anywhere. Encrypt a Harbor note and your assistant can’t see it either.
Audio you can search. Harbor records audio into a note and transcribes it when you press the button, with speakers labeled and a transcript you can search. Notesnook doesn’t transcribe.
A price in writing. Harbor has a written price promise: no increase for three years, then capped at 10% a year. Notesnook’s prices are low and they’ve been clear about staying independent. They just haven’t put a cap on paper.
Can either one read your scans?
| Text inside images | Text inside PDFs | Handwriting | Audio transcripts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notesnook | No | No | No | No |
| Harbor | Yes, every plan | Yes, every plan | Yes | Yes, on request |
Honest limit on ours: neat print reads well, everyday cursive does respectably, and a hurried scrawl is a coin flip. And again, an encrypted Harbor note skips all of this. You get to choose per note which matters more.
Encryption
This is Notesnook’s home ground, so we’ll keep it short.
Notesnook encrypts everything, always, with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2. The company can’t read your notes. It’s the core of the product and it’s done well.
Harbor has optional zero-knowledge encryption, per note or per notebook. When it’s on, we hold ciphertext and can’t read it. When it’s off, we can run OCR, transcription and full-text search on our servers. That’s the trade, and no app gets out of it. We wrote about why it’s unavoidable instead of pretending we’d solved it.
So pick by what your notes are. A private journal wants Notesnook’s default. Ten years of scanned paperwork wants to be searchable.
Platforms
| Mac | Windows | iPhone/iPad | Android | Linux | Web | CLI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notesnook | Electron | Electron | React Native | React Native, plus F-Droid | Desktop app | Yes | Not yet |
| Harbor | Native | Native | Native, universal | Native | Via the web app | Yes, offline-first | Yes |
Both have a web clipper. Both run offline.
Moving from Evernote
Both import Evernote’s .enex export. Harbor brings across notes, notebooks, tags, attachments, original dates and web clips with their source URLs, and then runs OCR over the attachments in the background. That last part is where an old Evernote archive changes: scans you could never search start answering to a search box. In Notesnook the same scans arrive, and stay pictures.
Whatever you move to, some things don’t survive the trip: notebook stacks, nested tags, note history and evernote:/// links. That’s the file format, not either app. The Evernote export guide covers the traps, and Import Evernote into Harbor covers our side.
What if the company stops?
Worth asking of any notes app, and both answers are good ones.
Notesnook’s answer is its license. The apps and sync server are GPLv3. If Streetwriters stopped tomorrow, the code would still be out there, your notes are on your devices, and you can run your own sync server today.
Harbor’s answer is the company and the exit. Cloudmanic Labs has been building software for over twenty years. Export works on every plan, including a lapsed one, and we’ve put our pricing in writing.
Different kinds of safety. Pick the one you trust more.
So which one
Pick Notesnook if privacy is the point. Encrypted by default, open source, auditable, cheaper, a free plan you can live in, and a Linux desktop app. For a journal, for writing, for anything you’d never want a company to read, it’s the better choice, and we’d tell a friend the same.
Pick Harbor if your notes are a searchable archive. If a lot of what you keep is scans, PDFs, photos of paper and handwriting, Notesnook can store them but it can’t read them, and Harbor can. Add native apps, an API, CLI and MCP server for your AI, and a price in writing, for about $29 a year more than Notesnook Pro.
The quick test: think of the last three things you went looking for in your notes. If they were things you wrote, Notesnook will serve you well. If any of them was a picture of a piece of paper, that’s what we built Harbor for.
Still shopping? The Evernote alternatives roundup covers more apps, Harbor vs Evernote is the head-to-head most switchers start with, and should you encrypt your notes? is the long version of the trade in the middle of this page.
Sources
Every Notesnook figure on this page was read on September 23, 2026:
- Plans, prices, limits and the stop-paying policy: notesnook.com/pricing
- Platforms, F-Droid and Linux packages: notesnook.com/downloads
- Planned and shipped features: notesnook.com/roadmap
- Electron and React Native, license and stars: github.com/streetwriters/notesnook
- The MCP decision: pull request #9702 · the OCR request: issue #4543
Harbor’s own figures come from our pricing page and our help center.
Notesnook ships several releases a week, so things here will go out of date. If something has, tell us and we’ll fix it. The date at the top is when we checked.