Harbor ·Comparison
Notesnook vs Standard Notes
Every price and limit below re-checked on September 30, 2026
A word about us first. We make Harbor, a notes app that competes with both of these. Neither one is ours, and we don’t win anything if you pick one over the other. Every figure below came off Notesnook’s and Standard Notes’ own pricing and help pages, or their GitHub, on the date at the top.
These two apps get compared constantly because they’re so alike. Both encrypt every note before it leaves your device. Both use the same algorithms. Both are open source, run on every platform including Linux, and let you run your own sync server.
So the choice comes down to three things: price, proof and policy. Notesnook wins on price and on what happens when you stop paying. Standard Notes wins on proof.
What each one costs
| Free | Paid, per year | |
|---|---|---|
| Notesnook | Unlimited notes and devices, rich text, 50 MB uploads a month | Essential $19.99 · Pro $69.99 · Believer $89.99 · 5-year prepay from $299.99 |
| Standard Notes | Unlimited notes and devices, plain text only, no files | Productivity $90 · Professional $120 |
That’s not close. Notesnook’s top plan costs about what Standard Notes’ bottom one does.
The gap gets wider once you look at what each tier unlocks:
| You want | Notesnook | Standard Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Rich text and checklists | Free | $90 a year |
| Notebooks or folders | Free (up to 50) | $90 a year |
| File attachments | Free (50 MB a month), $19.99 for 1 GB a month | $120 a year for 100 GB |
One caveat on files, because the two count differently. Notesnook caps how much you upload each month. Standard Notes Professional gives you 100 GB of storage in total. If you’re moving a big archive in one go, Standard Notes’ 100 GB is the simpler number. For everyday notes with the odd photo, Notesnook’s $19.99 plan is plenty.
Standard Notes has no free trial. It offers a full refund instead: 14 days on Productivity, 90 on Professional. Students get 30% off. Notesnook gives 14-day trials on its paid plans.
Where Notesnook wins
The free plan is a real app. Rich text, notebooks, 100 versions of each note, an app lock and 50 MB of uploads a month, for nothing. Standard Notes’ free plan is a good plain-text notebook. If your notes have headings, bold text or checklists, it isn’t enough.
It’s a fraction of the price. $19.99 a year gets you files. On Standard Notes, files start at $120.
Stopping paying costs you nothing. Notesnook’s pricing page says it plainly: “Nothing is deleted and nothing is locked.” You drop to Free and keep reading, editing and exporting. That’s the policy every notes app should have.
It looks newer. That’s taste, and we won’t pretend it’s measurable. But it comes up in nearly every forum thread comparing the two, including from people who stayed with Standard Notes.
Where Standard Notes wins
It’s been audited, four times. Standard Notes has published independent reviews of its whole system: a cryptography design review by Shackle Labs in 2017, full penetration tests by Cure53 in 2019 and 2022, and a review of its encryption code by Trail of Bits in 2020. Notesnook says on its own comparison page that it hasn’t had one yet. It built Vericrypt so you can check its encryption on your own notes, which is useful. It isn’t the same as a security firm spending weeks trying to break in.
For a lot of people, this is the whole decision. If you chose an encrypted notes app because you need to trust it, four public audits beat a promise.
Proton is behind it. Proton bought Standard Notes in April 2024. That’s a big, established privacy company with a long-term reason to keep the app going. Notesnook is a small independent team, and a good one, but a small team is a different kind of bet.
It does things Notesnook doesn’t. Spreadsheets with formulas. A built-in authenticator for your other accounts’ two-factor codes. Hardware security keys on Professional. Daily encrypted backups to your email, even on the free plan. Daily Notebooks for journaling. Notesnook’s own comparison page concedes most of these.
Self-hosting is easier. Both let you run your own sync server. Standard Notes also has a Home Server built into its desktop app: open Preferences, flip a switch, and your computer is your server.
Professional covers a family. You can share one $120 subscription with up to five accounts.
What happens when you stop paying
This deserves its own section, because it’s the one thing on this page that can actually hurt you.
Notesnook: you drop to the free plan. Everything stays readable, editable and exportable. You lose upload space, not notes.
Standard Notes: notes written in the paid editors go read-only. You can view them, but to edit one you have to convert it back to plain text. And per Standard Notes’ own help page, files you uploaded can’t be viewed or downloaded once your subscription expires.
So if you pay for Standard Notes Professional and keep files there, back them up before you let it lapse. Standard Notes’ desktop app can back up your files to your computer, and that’s worth turning on whether you plan to leave or not.
Encryption
On paper, a tie. Both use XChaCha20-Poly1305 to encrypt and Argon2 to turn your password into a key. Both are zero-knowledge, so neither company can read your notes. Both encrypt everything, always, with no switch to forget.
The difference is the audits above. Same algorithms, but only one has had outsiders try to break how they’re put together.
Platforms and how they’re built
| Mac | Windows | Linux | iPhone/iPad | Android | Web | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notesnook | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes, plus F-Droid | Yes |
| Standard Notes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Under the hood they’re built the same way too: an Electron desktop app and React Native mobile apps, according to each project’s own code on GitHub. That’s how small teams ship to six platforms, and it’s a fair trade.
Both are open source. Notesnook’s apps and server are GPLv3, with about 14,700 stars on GitHub. Standard Notes’ apps are AGPL-3.0, with about 6,600 stars, and its server is GPLv3. Both projects shipped releases this month.
Moving from Evernote
Both import Evernote’s .enex files. Standard Notes is upfront about the limits: its importer skips notes larger than 3 MB, and Evernote web clips full of embedded images can fail or slow the app down. Its help page suggests exporting in small batches. Notesnook has its own importer, and we didn’t find a published size limit for it.
Either way, some things don’t survive the trip out of Evernote: notebook stacks, nested tags, note history and links between notes. That’s the file format, not either app. Our Evernote export guide covers the traps.
What neither one does
Neither reads your scans. No OCR, no searching text inside images or PDFs, on any plan. Notesnook closed one OCR request as not planned in 2024, and another is still open. Standard Notes has an open request for document scanning.
That’s not an oversight. When every note is encrypted on your device, the server can’t read your images, so it can’t make them searchable. It’s the same trade we wrote about in should you encrypt your notes?
Neither connects to your AI. Neither has an MCP server for Claude or ChatGPT. Notesnook declined one in April 2026 and said it plans a CLI instead. Standard Notes hasn’t announced anything. That’s the same encryption trade again: an assistant can’t search what nobody can read.
This is where we come in, briefly. Harbor does read scans, PDFs and handwriting, and has an MCP server, because encryption in Harbor is optional, per note. That makes it the wrong app for anyone who wants everything sealed, and the right one if most of your notes are paper you’ve photographed. Harbor vs Notesnook is the honest version of that trade.
So which one
Pick Notesnook if you want the better deal. Rich text free, files from $19.99, a newer-feeling app, and a stop-paying policy that never locks you out. For most people choosing between these two, it’s the one.
Pick Standard Notes if you need proof. Four independent audits, Proton’s backing, and extras like spreadsheets, an authenticator and hardware keys. If you’d show your notes app to a security person before trusting it, Standard Notes has the paperwork. Just know the files rule before you rely on it.
Both are good apps made by people who take privacy seriously. You won’t regret either one for the job it’s built for.
Still shopping? The Evernote alternatives roundup covers more apps, and the cross-platform notes comparison lines up twelve of them across every operating system.
Sources
Every figure on this page was read on September 30, 2026:
- Notesnook plans, limits and stop-paying policy: notesnook.com/pricing
- Notesnook’s own comparison, including its audit status: notesnook.com/compare/standard-notes
- Standard Notes plans and refunds: standardnotes.com/plans
- What happens when a Standard Notes subscription expires: help article 20
- Standard Notes’ security audits: help article 2
- Standard Notes self-hosting and Home Server: help article 47
- Standard Notes’ Evernote importer limits: help article 10
- Code, licenses and stars: streetwriters/notesnook · standardnotes/app · standardnotes/server
- OCR requests: Notesnook #4543 and #5798 · Standard Notes #3724 · Notesnook’s MCP decision: pull request #9702
- Proton’s acquisition of Standard Notes: Tech.eu, April 2024
Both apps ship often, 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.