Standard Notes review

Encryption first, which is why free means plain text

Standard Notes starts from encryption and works outward. Notes are encrypted on your device with keys the server never sees, which is also why the free tier is plain text: rich content types are handled by editors that sit in the paid plans. The apps cover web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, the code is AGPL-3.0, and Proton acquired the company in April 2024.

Journalists, lawyers, and anyone under NDA

• Journalists, lawyers, therapists, and anyone else with a real confidentiality requirement
• People who want encrypted sync on unlimited devices without paying anything
• Long-term archives, since the project's stated design goal is notes that still open in decades
• Self-hosters who want to run their own sync server

Free syncs everywhere; the priced tiers add formatting

As of July 2026, free means unlimited notes, unlimited device sync on every platform, end-to-end encryption, tags, per-note password protection, and full export in encrypted or plaintext form. There is no trial and no data cap.

Productivity is $90 per year and unlocks Super notes and the full editor set, daily encrypted email backups, and 1 year of note revision history. Professional is $120 per year and adds 100 GB of encrypted file storage, maximum revision history, and family sharing. Five-year plans run $299 and $349. Refunds are 14 days on Productivity and 90 days on Professional.

Plain text is the limit, and you meet it on day one

• Free is plain text. No headings, no bold, no checkboxes in a rich editor, which is a bigger daily limitation than it sounds
• No file attachments at all on free, so it cannot replace Evernote for anyone who saves PDFs and images
• No backlinks or graph view, so it is not a knowledge base, just notes
• Search is basic compared with anything indexing plaintext on your own disk
• Encryption means no server-side features: no web clipper doing content extraction, no AI, no collaborative editing

Unmatched for private writing, wrong for attachments

Standard Notes solves one problem completely and ignores the rest. If what you need is a private place to write that syncs everywhere for free and will not be readable by anyone else, nothing else in this list matches it. If you need attachments, formatting, or links between notes, the free plan will frustrate you within a week and the answer is Joplin or Obsidian instead.