Ampersand vs
Apple Notes
Apple Notes is free, already installed and woven through every Apple device you own. The case for anything else is portability, and what happens when you are not on an Apple device.
Apple Notes is the honest default. It costs nothing, it is already on every device you own, it syncs without you deciding anything, it encrypts individual notes for free, it collaborates, and on a recent iPhone it will record a conversation and transcribe it inside the note. It is reachable from Spotlight, Siri, the Share Sheet, a widget, a Quick Note gesture and an Apple Pencil. For a very large number of people that is the correct answer and nothing on this page should talk them out of it.
The reason to want something else is almost never a missing feature. It is the shape of the file. A note in Apple Notes is a row in a local SQLite database, its body stored as a gzip-compressed Protocol Buffer — not human-readable, not portable, and for an iCloud account the canonical copy lives on Apple’s servers rather than on your disk. Getting a note out means exporting it, one note at a time. Ten years of thinking is a format you would have to reverse-engineer to read without the app that wrote it, and that is a real thing to weigh even if the app never gives you a single day’s trouble.
Ampersand takes the other position on that one question and accepts the costs. Every note is a plain .md file in a folder you picked, openable in any text editor on any machine, on macOS, Windows and Linux alike. Around that it puts the heavier tools — a real vector PDF, an editable Word file, tables with formulas, diagrams and maths, a git history of every save, AI on your own key. It has no phone app, no watch app, no sync of its own and no Siri. Against Apple Notes specifically, those are not small things to give up.
Ampersand and Apple Notes, row by row
Every row states what both apps do. A dot marks whichever one leads — including the rows Apple Notes takes.
| Feature | Ampersand | Apple Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, then a one-time $29 (regularly $49) for export, AI agents, encryption and extra vaults. Three devices, 14-day money back, never a subscription. | Advantage: Apple Notes.Free, and already installed. The cost is storage: the free iCloud tier is 5 GB shared with everything else on your account, and more space means paying for iCloud+. |
| Where notes live | Advantage: Ampersand.A folder you pick, on your disk. Plain .md files with optional YAML frontmatter that any text editor can open, now or in twenty years. | A local SQLite database, with note bodies stored as gzip-compressed Protocol Buffers — a proprietary binary format. For iCloud accounts the canonical copy is server-side. |
| Works offline | Everything except cloud AI, and running a local model through Ollama removes even that. | Everything, on the native apps. Reaching your notes from a non-Apple machine means iCloud.com, which only works online. |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Windows 10+ and Linux, on both Intel/AMD and ARM. There is no phone app yet. There is no web app either. | macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and visionOS. No native Windows or Android app — from those, the only route is the iCloud.com web app. |
| Sync | None of our own. Point it at iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or a git repo — a vault is just a folder, so the setup is yours to do and to fix. | Advantage: Apple Notes.First-party iCloud, free, using your existing storage quota, and it simply works. End-to-end encryption of synced notes depends on Advanced Data Protection being enabled on the account. |
| Encryption | Per-note with age (X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305) under one vault passphrase, Touch ID on a Mac, and a recovery kit. A locked note is a .md.age file and stays out of search and history until it is opened. | Locked Notes encrypt a note’s content and attachments with AES-GCM, under a key derived via PBKDF2/SHA-256 from your device passcode or a separate Notes password. Free, no tier gate. Metadata is not encrypted, and Apple states a forgotten Notes password cannot be recovered. |
| Export | Advantage: Ampersand.Vector PDF from a real layout engine, Word with native equations, self-contained HTML, single-file Markdown free, and the whole vault as Markdown on Pro. | PDF, long-standing and reliable, plus Markdown export on the Mac. No native Word export, and exporting is per note rather than in bulk. |
| Search | Full text across the whole vault, with case-sensitive, whole-word and regex toggles, and #tags, wiki-links and backlinks indexed alongside it. It covers encrypted notes too while the vault is unlocked. It does not read text inside images or PDFs. | Advantage: Apple Notes.Native and unusually deep: it finds typed text, handwriting, objects inside images and the text in scanned documents, all recognised on the device and all free. No regex, no case toggle and no saved queries — and it can find handwriting without being able to turn it into editable text. |
| AI | Advantage: Ampersand.Bring-your-own-key: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, local models through Ollama, and CLI agents, routed per feature. Nothing resold, and a local model costs nothing. | Apple Intelligence Writing Tools work natively inside Notes on supported hardware — proofread, rewrite, summarise, turn text into a table. No API keys, no third-party models, no local model configuration. |
| Recording and transcription | Records a meeting in person or on a call, transcribes it on your own Mac with a local Whisper model, and writes a note with a summary, the decisions and action items as checkboxes. Audio is deleted once the transcript exists unless you keep it. macOS only, Pro. | Records audio inside a note with a live transcript and, with Apple Intelligence, an automatic summary. Free, and in your pocket — but it needs iOS 18 or later on an iPhone 12 or later, and supports a limited set of languages. |
| Collaboration | None. No shared notes, no co-editing, no comments from other people. | Advantage: Apple Notes.Shared notes and folders with view-or-edit permissions, and Apple says collaborators’ edits appear in real time. Free, like everything else in it. |
| Sharing a document | A share link you control: expiry of 7, 30 or 90 days or never; an optional password, or an email allowlist that can cover a whole domain; and a choice of how much a chat app may preview. Never indexed, no scripts, and changing the password signs every existing reader out. Pro; taking a note down never is. | You share the note itself, with view-or-edit permissions, and Apple says collaborators’ edits appear in real time. Free. It is a live note opened in Notes rather than a page you hand to a reader — the other half of the same problem. |
| Capture | Quick capture from the menu bar or system tray, straight into a daily note or an inbox, on a global shortcut. Part of Pro. | Advantage: Apple Notes.Spotlight, Siri, the Share Sheet from any app, widgets, Quick Note and Apple Pencil. Nothing else in this comparison is anywhere near as reachable. |
| Document tools | Advantage: Ampersand.Blocks and slash commands, tables with spreadsheet-style formulas, callouts, Mermaid diagrams, Vega charts, KaTeX maths, live calculation blocks, wiki-links and backlinks. | Rich text with attachments, drawings and Apple Pencil support. |
| Structured content | Advantage: Ampersand.Notion-style blocks over plain Markdown: tables whose cells take spreadsheet formulas, Mermaid diagrams, Vega charts, KaTeX maths, live calculation blocks with units and currency, callouts and highlighted code — all round-tripping as ordinary .md. | Native tables whose cells take formatting and even nested checklists, though no formulas, and checklists throughout. No diagrams, no charts, no rendered LaTeX and no highlighted code blocks — but Math Notes solves an expression the moment you type =, remembers variables you define, and graphs equations with live sliders on the Mac, which is the most direct live calculation anything in this comparison offers. |
| Version history | Advantage: Ampersand.Every save, snapshotted into a git repository kept outside the vault, with a timeline and a line-by-line diff. Browsing and diffing are free; one-click restore is Pro. You set how long it keeps. | None. There is no per-note edit history: recovery means Undo while the app is still open, a full device backup, or the Recently Deleted folder — which holds notes you deleted, not earlier versions of the ones you kept. |
| Extensibility | None. No plugin API and no scripting. | No plugin or API ecosystem for Notes itself. Some automation is possible through Shortcuts. |
| Open source | No. The encryption is the standard age format and the notes are plain Markdown, so the files outlive the app. | No. |
Across these 18 rows, Ampersand leads 6, Apple Notes leads 5, and 7 are a draw. The dot marks the leader. Where Apple Notes leads, the dot is on its side of the table.
Ampersand is desktop-only today. An app for iPhone and iPad is in development and not yet released. The roadmap is where that gets announced.
Apple Notes details checked against its own pricing and documentation pages on . If something here has gone out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
Where Ampersand pulls ahead
Your notes are files you can read
Plain .md in a folder you chose, openable in any text editor on any machine and readable by a person even without an editor. Apple Notes keeps note bodies as gzip-compressed Protocol Buffers inside a SQLite database — a format you would have to reverse-engineer to read without Apple’s app, and one you can only leave one note at a time.
It runs where Apple does not
Native builds for macOS, Windows and Linux, on Intel/AMD and ARM, all covered by one licence. Apple Notes has no native Windows or Android app at all, and from those machines the only route to your own notes is the iCloud.com web app, which needs a connection to show you anything.
Export that produces a real document
Vector PDFs with running headers, controlled page breaks and real maths, and Word files that are genuinely editable — native equations, real styles, highlighted code. Apple Notes exports a reliable PDF and, on the Mac, Markdown, but there is no native Word export and no way to take the library out in one pass.
The heavier half of writing
Tables with spreadsheet-style formulas, Mermaid diagrams, Vega charts, KaTeX maths, callouts, wiki-links with backlinks, find and replace, and every save snapshotted into a git repository you can diff. Apple Notes is deliberately not this, and if what you write is a spec or a paper you will feel the difference immediately.
Where Apple Notes is the better tool
Every page here names at least two, because Apple Notes genuinely has them and a comparison that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
It costs nothing and it is already there
No purchase, no download, no setup, no account to make, and sync that works on every Apple device before you have configured anything. Ampersand asks you to choose a folder, arrange your own sync and pay $29 for the heavier half of the app. For a lot of people that is three problems where there were none.
It is woven into the whole device
Spotlight, Siri, the Share Sheet from any app, widgets, Quick Note, Handoff, Apple Pencil, and the app is on the watch and the Vision Pro too. Ampersand has quick capture from the menu bar and nothing else, because an app that is not made by Apple cannot reach into the system that way and never will.
Free encryption with no licence attached
Locked Notes encrypt a note’s content and attachments with AES-GCM under a key derived from your device passcode or a separate Notes password, at no cost and on every device. Ampersand’s per-note encryption is genuinely stronger in what it covers and it has a recovery kit, but it sits behind a $29 licence and Apple’s does not.
Recording and transcription in your pocket
On an iPhone 12 or later running iOS 18, Notes records audio with a live transcript and summarises it with Apple Intelligence, for free. Ampersand’s recorder is macOS-only, part of Pro, and needs a Mac in the room. Ours transcribes locally with Whisper and writes structured decisions and action items — but a Mac is not what most people have in a meeting.
Shared notes that work
Share a note or a whole folder with view or edit permissions and, Apple says, see collaborators’ edits appear in real time — again at no cost. Ampersand has no collaboration of any kind, and a shared grocery list or a family folder is a completely reasonable thing to want from a notes app.
Which one should you use?
Choose Apple Notes if
you live entirely on Apple devices and want the thing that is already there, free, synced, shared with your family and reachable from Siri and the Share Sheet. That is not a compromise and it is not a smaller choice — for most people it is simply the right one, and the honest reason to look elsewhere is the file format, not the app.
Choose Ampersand if
you want your notes to be plain Markdown files you could still read in twenty years without any particular company’s software, you use a Windows or Linux machine as well as a Mac, or what you write needs real export, structure and history rather than rich text.
Moving from Apple Notes
Asked plainly
Is there an Apple Notes alternative that uses plain files?
Ampersand is one. Every note is a plain .md file with optional YAML frontmatter, in a folder you choose on your own disk, so any text editor on any machine can open it and there is no database or account in the way. Apple Notes stores note bodies as gzip-compressed Protocol Buffers inside a local SQLite database, with the canonical copy held server-side for iCloud accounts, so a note has to be exported before anything else can read it. The trade is that Ampersand has no sync of its own, no phone app, and none of Apple Notes’ system integration.
Can I use Apple Notes on Windows?
Not as an app. Apple Notes ships for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and visionOS, and there is no native Windows or Android version. From a Windows PC the only route to your notes is the iCloud.com web app in a browser, which requires being online and is a different experience from the native apps. If you need the same notes app on Windows or Linux, you need something else: Ampersand ships native builds for macOS 14 and later, Windows 10 and later, and Linux, and keeps notes as plain Markdown files.
How do I get my notes out of Apple Notes?
On the Mac, Apple Notes can export a note as PDF, and Apple’s own support documentation covers Markdown export as well, which is the format worth using if you want the text to stay editable. The important limitation is that exporting works per note rather than as a bulk operation, so a large library takes a while. Once the notes are Markdown files in a folder, another app can read them directly — Ampersand can open that folder as a vault, or run it through an importer that shows a dry-run preview first.
Are Apple Notes encrypted?
Individual notes can be, using the Locked Notes feature. Locking a note derives an AES key via PBKDF2/SHA-256 from either your device passcode or a separate Notes password and encrypts that note’s content and its attachments with AES-GCM. It is free, with no tier gate. Two things are worth knowing: note metadata is not encrypted, and Apple states there is no recovery if you forget a dedicated Notes password. Separately, whether your synced notes are end-to-end encrypted in iCloud depends on Advanced Data Protection being switched on for the account.
Should I switch from Apple Notes to Ampersand?
For a lot of people, no. Apple Notes is free, already installed, syncs across every Apple device without setup, encrypts individual notes at no cost, supports shared notes, and on a recent iPhone records and transcribes audio — and Ampersand has no phone app, no sync of its own and no Siri integration. The reasons to switch are specific: you want your notes as plain Markdown files you could read without any particular company’s app, you use Windows or Linux as well as a Mac, or you need real PDF and Word export, structured documents and a history of every save.
Other alternatives
Stop reading tables.
Open the app.
Ampersand is free to start and there is no account to make. Point it at the folder your notes are already in — including the one Apple Notes keeps them in — and see for yourself.
Free to start · Mac, Windows & Linux · No account required