Ampersand vs
Craft
Craft is the most polished document workspace on the Mac, with real collaboration behind it. Ampersand is plain files on your disk, working the same whether or not there is a network.
Craft is the best-looking notes app most people have used. Documents come out finished rather than merely written, the Mac and iOS apps are fast and native in a way web-first competitors are not, and the learning curve is gentle enough that a team can adopt it in an afternoon — which is precisely what Notion is bad at. On the paid tiers it also does genuine real-time multiplayer editing in Shared Spaces, closer to Google Docs than to anything else in this category.
All of that rests on a hosted block database. Your documents are not files; they are rows on Craft’s servers, cached locally per document as you open them. That has consequences the marketing does not lead with and Craft’s own help centre states plainly. Offline is partial: the native Mac and iOS apps work offline for documents you have already opened, while Web and Windows need Offline Mode switched on, and a document you have never opened is not available at all. And there is no end-to-end encryption, because, as Craft explains, real-time collaboration requires the server to handle your content — so it is encrypted in transit and at rest, and Craft can technically read it.
Ampersand is the other shape entirely. Every note is a plain .md file in a folder on your disk, so there is no server to be up, no quota, no block count, and nothing to export before another app can read it. It costs $29 once instead of every month. It also cannot do a single thing Craft’s collaboration does — no co-editing, no shared spaces, no comments from other people — and it has no phone app and no web app at all. If your notes are a group activity, stop reading here.
Ampersand and Craft, row by row
Every row states what both apps do. A dot marks whichever one leads — including the rows Craft takes.
| Feature | Ampersand | Craft |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Advantage: Ampersand.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. | Free with 1,500 blocks total, 1 GB and 15 AI credits a month. Plus is $6.40 a month billed annually ($8 monthly); Family $12 a month annually for 2–6 accounts; Team $50 a month flat for up to 10 seats. |
| Where notes live | Advantage: Ampersand.A folder you pick, on your disk. Plain .md files with optional YAML frontmatter, readable by anything. | A proprietary block database hosted by Craft, cached locally per document as you open it. Nothing on disk another app can read without exporting first. |
| Works offline | Advantage: Ampersand.Everything — editing, search, links, history, export. Only cloud AI needs a network, and a local model through Ollama removes even that. | Partial. Native Mac and iOS work offline for documents already opened; Web and Windows need Offline Mode enabled; a document you have never opened is not available offline at all. |
| 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. | Advantage: Craft.macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Windows and the web — including mature, native iPhone and iPad apps. |
| 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. | Advantage: Craft.First-party, in the subscription, across every device. There is no bring-your-own-cloud option — sync is Craft’s or nothing. |
| Encryption | Advantage: Ampersand.Per-note, using age (X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305) under one vault passphrase you hold, with Touch ID on a Mac and a recovery kit. We could not read a locked note if we wanted to. | Encrypted in transit and at rest on Craft’s servers, but not end-to-end. Craft’s help centre states it does not support E2EE because real-time collaboration needs server-side handling. No per-note lock, on any tier. |
| Export | Advantage: Ampersand.Vector PDF from a real layout engine, Word with native equations and highlighted code, self-contained HTML, single-file Markdown free, and whole-vault Markdown on Pro. | Markdown, TextBundle, PDF and Word on Mac and iOS. On Windows and the web, Markdown and TextBundle only. |
| 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. | Full text across blocks, page and subpage titles, tasks, events, collection rows, code blocks, table cells, link previews and file names, from three characters up in Latin scripts, with real regex behind a regex: prefix, quoted phrases and -exclude. It indexes the names of attachments rather than what is inside them, and nothing inside images. |
| Structured content | 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. | The closest thing to it in this whole comparison. Real cell formulas — =SUM, =AVERAGE, =ROUND and the rest, with references like =B2*C2 and =SUM(A1:A5); native Mermaid in a split editor and preview covering flowchart, sequence, state, class, ER and XY charts, though not pie, Gantt or mindmap, and it reads and writes ordinary mermaid fences; native LaTeX inline and block with live preview and matrix environments; and highlighted code. |
| AI | Bring-your-own-key: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, local models through Ollama, and CLI agents, routed per feature. No credits, no metering, nothing resold — a local model costs nothing at all. | Craft Assistant, built in with nothing to configure: three cloud tiers, metered by credits — 15 a month on Free, 50 plus the Max model on Plus — and, unusually, free on-device local models that consume no quota at all. That last part is the same bet Ampersand makes about running a model on your own machine, and Craft got there without asking you for an API key. |
| Real-time collaboration | None. No co-editing, no shared spaces, no comments from other people. | Advantage: Craft.Real-time multiplayer editing in Shared Spaces on paid tiers, frequently described as closer to Google Docs than to a notes app. |
| 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. | A published document can take a passcode, an expiry date and a restriction to particular email domains, alongside a toggle for search-engine indexing — a genuinely comparable set of controls, and the closest match to ours in this whole comparison. Craft’s own analytics sets no cookies. Link sharing sits on Plus and above. |
| 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, and it is not tied to what you pay. | Automatic snapshots roughly every hour while you are editing, held server-side and retained by plan: 7 days on Free and Starter, 30 on Plus and Family, 180 on Team and Business. You can preview and restore one, though there is no diff view. Documents kept in an External Location forfeit it. |
| Integrations | None. No plugin API and no third-party integrations. | Advantage: Craft.Apple Calendar and Reminders, the Share Sheet, and an MCP connection to external AI assistants. No general plugin API, but more than nothing. |
| Meeting recording | Advantage: Ampersand.Records a meeting in person or on a call and transcribes it on your own Mac with a local Whisper model, then writes the note. macOS only, and part of Pro. | Nothing built in. |
| Open source | No. The encryption is the standard age format, so the files outlive the app either way. | No. |
Across these 16 rows, Ampersand leads 7, Craft leads 4, and 5 are a draw. The dot marks the leader. Where Craft 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.
Craft 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, on your disk
Plain .md in a folder you chose, with no block count, no storage quota and no export step between you and your own writing. Craft’s documents live in a hosted block database — they can be exported, but until you do, opening them anywhere else is not a thing that can happen.
Offline means offline
Editing, search, backlinks, version history and export all work with no network at all, including for notes you have never opened before. Craft is offline for documents you have already opened on Mac and iOS, needs Offline Mode enabled on Windows and the web, and cannot open a document it has never seen.
Encryption where you hold the key
A locked note is age-encrypted on disk under one vault passphrase, opened with Touch ID and recoverable with a recovery kit. Craft states in its own help centre that it does not offer end-to-end encryption, because collaboration requires the server to handle content — an honest trade, but a different one.
Pay once, and keep the price
$29 at the launch price, regularly $49, one time, with a 14-day money-back guarantee — against $6.40 a month for Craft Plus, or a free tier that stops at 1,500 blocks and 1 GB. Over three years that is roughly one payment against roughly $230, and the files stay readable whether or not you renew anything.
Where Craft is the better tool
Every page here names at least two, because Craft genuinely has them and a comparison that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
Real collaboration, not a share link
Shared Spaces on the paid tiers give you genuine real-time multiplayer editing — several people in one document, seeing each other work. Ampersand has none of this and is not building it. If your notes are something a team keeps rather than something you keep, this is the whole decision and nothing else on this page matters.
Every screen you own, including your phone
Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows and the web, with the iOS and iPadOS apps mature and native rather than wrapped. Ampersand runs on macOS, Windows and Linux and has no phone app and no web app at all, which for a lot of people rules it out before any other row is read.
AI with nothing to set up
Craft Assistant works the moment you open the app — no API key, no account with a model vendor, no decisions — and includes free on-device local models that do not spend your credits. Ampersand’s bring-your-own-key approach is cheaper and more flexible in the long run, and it is undeniably more work on day one.
Documents that arrive finished
Craft is the most visually polished workspace in this category and the fastest to feel at home in. A document you write in it looks presentable without you doing anything, which is a real advantage when the thing you are writing is going to be read by someone else tomorrow morning.
Which one should you use?
Choose Craft if
more than one person writes in the same document, you want the whole thing on your phone and in a browser, or you want AI that works the moment you open the app with nothing to configure. Craft is excellent at all three and Ampersand is not competing for that job.
Choose Ampersand if
you want your notes to be ordinary files on your own disk that open in anything, you need the app to work identically on a plane, you want encryption whose key you hold, or you would rather pay $29 once than $6.40 a month for as long as you want to read your own writing.
Moving from Craft
Asked plainly
Is there a Craft alternative that stores plain Markdown files?
Ampersand is one. Every note is a plain .md file with optional YAML frontmatter, in a folder you choose on your own disk — no database, no account and no server, so any text editor on any machine can open your library. Craft stores documents in a proprietary hosted block database and caches them locally per document, so they have to be exported before another app can read them. Craft does export to Markdown on every platform, which is the path across.
Does Craft work offline?
Partly, and the details matter. Craft’s native Mac and iOS apps work offline for documents you have already opened, because documents sync locally only as you open them; a document you have never opened is not available without a connection. On Windows and the web, offline access requires switching on Offline Mode in settings first. Ampersand works entirely offline for everything — editing, search, links, history and export — because the notes are files already on your disk; only cloud AI needs a network, and a local model removes even that.
Is Craft end-to-end encrypted?
No. Craft’s own help centre states that it does not support end-to-end encryption, because real-time multi-user collaboration requires the server to handle the data. Content is encrypted in transit and at rest on Craft’s servers, but Craft can technically access it, and there is no per-note password lock on any tier. Ampersand encrypts individual notes on disk with age (X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305) under a passphrase only you hold — which is possible precisely because it has no collaboration to support.
Can I export my documents out of Craft?
Yes. On Mac and iOS, Craft exports Markdown, TextBundle, PDF and Word .docx. On Windows and the web, the options are Markdown and TextBundle. Exporting to Markdown into a folder is also the way into Ampersand: point it at that folder and the files are the library, or run the folder through the importer, which shows a dry-run preview of exactly what it will do before anything is written.
Is Ampersand a good Craft alternative for teams?
No, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise. Ampersand has no real-time collaboration, no shared spaces and no way for two people to edit the same note at once — it is built for one person and a folder of files. Craft offers genuine multiplayer editing in Shared Spaces on its Family and Team tiers, at $12 a month annually for 2–6 accounts or $50 a month flat for up to 10 seats. If several people write in the same document, Craft is the right tool.
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 Craft keeps them in — and see for yourself.
Free to start · Mac, Windows & Linux · No account required