Ampersand vs
Joplin
Joplin is free, MIT-licensed, on every platform, and syncs wherever you like with free end-to-end encryption. Its notes live in a database; ours live in files.
Joplin is one of the few genuinely free things in this category. The app is MIT-licensed with no feature paywall — unlimited notes, notebooks and devices, if you sync it yourself — it runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS plus an official terminal client, and it is maintained at a pace most commercial products do not match, with releases roughly every two days. It also does the thing almost nobody else does: it lets you choose where your notes sync, to Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV, Nextcloud, S3-compatible storage or a local folder, and it will encrypt them end to end over any of those, free, before they leave your machine. Ampersand has no answer to that at all.
The disagreement is about two specific words, and both need saying carefully. The first is “Markdown”: Joplin writes Markdown, but the live store is a local SQLite database, not loose .md files on disk, so opening your notes in another editor means running an export first — plain Markdown, the lossless JEX archive, or a raw one-file-per-note mode. The second is “encrypted”: Joplin’s end-to-end encryption protects notes, attachments and metadata in transit and at the sync target, which is exactly where most people are worried about them, but it is off until you switch it on and the local database is not encrypted at rest. Joplin’s own forum confirms that notes and key material are readable in plaintext if you open the file. Local at-rest encryption is a long-standing open request.
Ampersand is the mirror image of that. The notes are plain .md files in a folder you chose, with no database in between, and a note you lock is age-encrypted on your own disk under a passphrase only you hold. What Ampersand does not have is the other half: no sync service, no end-to-end encrypted transport, no phone app at all, no plugins, and a closed source tree against Joplin’s MIT licence. If you are choosing between them, you are choosing which end of the wire you want protected, and how much you mind that the app is not free.
Ampersand and Joplin, row by row
Every row states what both apps do. A dot marks whichever one leads — including the rows Joplin takes.
| Feature | Ampersand | Joplin |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, then a one-time $29 (regularly $49) for export, AI agents, encryption and extra vaults. Never a subscription. | Advantage: Joplin.The app is free with no feature paywall — unlimited notes, notebooks and devices if you sync it yourself. Joplin Cloud is optional: Basic €2.40 a month billed yearly (€2.99 monthly) for 2 GB, Pro €4.79 (€5.99) for 30 GB, Pro 100GB €7.99 (€9.99), Teams €6.69 per user with a two-user minimum. |
| Where notes live | Advantage: Ampersand.A folder you pick. Plain .md files with optional YAML frontmatter. | Notes are written in Markdown, but the live store is a local SQLite database rather than loose .md files. Opening them in another app means exporting first — plain Markdown, the JEX archive, or a raw one-file-per-note mode. |
| Works offline | Everything except cloud AI, and running a local model removes even that. | Everything. There is no account to hold, and sync is entirely optional. |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Windows 10+ and Linux, on both Intel/AMD and ARM. There is no phone app yet. | Advantage: Joplin.Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, plus an official terminal client — the widest coverage of anything on this site. |
| Sync | None of our own. Point it at iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or a git repo — a vault is just a folder. | Advantage: Joplin.Both kinds. Joplin Cloud is the paid first-party option, or you can sync through your own Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV, Nextcloud, S3-compatible storage or a local folder at no cost. |
| Encryption | Per-note, on disk, using age (X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305) under one vault passphrase, with Touch ID on a Mac and a recovery kit. Nothing is protected in transit, because there is no service to send it to. | Free, optional end-to-end encryption protects notes, attachments and metadata in transit and at the sync target, over Joplin Cloud or your own backend. It is off until you enable it, and the local SQLite database is not encrypted at rest — Joplin’s own forum confirms notes and key material are readable in plaintext if you open the file. |
| Export | Advantage: Ampersand.Vector PDF from a real layout engine, editable Word with native equations and highlighted code, self-contained HTML, and Markdown. | Markdown, single or in bulk, plus HTML, PDF on desktop, JEX — its own lossless re-importable archive — and a raw one-file-per-item format. No Word and no ePub. |
| Version history | 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. Restoring opens the old text as an unsaved buffer, so nothing is overwritten until you save it. | Note History, built in and free: a revision saved every ten minutes, kept for 90 days by default and configurable per device — and because revisions sync, the effective retention is the shortest setting across your devices. Restoring is non-destructive too, copying the old version into a Restored Notes folder rather than overwriting. There is no diff view in the app; a community plugin adds one. |
| 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: Joplin.Full text over SQLite FTS, fast and indexed in real time, with a rich set of field operators — title:, body:, tag:, notebook:, created:, updated:, type:, resource: by attachment MIME type, sourceurl:, and negation with a leading minus. Wildcards work at the end of a word only, so swim* matches and *swim does not, and the vendor documents no regex. It also has OCR, and it is a genuine strength: text pulled out of PNG, JPEG and PDF attachments entirely on your own machine with no cloud call, desktop-only but syncing the extracted text to the phone, with attachment hits flagged in the results. It does not read handwriting, and accuracy on photographs is inconsistent. |
| 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. Mermaid and maths are the overlap; the formulas, charts and calculation are not. | A good deal is native and on by default: GFM tables, Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX maths inline and block with chemical equations through mhchem, and syntax-highlighted code with the language detected or declared. Tables take no formulas, callouts need a community plugin rather than shipping enabled, and there are no charts and no live calculation. |
| AI | Advantage: Ampersand.Built in and bring-your-own-key: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, local models through Ollama, and CLI agents, routed per feature. Rewrite, grammar, translate and summarise are free; agents and ask-your-vault are Pro. | Nothing generative in core. The official GitHub org ships one extractive, non-LLM summarisation plugin from a 2024 Google Summer of Code project; generative AI comes from third-party plugins such as Jarvis and NoteLLM, which do support bring-your-own key and local models through Ollama but are not officially maintained. |
| Open source | No. The encryption is the standard age format, so the files outlive the app either way. | Advantage: Joplin.Yes — MIT, with around 56,100 stars on GitHub, releases roughly every two days, and funding from Joplin Cloud and sponsorships. |
| Plugins | None. What ships is what you get, and it is the same app for everybody. | Advantage: Joplin.An official plugin API and a curated directory organised across eleven categories, actively maintained. |
| Sharing a note | Advantage: Ampersand.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. | Publish note gives a public, unguessable read-only link through Joplin Cloud or a self-hosted Joplin Server, and it keeps updating as you edit the source, which Ampersand does not — republishing here is a deliberate act. There is nothing to restrict who opens the link once they have it, and the shared copy is decrypted server-side, so publishing does not work with end-to-end encryption switched on. |
| Phone apps | None at all. This is the largest gap in the product. | Advantage: Joplin.On both stores, and consistently described in reviews as the weakest part of Joplin — no rich-text editor on iOS, no iPad handwriting, and laggy text editing reported on Android. It does include on-device Whisper voice dictation on Android. |
| Meeting recording | Advantage: Ampersand.Records a meeting in a room or on a call and transcribes it on your own Mac with a local Whisper model, then writes a note with the summary, the decisions and the action items. macOS only, and part of Pro. | Partial. You can record audio and attach it to a note from version 3.3, and Android has Whisper-powered voice dictation, but there is no meeting mode that transcribes and summarises on its own. |
Across these 16 rows, Ampersand leads 6, Joplin leads 7, and 3 are a draw. The dot marks the leader. Where Joplin 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.
Joplin 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
Files, not a database
Every note is a plain .md file in a folder you chose, so another editor, a script, grep or git can read it right now with no export step. Joplin writes Markdown but keeps it in a local SQLite store, which means the copy you can open elsewhere is one you produced on purpose and has to keep producing.
The file on your disk is the encrypted thing
Joplin protects notes on the way to the server and while they sit on it; the database on your own machine is readable in plaintext, and its forum says so. Ampersand encrypts the note where it lives, with age under a vault passphrase and Touch ID on a Mac, and unlocking your own notes is never gated behind a licence.
Export that produces real documents
A vector PDF laid out by a real engine with running headers, controlled page breaks, highlighted code and proper maths, and a Word file that is genuinely editable with native equations and real styles. Joplin exports Markdown, HTML, PDF and its own JEX archive, and has no Word export at all.
AI and meeting transcription as features, not plugins
Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, a local Ollama model or a CLI agent, configured once and routed per feature, plus meetings recorded and transcribed on your own Mac into a note with decisions and action items. Joplin ships one extractive summariser from a student project; everything generative is third-party.
Where Joplin is the better tool
Every page here names at least two, because Joplin genuinely has them and a comparison that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
Free, MIT-licensed, and it means it
No feature paywall, no note limit, no device limit, and a permissive licence that lets anyone fork the app and keep it alive. Ampersand is closed-source and asks $29 once for export, encryption and AI agents. On the question of whether an app can be taken away from you, Joplin simply wins.
You choose where it syncs, and it encrypts before it leaves
Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV, Nextcloud, S3-compatible storage, a local folder or Joplin Cloud — and free end-to-end encryption that works over all of them, because the encrypting happens on your machine. Ampersand has no sync service and no encrypted transport of any kind; you bring a folder-sync tool and set it up yourself.
It runs everywhere, including a terminal
Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, plus an official CLI client for servers and headless machines. Ampersand covers three desktop platforms and has no phone app at all, which for anyone who reads or captures away from a desk is the difference between using it and not.
A real plugin ecosystem, actively maintained
An official plugin API and a curated directory across eleven categories mean the features Joplin does not ship — including the AI ones — usually exist anyway. Ampersand has no plugins and no plugin API, so whatever is not in the box cannot be added.
Which one should you use?
Choose Joplin if
you want an app that is free and MIT-licensed and will still be there if its company is not, you need it on Android or iOS or a terminal, or you want sync you control end to end — your own backend, encrypted before it leaves the machine, at no cost. That last one has no equivalent in Ampersand and it is the strongest argument on this page.
Choose Ampersand if
you want the notes themselves to be ordinary files rather than rows in a database, you want the copy on your own disk encrypted rather than the copy on a server, and you want real PDF and Word export, bring-your-own-key AI and meeting transcription in the app instead of a plugin directory around it.
Moving from Joplin
Asked plainly
Does Joplin store notes as markdown files?
Not as files, no — and this trips people up. Joplin writes note content in Markdown, but the live store is a local SQLite database rather than loose .md files on disk, so you cannot open or edit your notes with another Markdown app without exporting them first. Joplin offers plain Markdown export, its own lossless JEX archive, and a raw one-file-per-note mode. Ampersand stores every note as a plain .md file in a folder you choose, with no database in between.
Does Joplin encrypt notes on my computer?
Not on your computer, no. Joplin’s end-to-end encryption is free and optional, and when you enable it, it protects notes, attachments and metadata in transit and at the sync target — over Joplin Cloud or your own Dropbox, WebDAV, Nextcloud or S3 backend. The local SQLite database is not encrypted at rest, and Joplin’s own forum confirms notes and key material are readable in plaintext if you open the file. Ampersand encrypts individual notes on disk with age under a vault passphrase, but has no encrypted sync at all.
Is there a Joplin alternative that stores plain markdown files?
Ampersand is one. Every note is a plain .md file with optional YAML frontmatter, in a folder you pick, with no database, no account and no server — you can open the same folder in any text editor, search it with grep or keep it in git. It keeps the parts of Joplin most people want, including working entirely offline and importing a Markdown folder, and adds per-note encryption on disk, PDF and Word export and bring-your-own-key AI. It has no sync service, no plugins and no phone app, where Joplin has all three.
Is Ampersand free like Joplin?
Not to the same degree. Joplin’s app is free with no feature paywall and MIT-licensed; only the optional Joplin Cloud sync is paid, from €2.40 a month billed yearly. Ampersand is free to use with the whole editor, full-vault search, wiki-links, backlinks, version history, inline AI and Markdown export, but PDF and Word export, AI agents, per-note encryption and multiple vaults sit behind a one-time $29 (regularly $49) covering three devices. Neither charges a subscription for the app itself.
Can I import my Joplin notes into Ampersand?
Yes, in two steps. Joplin can export your notes as plain Markdown, singly or in bulk, and that folder is exactly what Ampersand’s Markdown-folder import expects — it shows a dry-run preview of everything it will write before touching anything, or you can simply open the exported folder as a vault. Turn off end-to-end encryption for the export first, or make sure you can decrypt it, and keep a JEX archive as well, since JEX is the format that goes back into Joplin cleanly.
Which is better for privacy, Ampersand or Joplin?
They protect different halves and the honest answer is that it depends where you are worried. Joplin is stronger in transit: free end-to-end encryption over any sync backend, so nothing readable reaches a server, including its own. Ampersand is stronger at rest: it encrypts individual notes on your own disk with age under a passphrase only you hold, where Joplin’s local database is plaintext by its own account. Neither requires an account, both work fully offline, and Ampersand sends one anonymous count per day that can be switched off.
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 Joplin keeps them in — and see for yourself.
Free to start · Mac, Windows & Linux · No account required