Fractal Note vs Legend

Fractal Note is a free, MIT-licensed note environment inside VS Code. It combines a WYSIWYG Markdown editor with outliner, database, mindmap, and file-manager views. Notes remain plain Markdown and JSON files organized through a virtual folder and file tree. Full-text search covers outlines, Markdown pages, and PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint attachments. A built-in viewer handles Office documents, PDFs, HTML, images, and text or code files. The Chrome extension clips web pages into an outliner or Markdown and writes them to disk through the File System Access API. Backlinks, collapse and expand controls, subtree scoping, filtering, and PDF or Markdown export support navigation and sharing. Bidirectional S3 sync and Amazon Translate require AWS credentials; HTTP(S) proxy connections for those services are not supported. Published AI skills support note searching, reading, and writing in named AI IDEs.

Legend brings notes, documents, tasks, email, files, outlines, and projects into one productivity interface. Users organize work in Boards made up of Panes, which provide separate work areas and context switching. Panes can show Outline, grouped, List, or Calendar views, and filters can use prefixes, item contents, words, or tags. Writing features include Markdown, formatting hotkeys, backlinks, and mirrors that connect notes with tasks. The Agenda view sorts tasks by priority and date. Legend says it syncs in real time across devices and collaborators, works offline, and resolves changes after devices reconnect. Its privacy policy describes client-side encryption before item data syncs to Firebase, with optional password encryption. The Free plan costs nothing and includes 10 Panes, one plugin sync account, and unlimited documents and items. Basic costs $5 a month billed annually; Pro costs $9 a month billed annually. The Browser Pane is not available in the mobile app, though saved links can open in a browser.