Kilonotes vs SiYuan

Kilonotes is a handwriting notes app for students, combining note-taking with tools for turning lectures, PDFs, and recordings into study material. Its writing features include pressure sensitivity, palm rejection, and low-latency ink, with handwriting-to-text conversion that recognizes math equations. Users can import and annotate PDFs, then search handwriting across notebooks. Kilonotes AI can explain notes, create practice questions and flashcards, summarize documents, and generate mind maps. The app can record and transcribe audio, then produce summaries and key points. Core note-taking works offline; AI tasks wait for a connection if the device is offline. The Free plan includes five notebooks and basic AI, with trial uses of AI features before AI credits are needed. Premium adds unlimited notebooks, full AI, custom fonts, page styles, and other advanced features. The maker’s plans page does not show paid prices, though App Store listings show selected plan prices. The app is listed for iOS and Android, with Android 12 or later required on Android.

SiYuan is a personal knowledge management system for building a linked collection of notes. It supports Markdown, block-level references and bidirectional links, and organizes content into blocks with more than 20 block-level and more than 10 span-level element types. Backlinks can be filtered and searched; relationship graphs are available across a notebook and at block level. Databases support relations, rollups and templates, while flashcards use the FSRS spaced-repetition algorithm. Its AI feature connects to OpenAI for writing continuation, translation, summaries, brainstorming and grammar or spelling corrections. SiYuan supports offline access, and the maker describes multi-device synchronization as incremental and end-to-end encrypted. It is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and the web, with a Chrome/Edge extension, API and Docker self-hosting. The maker says data stays under the user's control on their device. Free access is free; PRO Features is listed at $64 a month with lifetime-use wording, and Subscription at $148 a month with 8GB cloud storage.