Notability vs SiYuan

Notability brings handwritten notes, typed text, recordings, images and imported documents into one workspace. It supports offline access, note sharing and real-time collaboration across Android, iOS, macOS, web and Windows. Notability Learn offers audio transcription, note summaries, Smart Notes, quizzes, flashcards and chat with notes; YouTube videos can also be turned into notes with a transcript and summary. Integrations include iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box and WebDAV. The Starter plan is free and includes five notes, editing tools and content, PDFs and documents, 20,000+ templates and seven-day version history. Pro costs $19.99 a month, billed monthly. Business Pro costs $180 a year per user. Notability describes its audience as students and professionals. The iOS and iPadOS apps require version 17 or later, while Android requires version 12 or later.

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.