Noted vs SiYuan

Noted records audio and links timestamped notes to recordings for lectures, meetings, interviews, and conferences. Live transcription displays speech as it happens and labels speakers. Noted+ can summarize key points, decisions, and action items, with each plan allowing up to 100 summaries a month. Ask AI can answer questions about recordings and notes and jump to relevant audio, but requires a supported Apple device with Apple Intelligence enabled. Intelligent Playback detects and skips background noise and silence. Notes sync through iCloud; third-party cloud services can import files but do not sync notes between devices. The app can use the Apple calendar for reminders linked to notes. Notes can be exported as PDF or plain text, audio as M4A, and notes can be shared with non-users by web link. Noted is available on iOS and macOS and supports offline access. The free download is listed at free. Noted+ Monthly costs $9.99 a month and has no trial; a seven-day trial is listed for the yearly plan, whose price is not provided. The maker says it cannot access created content or imported files, while text or generated transcriptions are sent to Google Gemini for AI summaries.

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.