Recall vs SiYuan

Recall is a personal AI knowledge base for saving, summarizing, organizing, connecting, and discussing articles, videos, podcasts, PDFs, and notes. It can connect related saved items in a knowledge graph and surface those links while users browse. Users can chat with their saved material, the open web, or both using models including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Recall can also generate quizzes and use spaced repetition to revisit saved content. Its MCP server connects with Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini CLI, but currently allows read-only access to the knowledge base. Recall says it does not use user data for advertising, profiling, or AI training; it also describes augmented browsing as local-first, with processing on the device and no browsing data sent to its servers. Users can access, export, or delete their data. The Free plan includes 10 AI summaries per month, unlimited saved content and notes, and API and MCP access. Plus costs $10 a month billed yearly; Max costs $38 a month billed yearly. Recall supports web, iOS, Android, browser extensions, and offline access.

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.