RemNote vs SiYuan

RemNote is a learning and note-taking app that turns notes, PDFs, and other sources into AI-generated flashcards, quizzes, and summaries. Its study tools include spaced repetition, practice quizzes, and card formats such as question-and-answer, fill-in-the-blank, lists, clusters, and image occlusion. Users can annotate PDFs and slides with highlights, drawings, and shapes, and source citations are available. Notes and flashcards remain accessible offline and sync when connectivity returns. RemNote offers desktop apps and mobile apps for iOS and Android. The free plan includes unlimited notes and flashcards and synced devices, plus 20 daily file uploads up to 8MB each and 250 monthly AI credits. It also limits free users to three annotated PDFs, five image occlusion cards, and one handwritten document. Pro is listed at $8 a month, and Pro with AI at $18 a month. RemNote was founded in 2020.

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.