Note Taking App Without AI: 14 Apps We Checked in 2026

Short Answer

Obsidian is the note taking app without AI that most people should install. The guides we publish here get rewritten more often than anything else on this site, because vendors keep adding the feature our readers came to avoid.

We read Obsidian's public roadmap and its full changelog on 2 September 2026, through version 1.14.0, and found no artificial intelligence (AI) feature in either. Obsidian says it "stores your notes locally as plain text Markdown files", so nothing is uploaded for a model to read. The app is free without limits.

Three apps moved this year, which is why an older list will mislead you. Joplin added an AI chat panel on 31 August 2026. Logseq now has a Settings > AI section. Trilium took its AI out in March and put it back in May.

How We Rank a Note Taking App Without AI

We rank these apps on four questions, and feature lists answer none of them. Most roundups score note apps on tags, backlinks and templates. That tells you nothing about whether a model reads what you wrote.

1. Does it ship first-party AI today? A plugin someone else wrote does not count, because the feature has to be in the app as you download it.
2. Is the AI off by default, and is the switch documented? An undocumented setting can move in the next release without anyone telling you.
3. Do the notes leave the device? A local model and a cloud model feel identical in the interface and are not remotely the same thing.
4. What does the company's own policy say about training, retention and human review? A company that publishes nothing about training has promised nothing.

Question two is the one vendors answer vaguely. An off switch that exists only on an enterprise plan is not an off switch for you. Notion only offers a workspace-wide AI switch on its Enterprise plan, and only with a verified domain. GoodNotes documents toggles for its on-device features inside a performance troubleshooting article, while control over its cloud model is sold through an institutional license key. Both technically have an off switch. Neither hands it to an individual.

We ask the same four questions in every category. The reasoning here matches our guides to browsers without AI and search engines without AI, and the AI-free apps index collects them all in one place.

In the guides we publish here, the changelog is the page we trust and the homepage is the page we ignore. A new AI feature shows up in release notes weeks before it reaches the marketing copy, which is exactly how Joplin spent this summer.

Note Taking Apps Without AI Compared

Every row below was checked against that company's own site, docs or repository on 2 September 2026. Where a company publishes no statement, we say so instead of guessing.

The Apps That Ship No AI at All

Four apps in this set ship no first-party AI today: Obsidian, Zettlr, Standard Notes and Notesnook.

Obsidian

Obsidian is the one we recommend to most people, because your notes are ordinary Markdown files in an ordinary folder. You can open them in any text editor, back them up with anything, and read them in twenty years. Obsidian says it "uses open file formats, so you're never locked in", and the free tier carries no note cap. Sync costs $4 per user each month on annual billing, per its pricing page.

One caveat, and it is the whole risk with Obsidian. Every AI feature available in it comes from a community plugin you install yourself, and some of those plugins can write into your vault. The app stays AI-free until you personally make it otherwise, so the discipline required is simply not installing them.

Zettlr

Zettlr is the plainest writing tool here and it is free under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3. Its privacy page says "we do not collect any information if you use our app". From version 2.0.0 the app does not even try to contact its own server, so there is no account to close and no sync to trust.

Its own feature table does claim Apple Intelligence integration on macOS. That is macOS Writing Tools appearing inside the editor rather than a model Zettlr built, and Zettlr publishes no in-app switch for it. Turn it off at the system level instead, which our guide to turning off Apple Intelligence walks through.

Standard Notes and Notesnook

Standard Notes and Notesnook encrypt every note on your device before it syncs, so what lands on their servers is ciphertext rather than text. Its privacy page says that "because this data is end-to-end encrypted, we can't read it, and we can't sell it". Its free plan costs nothing and still includes end-to-end encryption and unlimited device sync. The paid Productivity plan is $90 a year on its plans page.

Notesnook is the only company in this whole set that has put a refusal in writing. On its own comparison page it says "we have none of it, and we won't be adding anything that reads your notes". The next line is blunter: "if AI is what you want from a note app, we're the wrong choice". Its free plan is unlimited in notes and capped at 50MB of sync storage a month. We are not quoting its paid prices, because the figures rendered on its pricing page convert by region and we could not read them reliably.

The Apps That Added AI This Year

Joplin, the app most often named as the safe AI-free pick, shipped AI on 31 August 2026. Its own release announcement opens with the line "Joplin 3.7 is the release where AI arrives in the app". Version 3.7 added three things: a chat panel that can edit notes on your behalf, semantic search, and a server that lets outside assistants read and write your notes. The semantic search runs a background embeddings indexer, which reads every note in your collection to build its index.

Joplin also handled it better than most. Its AI documentation states plainly that "AI is off by default". A second gate called Allow remote AI providers lets you run a local model and keep everything on the machine. Leave both switches alone and Joplin behaves exactly as it did in July.

Logseq is a smaller change with the same lesson. Its official documentation describes "an optional MCP server to allow AI applications to connect to a graph", enabled under Settings > AI. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, the standard assistants use to reach outside data. No model ships with Logseq and nothing is on by default. Watch the storage change instead. The newer database version keeps notes in SQLite, and Logseq warns that its Markdown export "cannot capture all data in a graph". Use the file-based version if a plain-text escape route matters to you.

Trilium is the clearest illustration that these decisions get reversed. It removed AI from the core in version 0.102.0 in March 2026 and brought it back in 0.103.0 in May. Every release since has extended it, up to version 0.105.0 on 19 August. It remains off by default and free under the Affero GPL 3.0 licence. Simplenote and Bear sit in the same category of opt-in connectors, and Bear's own documentation puts it well: "nothing connects unless you opt in". Simplenote has a separate weakness worth knowing about, which its help pages state outright: notes "are not encrypted at rest due to server side constraints". If that matters to you, Standard Notes and Notesnook solve exactly that problem.

Apps Like Notion Without AI

Notion publishes no per-user setting that turns Notion AI off. We searched its entire AI help category on 2 September 2026 and found two narrow toggles, both restricted to workspace owners. One covers AI web search. The other covers AI meeting notes. The full switch appears on Notion's own security page, and it applies to a plan most readers will never buy. Notion's wording: "if you're on Notion's Enterprise Plan and have a verified domain, you'll be able to turn off Notion AI features".

Notion's AI security page is more reassuring on the second question. It states that "by default, Notion and its AI Subprocessors do not use Customer Data to train any models". Below the Enterprise tier, it adds, outside model providers keep customer data for 30 days or fewer. The concern is exposure rather than training.

If you already use Notion and want out, pick your replacement by the job you used it for.

• Databases, relations and linked objects: Anytype is the closest match, and its terms of use describe it as "local-first, E2E encrypted software". Its pricing page lists 100 MB of remote storage on the free plan and $4 a month for Plus.
• A personal wiki and long-form writing: Obsidian, which handles links between notes without ever needing a server.
• A shared team workspace with live editing: nothing on this page replaces that, and pretending otherwise would waste your weekend.

Get your content out before you cancel anything. Notion's export documentation covers Markdown and comma-separated values (CSV) output, which both Obsidian and Anytype can take.

iPad Note Taking Apps Without AI

No major iPad handwriting app is AI-free in 2026, so the useful question becomes which one gives you a switch. We checked five and the results split sharply.

GoodNotes puts generative AI on every tier, including the free one, which grants five monthly uses of its maths assistant and its question feature. Its own FAQ confirms that "Goodnotes AI uses an external large language model hosted on Amazon Bedrock", so that content leaves your iPad. The documented toggles cover the on-device features only, and they live in a performance troubleshooting article rather than a privacy one.

Notability is the opposite case and deserves credit for it. Its support article gives one clear instruction: "navigate to Notability Settings > AI Customization > toggle Learn." Its privacy policy then states that "we do not use nor share the Input Content ... for training AI/ML models" and that input is deleted once processing finishes.

The other two are harder to recommend. Nebo, now sold as MyScript Notes, runs handwriting recognition offline. Its privacy policy confirms that the generative features "are powered by OpenAI", and that your content goes with them. MyScript documents no path to switch that layer off. CollaNote ships an AI assistant, AI transcription and a document chat feature, names no model provider anywhere on its site, and documents no off switch at all.

Our iPad pick is Apple Notes with Apple Intelligence turned off. Apple documents Smart Script as an on-device model that helps "recreate handwriting in a similar style to your own", and it survives that switch. Image Wand, the generative part, does not. Fix one more thing while you are in Settings. Apple Notes is only encrypted end to end when Advanced Data Protection is on, as Apple explains on its iCloud data security page.

Leaving OneNote and Evernote

OneNote has the plainest off switch on this page, and it belongs to the user rather than an administrator. Microsoft documents it as File > Options > Copilot, clear the Enable Copilot checkbox, then restart. Two limits come straight from the same article: the checkbox is per app and per device, and the instructions apply to personal Microsoft accounts. On a work or school account the equivalent control sits with your administrator, through the connected experiences setting. Our guide to turning off Copilot in Windows covers the rest of the system.

Microsoft's Copilot privacy documentation also states that prompts, responses and data reached through Microsoft Graph "aren't used to train foundation LLMs". Turning Copilot off in OneNote is therefore a reasonable answer on its own, and moving apps is a choice rather than a rescue.

If you do want to leave, Obsidian is the usual destination, and Apple Freeform suits people who mainly used OneNote as an infinite canvas. Check its App Store listing before you settle in, because Freeform now carries an optional Creator Studio subscription with generative image tools.

Evernote ships an AI assistant, semantic search and AI meeting notes, all on by default. Its product page confirms that "each user can enable or disable individual AI features at any time in Settings, in the AI features section". We do not send anyone to Evernote because its free plan stops at 50 notes and one notebook, a cap its plan comparison spells out.

The Free Picks with No Note Limit

Three apps here are free, uncapped and open source: Obsidian, Zettlr and Trilium. Obsidian charges only for optional extras, namely Sync, Publish, and a $50 per user yearly licence for commercial use. Zettlr and Trilium take donations and nothing else, and Trilium's own site says it is "free and open-source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no paid tiers, accounts or feature paywalls".

Two more are free in the sense that matters most. Standard Notes gives you end-to-end encryption and unlimited device sync at $0 a year, and Notesnook gives unlimited encrypted notes with a 50MB monthly sync allowance. Both let you export everything on the free plan, so leaving costs nothing later.

The trap in this category is a free tier that caps the number of notes rather than the features. Evernote's 50-note limit is the clearest example, and it turns a free plan into a trial.

Who This Is Not For

An AI-free note app is the wrong recommendation for three groups, and we would rather say so than sell it to everyone.

• Teams editing one page together, live. Obsidian, Zettlr and Trilium are single-writer tools. Obsidian lists multiplayer editing as planned on its roadmap, not shipped. Stay on Notion, or move to a tool built for it, and treat the AI as the cost of the feature.
• Students who want flashcards and lecture summaries generated for them. Notability's Learn does that job and its policy says your input is not used for training. Choose it deliberately rather than hoping an AI-free app grows the feature.
• Anyone who wants to query their notes from an assistant. Bear and Simplenote both offer opt-in connectors, and Joplin now supports local models, so you can have this without sending anything to a cloud service.

Our Pick

Install Obsidian if you want one answer and no maintenance. It ships no AI, keeps your notes as plain files you own, costs nothing, and its changelog through 2 September 2026 gives us no reason to expect that changing. Choose Notesnook instead if encrypted sync matters more to you than plain files, or Zettlr if you only write and never want an account.

One line would flip this. If a first-party AI feature appears in Obsidian's changelog, or if Joplin's "AI is off by default" wording disappears, our pick moves to Notesnook. It is the only company here that has committed in writing to never adding a feature that reads your notes. We recheck the release notes and terms pages on each pass, and Joplin has already shown how fast the answer moves. If you are stripping AI out of the rest of your setup, our guide to photo editors without AI covers the category readers ask about next.

Download Obsidian and point it at an empty folder. Then read the changelog of your note taking app without AI before you accept each update. A new AI feature appears there weeks before anyone mentions it on the homepage.