Comparison

Hourglass vs Nota

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Hourglass

Enhance your focus and productivity with a simple, clean timer designed for work, study, or time management. Customize sessions and breaks without any data collection or advertisements.

Highlights
  • Simple and clean interface
  • Privacy-first data handling
  • Customizable focus and break sessions
  • Ad-free experience
Read full description

Boost Your Productivity with ‘Hourglass’ - your personal focus timer! Take control of your time and achieve your goals with ‘Hourglass’, the ultimate app for staying focused and productive. Whether you're working, studying, or simply trying to manage your time better, our app provides a simple and clean interface designed to help you stay on track. Key Features: * Simple & Clean Design: Enjoy a user-friendly interface that makes time management effortless. No distractions, just pure focus. * Privacy First: We respect your privacy. 'Hourglass' does not collect or store any user data, ensuring your personal information stays secure. * Customizable Sessions: Tailor your focus sessions and break intervals to fit your personal workflow and maximize productivity. * No Ads: Focus entirely on your tasks without interruptions from ads. Experience the power of focused work sessions and improve your productivity with ‘Hourglass’. Download now and take the first step towards a more efficient you! +++ Copyright +++ App Store screenshots generated with Screenshots.pro

About

Nota

Features
Read full description

You had a great idea this morning. You were in the shower, or walking, or halfway through something else. By the time you sat down to write it up, it was gone. Not entirely — just blurry enough to lose the edge that made it worth capturing. Nota exists for that moment. Open the app and speak. Or type, if that is how you think. There are no rules about how you capture — only that you do. A quick voice note on a walk. A typed thought between calls. An imported recording from a meeting you wanted to revisit. Nota takes whatever you give it and turns it into something structured and useful, automatically. After you capture a note, Nota goes to work. It transcribes your audio on-device, privately, without sending anything to a server. Then it reads what you said and produces a clean summary, a list of action points, key moments you can jump to, and insights — patterns, risks, decisions — surfaced from your own words. You do not have to read back through everything. You do not have to organize anything manually. You open the note and the value is already there. If you want to go deeper, you can talk to your note directly. Ask it what decisions were made. Ask it to list the open questions. Ask it to summarize just the part about pricing, or the part about the timeline. The note assistant understands your content and answers in plain language. It is not a search bar. It is a conversation with your own thinking. That is what a single note gives you. But the real shift happens when your notes start talking to each other. Over days and weeks, you capture more. Customer calls. Product ideas. Research conversations. Weekly reflections. Each one is useful on its own. Together, they hold something larger — a pattern, a direction, a story about where things are heading — that you would never see by reading them one at a time. Smart Notes is how Nota surfaces that bigger picture. You give it a topic and a time range. It reads across your notes, finds what is relevant, and composes a single, coherent output. Your week of product thinking becomes a strategy document. Your last five customer calls become a list of the things people actually want. Your scattered ideas about a launch become the outline of a plan. You did not write any of that. You just captured, consistently, the way you already think. Nota is private by default. Transcription runs locally on your device using on-device AI. Nothing is sent to a server unless you choose to use cloud processing for longer or more complex recordings. There are no accounts to create, no logins, no data handed over before you have even decided if you trust something. You open the app, you capture, and what you say stays yours. Everything you produce — transcripts, summaries, action points, insights — can be exported in whatever format you need. The audio is yours too. Nota works for founders who want to stop losing what came out of a customer call. For creators who think through episodes out loud before they write a single word. For students who need to capture a lecture and come back to the key points without replaying the whole thing. For anyone who has ever had a good idea and watched it dissolve before they could use it. You think faster than you type. Start there. Capture anything. Understand it. Build on it. Terms of Service: https://trynota.ee/terms/

Screenshots

Hourglass3 screens
Nota4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Hourglass at none against Nota's 6. Hourglass also leads on iOS requirement (17.0 vs 26.0). On price, ads and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Nota sells 6 in-app purchases, starting at $5.99 per 7 days. Hourglass asks for nothing beyond the download.

Scorecard2 real differences · 7 level
Hourglass versus Nota: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterHourglassNota
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (1 ratings) — better—
Number of ratings1 — better—
Update frequency—Every 9 days
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNo — betterYes
MonetizationFree—
DevicesiPhone, Apple WatchiPhone, iPad, Apple Watch — better
Requires iOS17.0 — better26.0
Further details — not scored
Size2 MB54 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperPhilipp MailandChipp Studio OU

In-app purchases

None

Hourglass

No in-app purchases

6 purchases

Nota

Subscriptions3
  • Weekly$5.997 Days
  • Monthly$11.991 Month
  • Annual7 Days trial$69.991 Year
One-time3
  • AI Credits: Small pack$8.99
  • AI Credits: Medium pack$22.99
  • AI Credits: Large pack$59.99

Questions

Is Hourglass free?
Hourglass is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Nota free?
Nota is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do Hourglass or Nota have ads?
Neither Hourglass nor Nota shows ads.

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