SteelNote vs Anima

SteelNote is a notes app built on one promise: your notes are plain Markdown files that you own. Every note is a real .md file on your device, openable in the Files app or in any editor you like, today and years from now. No proprietary database. Nothing locked away. Your notes, truly yours. Because every note is plain text, you are never trapped. Read and edit them in SteelNote, in Files, or in any other Markdown app. If you ever move on, you take your files with you as they are, in an open format that lasts. Native on all your Apple devices. SteelNote is built natively for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Your notes sync across all of them through iCloud, with no third party account and no extra sign in. Start a note on your phone and finish it on your Mac. Find anything, instantly. A local full text index makes search immediate, even in large libraries. Link notes together, see backlinks, organize with folders and tags, and turn any line into a task. Private when you want it. Mark a note as private and it stays out of widgets and AI features. Your most sensitive notes remain yours alone. Bring everything with you. Import from Bear, Notion, Obsidian and Evernote, or from Markdown, TextBundle, Word, RTF, PDF and CSV files. Your folders and structure come along. Apple Notes works too, one note at a time, because Apple offers no bulk export. Everything you expect. Add images, PDFs and tables inline. Use checklists, footnotes and links. Reach your notes from Spotlight, Siri and widgets, and hand off between devices. An open format, now standard. Markdown is a first class type across Apple platforms, and SteelNote is built natively around it. Your files are open, portable and yours. Membership. SteelNote comes with a 14 day free trial, then a yearly plan or a one time lifetime purchase. You can cancel during the trial and pay nothing, or skip the subscription and choose the lifetime purchase instead. Sync is always included and never restricted. Payment is charged to your Apple Account. A yearly plan renews automatically unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the period. You can manage or cancel anytime in your Account settings. Privacy Policy: https://steelnoteapp.com/privacy.html Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Private voice notes, powered by Apple Intelligence. Speak whatever's on your mind and Anima notices the patterns you keep returning to. The inner dialogue you didn't realise you were having, surfaced and given back to you. Everything happens on your device. Your data never leaves it. There are no servers, and no cloud you don't already own. SPEAK Tap to record. Anima transcribes through Apple's on-device Speech models. No audio ever leaves your phone unless you choose to back it up to your own iCloud. The microphone surface is ambient, not anxious: a breathing waveform, a quiet stop button, and you. STRUCTURE Each recording becomes a structured note: a two-sentence summary, the ideas you raised, the tasks you committed to, and the open questions you didn't resolve. Apple's Foundation Models handle the synthesis on-device. Your words, given back to you in shape. NOTICE The more you speak, the more Anima notices. The Constellation tab shows your tags as a graph: clusters of recurring themes, threads that connect across days. The Open Questions tab surfaces what you've been asking but haven't answered. Day Recap appears once a day with one thought and one question to sit with. None of it gamified. None of it telling you to do better. STAY YOURS Anima never sends your audio, transcripts, or text to anyone. The only network connection it makes, and only if you turn it on, is to your own private CloudKit container, where backups of your notes and recordings stay accessible to no one but you. If you want it to be a journal, it's a journal. If you want it to be a sketchpad, it's a sketchpad. If you want it to be quiet most days and noticing-loud on others, it's that too. ANIMA STYLE Five questions during onboarding tune how Anima talks back to you: warmly or critically, in detail or briefly, suggesting gaps or just reflecting. You can change any of it later in Settings. The voice that emerges is yours, not ours. Made for thinking out loud. Built for staying private. FREE AND PREMIUM Capture, transcription, summary, library, search, Day Recap, and Living Summary are free, with no time limit. Premium adds the deeper noticing surfaces (Constellation, Convo, Threads, and the Ideas + Tasks tabs in every note) as a monthly subscription with a 7-day free trial, or a weekly subscription. Subscriptions auto-renew unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the renewal date. Manage or cancel any time in Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions. Use is governed by Apple's standard End User License Agreement: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Requires iPhone with Apple Intelligence and iOS 26 or later.