SteelNote vs Reflect Open

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/

Reflect Open is a local-first note-taking app for daily notes, linked thinking, and private AI over your own files. Start each day in a daily note, capture meetings, ideas, tasks, and journal entries, then connect people and projects with wiki-style links. Reflect builds a personal graph from ordinary Markdown files, with fast search, backlinks, and optional semantic search that runs on-device. Your notes stay yours. Reflect has no account, no telemetry, and no Reflect-hosted cloud service. Notes are stored as plain Markdown in a folder you choose, with a rebuildable local SQLite index beside them. Optional AI chat, transcription, and sync features only run when you connect your own provider or storage, and private notes are blocked from external AI calls. Highlights: - Daily notes first, with quick capture into today. - Wiki links and backlinks instead of folders. - Full-text search and optional on-device semantic search. - Optional bring-your-own-key AI chat over your notes. - Audio memos with optional BYOK transcription. - iCloud Drive or Git-based sync using files you own. - Markdown source of truth for long-term portability. - Keyboard-native, minimal interface built for focus. Terms of Use: https://reflect.app/terms Privacy Policy: https://reflect.app/privacy