ExpandNote vs Beaver Notes

ExpandNote is an AI-powered note-taking app for capturing, organizing, and transforming your notes across devices. Write notes with markdown, add tags, dictate ideas with voice-to-text, and use AI Profiles to automatically process notes based on tags. Email-to-note lets you forward information into your notebook, while offline-first sync keeps your notes available when your connection is unreliable. Create, edit, search, favorite, archive, lock, and restore notes. Organize notes with tags and smart workflows. Use your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or OpenRouter API keys for AI-powered note workflows.

Beaver Notes is a fast, native client for the open-source Beaver Notes server — a self-hosted note wall you run on your own infrastructure. Write markdown notes. Drop in photos, videos and files. Everything lands on your server, nowhere else. No accounts to sign up for, no third-party services, no analytics, no telemetry. FEATURES • Multi-server — connect to as many self-hosted Beaver Notes servers as you need and switch between them from the sidebar. • Local-first sync — an outbox queue keeps everything working offline and catches up the moment the server comes back. • Markdown editor — bold, italic, code, lists, links, headings, with live preview. • Attachments — photos, videos, and arbitrary files. Images appear in an adaptive grid with a fullscreen viewer. Inline video playback. • Upload progress — per-file and per-message progress overlays, including retry on failure. • Image editor — crop, draw, filters, and optional optimization before upload. • Video trim & optimize — HEIC and H.265 encoding to keep uploads small. • Quick input — a compact composer at the bottom of the wall for fast capture. • Search — local full-text search with type, tag, pinned and date filters. • Spotlight — your notes are findable from the system search. • Privacy — biometric lock with Face ID / Touch ID, auto-lock timeout, and the option to hide previews in the App Switcher. • Storage controls — per-server cache size limit and one-tap erase. • Multi-platform — adapted layouts for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with native sidebar, context menus, swipe actions, and keyboard shortcuts. PRIVACY The app talks only to the self-hosted server you configure. No analytics SDKs. No third-party services. No developer-side backend. Read the full privacy policy at https://eduard256.github.io/beaver-notes-apple/PRIVACY.md REQUIREMENTS You need a running Beaver Notes server. The server is open source — see https://github.com/eduard256/beaver-notes