Ariv vs HighMemo

Ariv is a local-first second brain for notes, tasks, journaling, study, projects, and personal knowledge management. Capture ideas, organize work, search your vault, ask questions about your notes, and keep your thinking connected without building a complicated plugin setup. Everything is built in: - Markdown notes and daily writing - Smart dashboard for active work - Tasks and Kanban - Quick capture - Voice memos with transcription - Ask Brain, an AI assistant for your notes - Calendar-aware planning and meeting context - Graph view and visual maps - Templates and presentation mode - Unified search across files, tags, and content Ariv is designed around a simple idea: your notes have a life. New thoughts land in your inbox. Active notes stay visible while you are working on them. Older notes move out of the way but stay searchable, linkable, and ready to resurface when you need them. No manual filing system required. No weekend spent setting up plugins. Open the app and start thinking. Your files stay yours: - Notes are stored as plain Markdown - Works with existing Markdown folders and vaults - No proprietary format - No account required to use the local app - Optional end-to-end encrypted sync is available AI is optional and on your terms. Use your own API key, run supported local models, or use Ariv's managed AI add-on. Ask Brain can answer questions from your vault and point back to the notes it used. Whether you are a student, writer, researcher, developer, founder, or lifelong learner, Ariv gives you one place to capture, connect, and use what you know. Think freely. No setup required.

HighMemo saves every memo to your device first, shows how your memos relate, and adds AI, Drive sync, and calendar only when you connect them yourself. No account. No API key. No setup. HighMemo works before you connect anything — and you decide what to connect. Sync across mobile and desktop Connect Google Drive to keep the same memos, images, and attachments in sync across iPhone, iPad, Android, and the HighMemo desktop app. Saving never waits The memo is on your device the moment you send it, and any tidying happens afterwards in the background. If that tidying fails, nothing you already had is erased. Share a link from any app and it lands as a memo — the title, summary and thumbnail fill in behind you. Attach a photo from your library and it stays with the memo. How your memos relate Memos that share a tag gather together, and the tag's name sits at the centre. Link two memos yourself, or mention one inside another with @ — those links are never removed by an automatic rebuild. Folders, tags and pinning work with no account and no AI. Type to filter by title, body or tag; #tag matches that tag exactly. Organized automatically when you connect an AI Once an AI provider is connected, HighMemo automatically creates a title, summary, tags and category for every memo, helping you review and organize captured information with less manual work. On supported Apple devices, choose Apple Intelligence and start using AI immediately without a separate API key or model download. Processing uses Apple's on-device system model. Connect Google Calendar and your schedule sits beside your memos — access is read-only, so HighMemo never creates, edits or deletes an event. Save a memo and HighMemo suggests the events it looks related to; you choose whether to link it. Open an event and tap Add memo to start a memo already attached to it. Reminders that know when and where Put a reminder on a memo — once, daily, weekly or monthly. Or pin a place: when you arrive, the memo comes back. Arrival is decided on the device and the notification is created there too — it fires once per visit. Your storage, not ours Connect a Google account and your mobile devices and HighMemo desktop app see the same memos. They live in your own Google Drive app-data folder — there is no HighMemo server and no HighMemo account, so we cannot look at them. Images and attachments travel too. Sync runs when you open the app and every 5 minutes while it is open, plus a button whenever you want. Your AI, your key — or no AI at all You bring the AI. Paste the API key of a service you already pay for and requests go from your device straight to that provider — there is no server of ours in between. Or use a supported on-device model so your memo text never leaves the device. Or connect nothing at all and keep using the app. Export everything as one JSON file, with your attached photos embedded in it. Before you install - HighMemo shows ads. There is no paid or ad-free version. - On first launch HighMemo asks whether to download a small model (about 330 MB) used for search and related memos. Decline and the app keeps working. - Connecting Google for sync asks for app-data folder access and read-only calendar access together. - Location access is requested only when a memo actually has a location reminder. - The interface is in English. AI output follows the language of your memo, or a language you pick in Settings. Most memo apps decide where your memos live and which AI reads them. HighMemo makes both of those your choice — and works before you choose either.