OpenNotas is a free, open-source, cross-platform personal note-taking application delivered as a Progressive Web App for anyone who wants to capture text and Markdown notes quickly on mobile or desktop without paying for a subscription.

What it is

OpenNotas is a lightweight note-taking application built with Vue and Nuxt 3 and distributed as a Progressive Web App. It is published under the AGPL-3.0-or-later licence, hosted at https://opennotas.io, and documented in full at https://docs.opennotas.io. The project targets people who want to jot notes down in text format, supports Markdown through open-source editing tools, and is designed around two priorities: security and synchronization across devices.

The concrete problem it solves is feature bloat. Many note-taking applications ship with so many options that capturing a single note becomes slow, and OpenNotas explicitly positions itself against those complex tools, following a philosophy of simplicity in usage. It replaces the heavy, general-purpose note client for people who only need to write plain text quickly and have it appear on every device they own.

Key capabilities

• Cross-platform delivery as a PWA, covering mobile and desktop, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.
• Markdown support built on open-source text editing tools that can be extended with additional features and utilities.
• Multi-device synchronization configured through an Adapter, documented at https://docs.opennotas.io/advanced/sync-flow.
• End-to-end encryption using the AES algorithm, applied to note data before it reaches the sync server, documented at https://docs.opennotas.io/advanced/security.
• Immediate writing flow, where a tap starts a new note.
• Open-source codebase under the AGPL-3.0-or-later licence.
• Built on Nuxt 3 and Vue, matching the repository's nuxt3 and pwa topics.

Who uses it and how

• Individuals who write short text and Markdown notes and want them on a phone, a laptop, and a desktop without switching tools.
• Privacy-conscious users who want AES encryption applied before note data leaves the device.
• Users running more than one machine who configure an Adapter to synchronize notes across those machines.
• Readers who prefer installing a PWA over a platform-specific binary, and who want the same application on every operating system they use.

Getting started

Install the PWA from https://opennotas.io, or build the application from source code. Further instructions are maintained at https://docs.opennotas.io/started/install.

How it compares

No list of paid products is provided in the facts, and no directly similar tools are named alongside OpenNotas in this registry, so it stands alone in this listing. Comparisons against commercial note-taking services are therefore not supported by the material available here.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must operate the sync server and configure an Adapter to move notes between devices, so anyone unwilling to run that infrastructure should rely on the PWA alone or look elsewhere. The repository's GitHub metadata reports the licence as NOASSERTION even though the README states AGPL-3.0-or-later, so the licence should be confirmed before redistributing the code. The author openly requests that contributors temporarily refrain from submitting pull requests for new features and warns of delays in responding to them, and notes the application was created in just over a month, so prospective users wanting an actively roadmapped feature set should weigh that against the small project size of 178 stars, 19 forks, and 5 open issues.