NNote is a free outliner note app built around one idea: your notes should belong to you — not to a company's server.
NNote started, as most tools do, with a personal itch. Its developer — a software engineer in Japan — had spent years cycling through note apps: outliners with beautiful editors but mandatory accounts, knowledge bases with powerful linking but monthly fees for basic sync, journals that got acquired and shut down with a thirty-day export window. Each migration meant re-learning a tool and, worse, trusting a new company with another copy of a decade of private thinking.
The pattern underneath was always the same: the app was designed around the company's server, and the server was designed around the company's business model. So NNote was built from the opposite starting point — what does a serious note-taking app look like if there is no server at all? Every note stored on your own device, sync as a direct conversation between your devices, AI that runs on your hardware, and a site that is nothing but static files. It turned out the answer wasn't a compromise; the app got faster and simpler for it.
The mission is narrow on purpose: make outline-based note-taking — the way of working NNote is built around — available to anyone, for free, without asking them to surrender their data to get it. Notes are often the most personal writing a person does. A tool with that job should be private by architecture, not by policy.
The User Guide walks through every feature, and the Blog covers the thinking behind this way of working — outlining, Zettelkasten, personal knowledge management, and why local-first matters.
NNote is a Progressive Web App. Notes are stored in IndexedDB in your browser; device-to-device sync uses WebRTC with vector-clock–based conflict resolution; optional Google Drive sync — which shares the same merge logic and doubles as an off-device backup — stores its data in the hidden app-data area of your own Drive; and AI features use the browser's built-in Prompt API so inference happens on your hardware. The entire site is served as static files — there is no application server and no database of users. The Privacy Policy describes the (short) list of what data goes where.
NNote is designed, built, and maintained by one person: a software engineer in Japan who builds it as an ongoing personal project, uses it daily as their own primary note system, and answers questions in the community directly. It is not backed by a company or investors — which is precisely why it can make the promises above. There is no growth target that ever needs your data, and no acquirer who could change the terms.
Being a one-person project cuts both ways, and that is worth saying plainly: development moves at the pace of one committed developer, and support comes from that same person via the community rather than from a help desk. In exchange, the app has a single, consistent point of view — and a maintainer with skin in the game, whose own notes live in it too.
Found a bug, have a feature idea, or just want to say hello? The Contact page explains how to get in touch, and the NNote Discord server is where the conversation happens. Bug reports with steps to reproduce are especially appreciated, and feature suggestions have shaped much of what NNote is today.