A Standard Notes alternative for Mac and Windows, every note type included

NotePrivate is a Standard Notes alternative for Mac and Windows, aimed at people who already believe in encrypted notes and have run into the Standard Notes plan wall. Checked on standardnotes.com on 8 September 2026, the free Standard Notes plan gives you plain text notes, tags, unlimited device sync, offline access, a passcode on individual notes and two-factor authentication. Rich text, markdown, checklists, code, spreadsheets, folders, the built-in authenticator and the Web Clipper all sit on Productivity at $90 a year, and 100GB of encrypted file storage sits on Professional at $120 a year. NotePrivate has a planned price of $59 a year with every note type switched on from the first launch: rich text, markdown, code, checklists, spreadsheets, one-time codes and saved web pages, plus folders, subfolders, tags and saved searches. The vault lives on your own machine, opens with the network off, and the password that unwraps it never leaves the device. NotePrivate is not on sale yet, so every button on this page joins the NotePrivate waitlist. What NotePrivate is not: it is not free, it is not open source, it has no published third-party security audit, and it runs on macOS and Windows only, with no Linux, web, iPhone, iPad or Android app.

• You want every note type without a tier decision. NotePrivate includes spreadsheets, code notes, one-time codes and folders in the single planned $59 a year price, which is the set Standard Notes splits across its $90 and $120 plans.
• You want open source and audited code. Standard Notes publishes both its app and its server source and lists four third-party security audits, and NotePrivate does neither. If that is your bar, stay with Standard Notes or look at Notesnook.
• You need Linux, a phone or the web. Standard Notes runs on desktop, mobile and in a browser. NotePrivate is a native Mac and Windows app and nothing else yet, so a phone-first note habit is a reason to skip it.

Named products are market context, not reviews or endorsements. Every price on this page was read from the vendor's own site on 8 September 2026 and prices change, so check before you buy anything.

Standard Notes prices were read from standardnotes.com on 8 September 2026. The NotePrivate price is planned, not live: NotePrivate is not on sale, there is no purchase page, and joining the waitlist is the only thing to do here today.

If a single flat price is the appeal, the NotePrivate homepage covers what is in the app and how the encrypted vault is set up in five steps.

Standard Notes on Windows is the same cross-platform app you get on every other device, and it works, which is the point of building it that way. NotePrivate ships a native Windows installer instead, with one licence covering both a Windows PC and a Mac and the same encrypted vault opening on either. On a work laptop or a shared family PC that matters more than it sounds: BitLocker protects the drive while Windows is off, and once you are signed in every file on that drive is readable by whoever is at the keyboard. A NotePrivate vault stays encrypted while the machine is running, locks itself on sleep and after an idle timeout, and takes a second password on the individual notes you pick.

NotePrivate has no iPad app and no Android app, so if you capture notes on a tablet during the day and write them up on a PC at night, Standard Notes covers that loop and NotePrivate does not. On the PC itself, the on-device OCR engine reads text inside screenshots so a pasted receipt or error message is searchable without the image ever leaving the computer.

Searching for this from a PC rather than a Mac? The encrypted notepad for Windows page covers what Windows encrypts on its own, what Notepad cannot do, and where NotePrivate fits. Writing mostly in plain markdown? The encrypted markdown notes page covers the editor and the export format.

1. Export your Standard Notes data first, in plain format. Standard Notes offers a full export in encrypted or plaintext form on every plan including the free one. Take the plaintext backup so NotePrivate can read the notes, keep it somewhere safe, and delete it once the import is checked.
2. Import the backup into NotePrivate. NotePrivate reads the Standard Notes export and rebuilds the structure as it goes, with your tags arriving as folders you can then rearrange. Import everything in one pass and reorganise afterwards rather than tidying in Standard Notes first.
3. Check the notes that used a paid Standard Notes note type. Super notes, spreadsheets and authenticator entries are the ones worth opening by hand after the move, since they are the richest and the most likely to need a glance. In NotePrivate those same formats are ordinary note types, so nothing needs re-buying to keep editing them.
4. Put a second password on the handful of notes that deserve one. Per-note passwords in NotePrivate are for recovery codes, financial records and the personal entries you would not want on screen if someone walked past, not for the whole vault, which is already encrypted.
5. Test the way out on day one. Run the full NotePrivate export and open one of the resulting files before you delete anything from Standard Notes. Notes come back as plain markdown, so leaving NotePrivate later costs you time and nothing else.

Bringing notes from more than one place into NotePrivate? It also imports from Apple Notes, Evernote, Notion, Google Keep, Simplenote, markdown, HTML, DOCX and plain text. The private Apple Notes alternative page covers the Mac side of that, and the private Notion alternative page covers a Notion export.