FoldNotes Compared
Every app below is a good app, and people we like use all of them. This page is here because the differences that matter are hard to see from a features list — what it costs over a few years, whether your notes are files you own, and how much you have to assemble yourself before the app does what you wanted.
FoldNotes is for your own writing and your own notes. If what you need is a shared workspace where a team comments on the same page, none of the apps on this page are that.
Prices and features checked 19 September 2026, from each vendor’s own site. If something here is out of date or unfair, tell us and we’ll fix it.
What it costs
Both assume the usual case: a Mac and an iPad.
| FoldNotes | Obsidian | Scrivener | iA Writer | Ulysses | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $35/yr or $95 once — and the iPhone and iPad app is free | app free; Sync $4/mo billed yearly, so $48/yr | $59.99 Mac + $23.99 iPad = $83.98, once | $49.99 Mac + $49.99 iOS = $99.98, once ✳︎ | $39.99/yr, all your devices |
| Over 3 years | $105, or $95 once | $0 without sync; $144 with | $84 | $100 | $120 |
| Sync between your devices | your iCloud, included | $4/mo add-on, or set up your own | a Dropbox account, for iPhone and iPad | your iCloud, included | your iCloud, included |
FoldNotes for iPhone and iPad is free on the App Store and stays free — a licence is for the Mac app, so the iPad half of every figure above costs you nothing.
✳︎ iA Writer is a one-off purchase, and they’re straight about what that means: “Minor updates are free, while major updates may incur costs.”
Obsidian is free for personal use, and if you don’t need sync it stays free. That’s a real answer for a lot of people. Ours is that once you do want your notes on a second device, our lifetime licence costs less than two years of theirs — and never asks again.
Scrivener is cheaper than our lifetime licence and always will be, which is the honest arithmetic. What you’re buying with the difference is where the work lives: Markdown files in your own iCloud Drive that any app can open, syncing without a Dropbox account, on a Mac and an iPad that behave the same way.
Where your notes live
| FoldNotes | Obsidian | Scrivener | iA Writer | Ulysses | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stored as | .md files in your iCloud Drive | .md files in a folder you pick | a Scrivener project package | .md files in a folder you pick | Ulysses’ library; external folders optional |
| Open a note in another app, no export | yes | yes | no | yes | only for external folders |
| If you stop paying | a lifetime licence never lapses; a lapsed yearly one still opens, reads, searches, previews and exports plain Markdown | free to keep using | nothing to lapse — bought once | nothing to lapse — bought once | read-only; you can still read and export |
FoldNotes is built on Apple’s own document system, so iCloud handles downloading a note you haven’t opened yet, and handles two devices editing the same one. That work isn’t ours to guess at, which is why your notes can sit in iCloud Drive alongside everything else rather than in a folder the app asks you to keep to itself.
What’s built in
| FoldNotes | Obsidian | Scrivener | iA Writer | Ulysses | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typewriter scrolling, and focus on a line, sentence or paragraph | yes | needs a plugin | yes | yes | yes |
| Parts-of-speech highlighting — see every adjective at once | yes | no | no | yes | grammar and style check instead |
| Outliner — fold, hoist, move a row with everything under it | yes | folding yes; hoisting and row moves need plugins | outlines documents, not rows | no | no |
| Graph of your links | built in | built in | no | no | no |
| Database views over your notes | built in | built in (Bases) | outliner columns | no | smart filters |
| Task board across every note | built in (macOS) | needs a plugin | corkboard and status labels, per project | no | no |
| Word, PDF and EPUB — and chapters bound into one book | yes | needs plugins | yes (Compile) | Word and PDF | yes |
| Command line, and AI agents that can read and write your notes | fn and MCP, both included | community MCP servers | no | no | no |
| Plugins to install before it does the above | none | several | none | none | none |
| Built as | native Swift | Electron | native | native | native |
Where FoldNotes stops
If any of these matter, one of the others is the better app and we’d rather you knew now.
- Mac, iPhone and iPad only. No Windows, no Android, no web. Obsidian and iA Writer run everywhere.
- No plugin ecosystem. What’s in the app is what there is. If you want to extend it yourself, Obsidian is built for that and we are not.
- No publishing service. Obsidian Publish and Ulysses’ blog publishing have no equivalent here. We turn your writing into a Word file, a PDF or an EPUB; we don’t host it.
- The Task Board, Gallery view and snapshots are macOS. The iPhone and iPad app is free and edits the same notes, but it isn’t the whole Mac app.
- It’s a young app. Ulysses and iA Writer have been refined for over a decade.
Where it doesn’t
- Your notes are
.mdfiles in your own iCloud Drive, readable by anything, today and in ten years. - The outliner, the graph, the database and the task board are one app, with nothing to assemble.
- Sync is included because it’s your own iCloud Drive — there is no account with us at all.
- A licence is $95 once, if you’d rather never think about it again.
A word about Bike
Bike is a lovely outliner, and FoldNotes isn’t trying to replace it. We read and write Bike’s own .bike files: an outline you made in Bike opens here, edits here, and goes back as a Bike file, with its rows, its status attributes and its formatting intact.
They’re different tools. Bike is an outliner, and does that one thing beautifully in a single focused window. FoldNotes is a notes app that happens to have an outliner in it, alongside tags, links, tasks, a database and a collection of Markdown files. If you use Bike, nothing here asks you to stop — and FoldNotes is how those outlines come with you to an iPad.