Notion alternative
Everything Notion does. Plus the half it can’t.
Notion is where a company writes things down. lodos is where it gets things done. The same wiki, the same board, the same documents, plus a knowledge graph, an encrypted vault, workflows that run on a schedule, and an agent that can spend your Stripe key without ever reading it. All of it on your Mac. Free, offline, no account.
You would not paste your Stripe secret key into a Notion page. Nobody would. That reflex is not paranoia. It is an accurate reading of where the page ends up: on servers Notion can read, in a workspace its AI is built to read.
So the half of your company that actually runs never gets written down. The runbook says "use the production key" instead of naming it. The onboarding doc stops exactly where it would start being useful. Your documentation has a hole in it, and the hole is the part that would let anyone, or anything, do the work for you.
lodos closes the hole. Then it puts an agent in it.
Worth saying plainly. If your company lives in one document that five people type in at once, Notion is the right tool and this page will not change that.
Real-time editing, with comments, mentions and presence.
Databases, views and relations, refined over a decade.
Templates, integrations, and people who already know how to drive it.
Notion gives you somewhere to write. lodos gives you the machine that runs what you wrote: the surface of five products woven together by an agent that has all of your context and none of your keys, and a team layer that shares it without ever handing a server a key.
Ask a question, get a written answer with [[wikilink]] citations instead of a page of search results. Imported sources are write-once and hash-checked, so every claim traces back to where it came from. A nightly pass flags orphans, dead links, stale claims and gaps in plain SQL, which means the rot surfaces before you trip over it.
Obsidian-grade linking, with one resolver shared by the renderer, the linter and the agent. Local and global graph views make the whole company browsable. The agent traverses slugs, titles and edges to build multi-hop context, and never page bodies. Point lodos at a real Obsidian vault and it becomes the editor.
Kanban tasks the agent reads, plans and moves. When a job starts repeating it becomes a workflow: drafted by the AI, approved by you, running on a schedule, calling your own APIs with credentials injected at the moment of use. Pin the result to your dashboard as a number, a chart or an overdue flag.
Twenty-four skills ship in the box: weekly metrics, customer refunds, ADRs, incident post-mortems, spec authoring, security review, office hours. Write your own and a scanner checks it before it can ever be saved. A skill is instructions, never code, and the app enforces which tools each one may touch.
This is the part with the most engineering behind it. Every member holds their own sealed copy of a section key, and the coordinating server relays addressed envelopes it cannot open, with no delete endpoint to censor with. Invites are confirmed out of band with a safety number, so a coordinator sitting in the middle is detectable rather than trusted. A member without a grant never receives the ciphertext at all: the boundary is cryptographic, not a filter in the interface. Remove someone and the key rotates, the content is re-encrypted and everyone remaining moves to a new epoch, so the envelope they kept opens nothing written after they left. Every action lands in a signed, hash-linked record with a Merkle root you can anchor to an external timestamp, and it records whether a human or an agent did it. Shared, audited, and still zero-knowledge.
Secrets are encrypted on your device before they touch disk, with a key per section and a hash-linked audit trail behind every access. This is not carelessness on Notion’s part. A workspace whose AI is designed to read everything cannot also be the place where the AI cannot read something.
Drop in a PDF, a contract or a spreadsheet and it becomes searchable knowledge. Query your own numbers and get a chart. Ask for a board update and get a rendered deck, offline, with no service in the loop. The AI chat remembers what you told it last week, on your machine, and the transcript is never written to disk.
Nine dollars a month for the whole install, not per seat, buys the one thing a cloud is genuinely good at: an encrypted snapshot that brings a new machine up in minutes and keeps the rest in step. Our servers hold ciphertext and an integrity chain, never a key, so a breach on our side is a pile of noise. The desktop runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and the phone companion reads that same snapshot behind Face ID, so you can check a credential or approve a run without being at your desk.
Both products are described with the same four answers. There is no kinder phrase available for the same behaviour, so neither column can be graded on a curve.
| What can it see? | Notion | lodos |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | On their servers | On your device, sync optional |
| What the vendor can read | Everything you write | Only ciphertext it cannot open |
| What its AI can read | Your whole workspace | Structure, never a secret value |
| Who holds the key | The vendor | You |
| Starts at | $10 per member, per monthRead from the vendor on 2026-07-31 | $0 |
Yes, and it has to. Notion AI answers questions about your workspace by reading your workspace; a version that could not read your pages could not do its job. Notion encrypts your data in transit and at rest and holds the keys, which is exactly what makes search, collaboration and AI possible. That is a normal, well-built SaaS architecture. It is simply not zero-knowledge, and the two get confused constantly.
The lodos agent is the same kind of assistant with one structural difference: nothing in the system returns the plaintext value of a secret. Not a restricted tool, not an admin one. The build fails if anyone adds one.
This is the part with no equivalent in a hosted workspace, so here it is concretely.
01
Your wiki page references a credential the way it would a variable: {{secrets.stripe.sk_live}}. The reference is what gets stored, and the reference is all the model ever sees.
02
When the agent runs a command that needs the real value, that value is decrypted on your device and injected into an isolated subprocess as an environment variable.
03
The model gets the exit code and the output, with anything shaped like a secret stripped out. The value was never in its context, so it cannot surface in a transcript, a log, or an answer six weeks from now.
The audit log records that a secret was used, by whom and for what, and never which value. Entries are hash-linked, so removing one is detectable.
Same company, same week, same three jobs.
Notion
You open Stripe, copy the figures into a database, write the summary yourself, and remember to do it again next Monday.
lodos
A workflow ran at 08:00. It queried Stripe with a key the model never saw, filed the digest to your wiki with its sources, and pinned the number to your dashboard.
Notion
The runbook says which dashboard to open and which key to use, without naming it. You do the work by hand and paste the outcome back.
lodos
You say what happened. The agent follows the refund playbook, spends the key inside an isolated subprocess, writes the outcome to the wiki and closes the task.
Notion
Search returns nine pages. Three are out of date, and nothing tells you which three.
lodos
The agent answers from the index with citations, and last night’s pass had already marked the out-of-date pages stale.
Export your workspace as markdown. Notion does it natively, in one click.
Point lodos at the folder. Pages, structure and links come across, and a scan refuses anything carrying a plaintext secret.
Ask the agent what is in there. It builds the index, answers with citations, and tells you which pages are already stale.
Your pages stay markdown the whole way through, which means leaving is the same click in reverse. Nothing to request, no export queue, no format you cannot open.
Switch if you run the company. Founders and very small teams, where the work is decisions, credentials and follow-through rather than one shared document.
Stay on Notion if your day is five people typing in the same page at the same time. That is what it does best, and we would rather you kept using it than be disappointed.
Or run both for a week. lodos is free, needs no account, and your pages are markdown at both ends.
It depends what you are replacing. For notes alone, Obsidian is excellent and has a much larger plugin ecosystem. For the whole company, wiki plus tasks plus credentials plus an AI that can act on all three, lodos is the one built for that job: local-first, zero-knowledge, and free with no account.
No, and it does not claim to be. Notion encrypts data in transit and at rest while holding the keys, which is what lets search, collaboration and Notion AI work at all. Zero-knowledge means the vendor cannot decrypt your content even when asked. That is a different and much narrower guarantee, and it is the one lodos is built on.
Yes. Export your Notion workspace as markdown and point lodos at the folder; pages, folder structure and links come across. Databases arrive as pages and tables you can query rather than as Notion databases. Everything stays markdown, so you can take it out again the same way.
Completely. There is no account, no sign-up and no network call required to use the app. Encrypted cloud sync is an optional nine dollars a month, and even that only moves ciphertext.
The whole company OS is free and stays free: vault, wiki, knowledge graph, tasks, workflows, skills, documents, charts and the built-in AI. The only paid part is optional encrypted backup and multi-device sync. The AI runs on your own Claude account, so we never resell you tokens.
Yes, and it is the part of lodos with the most engineering behind it. Shared vaults and a shared wiki with roles, access control and per-seat billing, built so that a member without a grant never receives the ciphertext in the first place: the boundary is cryptographic, not a filter in the interface. The coordinating server relays sealed envelopes it cannot open, removing someone rotates the key and re-encrypts, and every action lands in a signed, hash-linked audit that records whether a human or an agent did it.
Yes. The desktop runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and the phone companion reads the same encrypted snapshot behind Face ID: read-only by design, so you can check a credential or approve a run away from your desk.
Comparison
The same rows we publish on the product page, with the Notion column pulled out beside ours. Anything marked limited explains itself on hover.
| lodos | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge wiki | ||
| Obsidian-style graph | ||
| Tasks & kanban | ||
| Workflows & automation | Notion’s automations are template rules; lodos workflows are AI-drafted, call your own APIs and inject secrets at runtime. | |
| Zero-knowledge secret vault | ||
| Built-in AI agent | Notion AI writes and summarises text; lodos’s agent reads your data and runs tasks through your own tools. | |
| Local-first, fully offline | ||
| Your whole company, one app |
Hover any “Limited” to see how lodos compares.
Put a real API key in the vault, reference it from a wiki page, and ask the agent to use it. Then open the transcript and go looking for the value.
Apple Silicon · macOS 13+ · notarization pending
If this page describes Notion incorrectly, that is a bug. Tell us and we will fix it. Notion. Source: www.notion.com/pricing