Screenshots 3
VelocityNote
Summary
Most note apps phone home the moment you ask AI to touch your text — your draft rewrites hit an API, your voice memo leaves the machine, your private ops review lands on someone else's server. VelocityNote is built for the case where that is not acceptable.
The app runs a full local AI stack — llama.cpp for text, speech recognition, and image OCR — so rewrites, transcriptions, and document summaries never leave your hardware. The vendor states install size sits at 34 MB and cold-start on Apple Silicon at 0.4 seconds, with SQLite FTS5 returning search results across a 10,000-note vault in 9 ms — numbers competitors measured in the hundreds of milliseconds. Markdown, diagrams, LaTeX math, voice notes, attachments, and file import from Word, PDF, Evernote, and Notion are all built in. The ceiling appears when you need collaborative notebooks or a mobile-first workflow: the app is a local-first desktop tool, not a team workspace.
Bottom line: The right pick if your notes contain anything you cannot afford to upload to a third-party API and you want AI rewriting that works offline — the wrong pick the moment your team needs shared notebooks or you live on a phone.
Community Performance Report Card
No community ratings yet. Be the first to rate this tool!
Pros
Sign in to edit- AI rewriting, voice transcription, and image OCR run entirely on-device via llama.cpp and ONNX runtimes, so notes containing sensitive material never reach an external API — the failure mode of every cloud AI note app is removed by default.
- The vendor states install size of 34 MB and a 0.4-second cold-start on Apple Silicon, which means the app opens before a heavier Electron-based tool has finished its splash screen — relevant when you need to capture something fast.
- SQLite FTS5 full-text search returns results across a 10,000-note vault in under 10 ms according to vendor benchmarks, so search stays instant as the vault grows rather than becoming the bottleneck that drives people to external search tools.
- Import converts Word, PDF, Evernote exports, Notion exports, HTML, RTF, and plain text directly to Markdown, which means migrating an existing archive does not require a separate conversion pipeline or manual reformatting.
- Self-hosted option with a native binary is available, so teams with air-gapped machines or strict data-residency requirements can run the full feature set without depending on vendor infrastructure.
Cons
Sign in to edit- Shared notebooks are listed as a beta feature with collaborative conflict resolution on the roadmap — teams that need more than one person editing the same vault in real time hit this wall immediately, and the next step is a dedicated team wiki or a tool like Notion or Outline.
- No API is available, which means the tool cannot be connected to external automation pipelines, CI systems, or custom integrations — teams that want to trigger note creation, search, or summarization from another service have no programmatic path and switch to a tool that exposes one.
- The bundled AI models (the vendor cites Qwen3-4B at Q4_K_M quantization and Parakeet TDT 0.6B for speech) are fixed choices shipping with the binary — teams that need a specific model, a larger context window, or a fine-tuned variant cannot swap the backend without losing the built-in integration.
- The tool is desktop-first with optional sync; there is no described mobile app with equivalent AI features, so users whose primary capture device is a phone lose the transcription and rewriting capabilities that justify choosing this over a simpler Markdown editor.
About
- Platforms
- macOS, Windows, cross-platform native app
- API Available
- No
- Self-Hosted
- Yes
- Last Updated
- 2026-09-08T19:56:08.017Z
Best For
Who it's for
- Users prioritizing local data and privacy
- Markdown power users needing fast search
- Offline AI features for notes and voice
- Lightweight cross-platform notebooks
What it does well
- Offline note-taking with full-text search
- Local voice transcription and timestamped notes
- Screenshot OCR and image description
- AI-assisted rewriting and summarization on device
- Importing from other apps into Markdown
Integrations
Add notes, reviews, and benchmarks so the next visitor gets a clearer picture.
Compare VelocityNote
Spotted incorrect or missing data? Join our community of contributors.
Sign Up to ContributeFrequently Asked Questions
- Is VelocityNote free?
- VelocityNote has a permanent free tier alongside paid upgrades. You can keep using a baseline version indefinitely without paying.
- Is VelocityNote open source?
- No — VelocityNote is a closed-source tool. Source code is not publicly available.
- Can I self-host VelocityNote?
- Yes. VelocityNote supports self-hosting on your own infrastructure.
- What platforms does VelocityNote support?
- VelocityNote is available on: macOS, Windows, cross-platform native app.
Best VelocityNote alternatives →
Curated lists that include this category
Cloud note-taking apps have trained users to accept that AI features require an API key and an upload. VelocityNote breaks that assumption: it ships with llama.cpp and ONNX runtimes built directly into a 34 MB binary, so the language model, speech-to-text, and image recognition all execute on your machine. The core workflow is Markdown editing with full formatting support — tables, task lists, footnotes, LaTeX, flowcharts, code highlighting, attachments — plus voice transcription that produces timestamped notes as you speak, OCR that converts screenshots into searchable Markdown blocks, and AI rewriting that operates on selected text or full notes without touching the network.
The standout differentiator is what the vendor calls a ‘small footprint, full notebook’: the app holds the entire retrieval layer that AI agents need inside a binary that loads in under half a second. SQLite FTS5 handles full-text search, and the vendor-provided benchmark puts search latency across a 10,000-note vault at 9 ms — compared to 180 ms for Obsidian and 600 ms for Notion in the same illustrative test. For teams whose AI workflows need to query a large note vault locally without an external vector database, this matters.
VelocityNote fits individuals and small teams whose threat model rules out cloud AI, privacy-conscious researchers keeping large Markdown vaults, and power users importing archives from Evernote, Notion, or Word into a local-first system. It does not fit teams that need real-time collaborative editing, mobile-primary workflows, or a published API to connect the tool to external systems — no API is available. The optional sync feature exists, but the docs describe shared notebooks as a beta offering, and collaborative conflict resolution is listed as a roadmap item, not a shipping feature.