Cryptee
CherryTree
Trilium Notes
Zim Wiki
Joplin
Notesnook
Milanote
Standard Notes
SpawnGraph
Miro
Mapify
Xmind
LucidChart
MindMeister
Mural
FigJam
Cryptee is a safety and privacy focused, encrypted and cross-platform personal data storage service. You can write personal documents, notes, journals, store photos and all sorts of other files.
It works on all your devices and provides a zero-knowledge place to keep all your sensitive digital belongings. cryptee has all the features you'd expect from a modern document editor, like live sync with unlimited devices, rich document editing, to-dos, markdown, hotkeys, code highlighting, latex math, embeds, attachments, support for tables, ability to attach pdf files, read EPUB ebooks, listen to audio-memos, as well as open and link other various file formats.
Cryptee is based in Europe, in Tallinn, Estonia. A country named "the most advanced digital society in the world" by Wired, and a country where the government runs on blockchain.
SpawnGraph turns any PDF, URL, YouTube video, Word doc, PowerPoint, EPUB, or 90+ other file formats into an editable hierarchical mind map in seconds. All natural-language processing runs entirely in your browser โ no data uploads, no AI API costs, no signup required. Real-time multi-user collaboration is included on every plan including the free tier. Built for students, researchers, consultants, and content creators who need to synthesize source material fast.
Key differentiators: โข Browser-native NLP โ verifiable in DevTools, your content never leaves your device during generation โข 93+ file formats supported (PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, EPUB, YouTube transcripts, images via OCR, audio via Whisper WASM) โข Real-time multi-user collaboration on every plan including free โข No per-seat pricing โข Free tier is the product, not a trial
Cryptee SpawnGraphIndividuals or organizations that require secure storage and privacy for their documents and photos, particularly those concerned about data tracking, surveillance, or needing a privacy-first cloud service alternative.
SpawnGraph's answer:
SpawnGraph is the only mind mapping tool that combines three things in one product: (1) browser-native natural-language processing โ every PDF, document, and transcript is parsed entirely client-side, so your content never reaches our servers and you can verify it in DevTools โ Network; (2) automatic mind map generation from 93+ source file formats including PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, EPUBs, YouTube transcripts (auto-fetched), audio recordings (Whisper WASM), and images (Tesseract OCR); and (3) real-time multi-user collaboration with named cursors on every plan including the free tier, with no per-seat pricing. Every other tool in the category sends your content to a cloud AI service, charges per generation, or locks collaboration behind a paid tier.
SpawnGraph's answer:
Three reasons:
Speed-to-first-map. Drop a 30-page research paper and SpawnGraph produces a hierarchical mind map in under 2 seconds. Tools like MindMeister, Miro, and Whimsical require you to type every node yourself. AI tools like Mapify or MyMap upload your document, charge per generation, and wait several seconds for a model round-trip.
Genuine privacy. Confidential pre-prints, interview transcripts, legal contracts, embargoed materials โ none of it leaves your browser during generation. This isn't a marketing claim; open DevTools โ Network and watch zero outbound requests during a generation. Critical for researchers, lawyers, and anyone working with sensitive content.
Free tier is the product, not a trial. Miro caps you at 3 editable boards. MindMeister at 3 maps. Heptabase has no free tier at all โ just a 7-day trial. SpawnGraph's free tier covers 2 saved mindmaps, 8 export formats including watermarked PNG, real-time collaboration with up to 5 editors per board, and unlimited generation from any of 93+ file formats. Solo Pro at $5/month annual unlocks unlimited boards and the full export set โ but the free tier is genuinely usable forever.
SpawnGraph's answer:
SpawnGraph's primary users are knowledge workers who deal with a lot of source material and need to extract structure from it quickly:
Secondary audience: PKM enthusiasts (Obsidian, Heptabase, Logseq users) looking for a visual synthesis tool that complements their long-term knowledge management vault.
SpawnGraph's answer:
I built SpawnGraph because every "AI mind map" tool I tried in 2024โ2025 had three problems: they required signup, they uploaded my PDFs to their servers, and they charged per generation (sometimes hidden as "credits"). I wanted to map research papers, technical docs, and YouTube talks without any of those constraints.
The technical insight was that modern browsers can do most of the heavy lifting client-side: pdf.js for PDF text extraction, Intl.Segmenter for tokenization (built into V8), heading-hierarchy reconstruction in plain JavaScript, Whisper.cpp WASM for audio transcription, and Tesseract.js for image OCR. The "AI" part of AI mind maps was largely unnecessary โ most real-world documents already have implicit structure (headings, paragraphs, lists) that can be extracted deterministically.
Real-time collaboration was added next because mind mapping is genuinely better as a multi-player activity. We used Yjs CRDTs over a custom binary WebSocket protocol โ the same underlying tech as Linear, Figma's multiplayer layer, and AFFiNE.
The product is solo-built and bootstrapped. We're currently pivoting toward a local-first desktop model (Tauri 2.x) for power users who want the same workflow without any browser dependency, modeled on Obsidian's approach.
SpawnGraph's answer:
Frontend (browser): - React 19 + Vite + TypeScript - @xyflow/react for the canvas - Yjs + y-indexeddb + y-protocols for real-time CRDT collaboration - Zustand for client state - Tailwind CSS for styling - pdf.js for PDF text extraction - Intl.Segmenter for tokenization - Whisper.cpp WASM for audio transcription - Tesseract.js for image OCR - @xenova/transformers for browser-side ML utilities - pdf-lib + pptxgenjs + jszip for client-side export to PDF/PPTX/zip - React Router v6 + SSR prerender for marketing pages
Backend: - Hono framework on Node.js (single VPS) - Postgres for primary storage - Lucia Auth for session management - Yjs sync server (WebSocket binary protocol) - Dodo Payments for billing (not Stripe) - Cloudflare Pages for static hosting + edge caching - Cloudflare DNS + Cloudflare Insights for analytics
Infra cost is ~$30/month at current traffic โ single VPS + Cloudflare free tier + small Postgres instance.
SpawnGraph's answer:
Based on our record, Cryptee seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 79 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
> The only major hurdle to this is Apple continuing to treat web apps as second class citizens on iOS If you add a site to iOS' homescreen it automatically becomes a PWA. The best example I found of a site fully leveraging this feature is Cryptee[0]. They talk about the PWA thing here: https://crypt.ee/download [0] https://crypt.ee/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
Well, then - if self hosting is not your thing - something like crypt.ee might be your thing? Clearly a different pricing model, data is fully encrypted, open source, across platforms. Source: over 2 years ago
Https://crypt.ee now. I used to mostly use local markdown editors like Ulysses and Zettlr. Source: about 3 years ago
Crypt.ee Ticks 1/2/3/5 of your requirements However free tier only has 100MB storage which might be enough for a journal, it also has the best rich text editor of them all, would highly recommend. Source: about 3 years ago
I've only used it for editing docs but have found crypt.ee very easy to use. Source: about 3 years ago
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Xmind - Xmind is a brainstorming and mind mapping application.