Your workspace. On your disk.
Under your keys.

Rich notes and real relational tables, in a Notion-style app that runs entirely on your own machine. Import a Notion workspace, databases included, and carry on with the network off — every page also written to your disk as plain HTML you can read without us.

Download free app Import from Notion

Free forever for local use · No account required · macOS & Windows

Sync service launch offer: 40% off for life →

A Ubimate page with rich text, a nested outline and an inline datatable
Works fully offline Encrypted before it leaves your device Self-hostable sync server Markdown & CSV export No telemetry, no profiling Built in the EU

A false choice

Power or sovereignty? Pick both.

Knowledge tools have split into two camps, and each one asks you to give up what the other is good at.

Cloud workspaces

Notion, Coda

  • Databases, sharing and collaboration that actually work
  • Your content sits in plaintext on someone else’s servers
  • Pages open at the speed of your connection, or not at all
  • Leaving means an export: the pages come out, the databases come out flat

Power, rented.

Local note apps

Obsidian, Logseq

  • Your files, your disk, readable without the app
  • Relational structure means plugins and maintenance
  • Real-time collaboration is not the model
  • Sync is an add-on with its own trade-offs

Sovereignty, alone.

Ubimate

neither camp

  • Outliner, editor, datatables and search, all with the network off
  • Sync and live collaboration over a relay that cannot read your pages
  • Your pages are already on your disk — nothing to export
  • A Notion workspace imports whole — working databases, not just pages

Both, on your machine.

Coming from Notion

Bring the workspace, not just the pages

The hard part of leaving a cloud workspace is never the prose. It is everything the prose was arranged by — the databases, the columns, the links between rows — and that is the part an export usually flattens on the way out.

Point it at an HTML export

Ask Notion for an export and choose HTML. The same dialog offers Markdown & CSV, which the importer does not read. Hand the folder over and pages come across with their structure intact: headings, callouts, checklists, nesting and all, as blocks you can edit rather than as a page of text that used to be a page.

Databases arrive as databases

A Notion database becomes a datatable, its columns still typed and its relations still pointing at the rows they pointed at — not flattened into a table of text that has to be rebuilt by hand. This is the part that usually does not survive a move.

Or paste a page at a time

Ubimate reads the Markdown Notion puts on the clipboard, so a single page can simply be pasted across. Use the importer for a whole workspace, though: pasting moves one page and cannot see what links it to the others.

The whole import arrives as a Space of its own, so nothing you already keep is touched by it. What you are left with is a workspace on your disk that opens with the network off — and the FAQ says what the importer drops on the way in.

Features

A workspace, not a notebook

Everything below is shipped and running in the desktop app today, and all of it works with the network unplugged, bar the one card that is about other people. Most days it is the first three you actually live in — write a page, fold it into an outline, keep a table of what you are tracking. The rest waits for the day you want it.

What you write in

A block editor that keeps up

Headings, callouts, checklists, tables, multi-column layouts, inline maths and code blocks. Type Markdown and it becomes the block. Paste in and out in both Markdown and HTML — a Notion page arrives with its structure, a selection lands in Word still styled.

On a Mac with Apple Intelligence, on-device AI can rewrite, summarise or draft text — only when you ask, without it leaving your machine, and off with one switch.

/ slash menuMarkdown shortcutsbubble menublock handle22 code languagesMarkdown & HTML clipboardon-device AI

Outlining on every block

Fold away what you are not working on and a long page collapses to its own table of contents: the shape of the whole thing on one screen, with the part you actually want one keystroke from it.

Anything folds — paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, code, diagrams and media alike — because the structure is the document, not a separate outline view kept in step with it.

Tab / Shift+Tab12 levelsfold anythingstructure at a glance

A database in the middle of a page

Keep a budget, a reading list, a set of clients — a real table dropped into the page you are already writing.

Columns know what they hold: dates, tags, checkboxes, links to rows in another table, and numbers that total themselves at the foot of the column.

Sort it, filter it, open any row as a page of its own, and paste the whole thing into a spreadsheet the day you want it somewhere else.

12 column typestotalslinked tablesfilters and sorta page per row

What stays yours

Spaces you can put away

A workspace holds as many Spaces as you keep contexts — your own work, a client, the one that is nobody else’s business. Choose which are active and the rest are not hidden so much as absent: out of the sidebar, out of the panels, out of search. Which is what you want about a second before you share your screen.

many Spacesactive selectionscreen-share safe

Collaboration over a blind relay

Live cursors, threaded comments anchored to the text, and per-block locking for the editors that need it. The relay moves encrypted Yjs updates between clients and never decodes one.

Yjs CRDTlive cursorsinline comments

Search that runs on your device

Results as you type, from a full-text index kept locally and persisted on desktop, re-indexing only what changed at startup. It has to be local: the server cannot read your content, so it could not search it for you even if you asked.

fuzzytitle-boostedincremental index

The day you need it

Panels that build themselves

Every checkbox in the workspace in one list. Every date you mention on a calendar. Every tag, every image, every table — each panel projected from what you wrote, with nothing to configure and no database to declare first.

taskscalendartagsmediadata

Diagrams, charts and media

An embedded draw.io editor, Mermaid and Chart.js rendered from ordinary code blocks, an image editor with filters and annotation, video and audio with size limits you set, and link previews the app fetches itself.

MermaidChart.jsdraw.ioimage editor

A plain-HTML mirror of everything

The desktop app can keep a continuously updated copy of every page as semantic HTML files on your disk — indexed by Spotlight, readable in any browser, a folder you can point a local model at without asking anyone for an API key, and still there the day you stop using Ubimate.

semantic HTMLSpotlightyour own modelubimate:// links

What you write in

A block editor that keeps up

Headings, callouts, checklists, tables, multi-column layouts, inline maths and code blocks. Type Markdown and it becomes the block. Paste in and out in both Markdown and HTML — a Notion page arrives with its structure, a selection lands in Word still styled.

On a Mac with Apple Intelligence, on-device AI can rewrite, summarise or draft text — only when you ask, without it leaving your machine, and off with one switch.

/ slash menuMarkdown shortcutsbubble menublock handle22 code languagesMarkdown & HTML clipboardon-device AI

Outlining on every block

Fold away what you are not working on and a long page collapses to its own table of contents: the shape of the whole thing on one screen, with the part you actually want one keystroke from it.

Anything folds — paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, code, diagrams and media alike — because the structure is the document, not a separate outline view kept in step with it.

Tab / Shift+Tab12 levelsfold anythingstructure at a glance

A database in the middle of a page

Keep a budget, a reading list, a set of clients — a real table dropped into the page you are already writing.

Columns know what they hold: dates, tags, checkboxes, links to rows in another table, and numbers that total themselves at the foot of the column.

Sort it, filter it, open any row as a page of its own, and paste the whole thing into a spreadsheet the day you want it somewhere else.

12 column typestotalslinked tablesfilters and sorta page per row

What stays yours

Spaces you can put away

A workspace holds as many Spaces as you keep contexts — your own work, a client, the one that is nobody else’s business. Choose which are active and the rest are not hidden so much as absent: out of the sidebar, out of the panels, out of search. Which is what you want about a second before you share your screen.

many Spacesactive selectionscreen-share safe

Collaboration over a blind relay

Live cursors, threaded comments anchored to the text, and per-block locking for the editors that need it. The relay moves encrypted Yjs updates between clients and never decodes one.

Yjs CRDTlive cursorsinline comments

Search that runs on your device

Results as you type, from a full-text index kept locally and persisted on desktop, re-indexing only what changed at startup. It has to be local: the server cannot read your content, so it could not search it for you even if you asked.

fuzzytitle-boostedincremental index

The day you need it

Panels that build themselves

Every checkbox in the workspace in one list. Every date you mention on a calendar. Every tag, every image, every table — each panel projected from what you wrote, with nothing to configure and no database to declare first.

taskscalendartagsmediadata

Diagrams, charts and media

An embedded draw.io editor, Mermaid and Chart.js rendered from ordinary code blocks, an image editor with filters and annotation, video and audio with size limits you set, and link previews the app fetches itself.

MermaidChart.jsdraw.ioimage editor

A plain-HTML mirror of everything

The desktop app can keep a continuously updated copy of every page as semantic HTML files on your disk — indexed by Spotlight, readable in any browser, a folder you can point a local model at without asking anyone for an API key, and still there the day you stop using Ubimate.

semantic HTMLSpotlightyour own modelubimate:// links

Sovereignty

Architecture, not promises

Every tool says your data is yours. What settles it is where the software runs, who can read what it syncs, and what you are left holding if we stop existing. All three have answers you can check for yourself.

It runs on your machine

Ubimate is not a client for a server. It edits the workspace that is on your disk, so there is no offline mode to fall back to and nothing to fetch before you can start.

Sync is the part we run for you, through a relay whose source we publish in full and which runs on your own hardware the day you would rather nothing reached us at all.

We cannot read what you sync

Not "we promise not to". Your key is worked out from your password on your own device, never stored and never sent; you log in by signing a one-off challenge rather than by telling us anything; and pages, properties, edits and attachments are locked before they leave.

What we do see is the shape of things — how many documents there are, how large, which Space each belongs to and who is in it — which is the minimum routing and permissions need. The security page names every visible field and why.

All of it happens in the app on your own machine, which is the part you are taking on trust.

It stays yours

The working copy is a local database built for editing rather than for reading, so the desktop app keeps a second one beside it: every page as semantic HTML, updated as you write.

Nothing here is a format we invented — the clipboard carries Markdown and HTML both ways, and a datatable is YAML front matter over CSV rows.

So leaving is not a migration: let the subscription lapse and sync stops, the app does not. An export is something you have to remember to do while you still can. This is the state your workspace is already in.

Compared

Where we stand

Written to be checkable rather than flattering. Where something is partial or unfinished, it says so, including ours.

  Ubimate Notion Obsidian
Works with no account at all
Full functionality offline
Content readable without the app HTML mirror Markdown
Server cannot read synced content paid add-on
Sync server you can host yourself
Relational tables inside a page plugins
Outlining and folding on every block partial plugins
Real-time collaborative editing
Inline comment threads
Diagram and chart editors built in plugins
Mobile app coming soon
Linux desktop app web app (soon) web app
Template and plugin ecosystem

Pricing

The app is free.
The subscription is optional.

Everything that runs on your machine is free forever. What we sell is an end-to-end encrypted sync and collaboration service, and you can run it yourself instead.

Free

€0 local, one device

No account, no expiry

The whole desktop app, running entirely on your own machine.

  • Unlimited pages and Spaces
  • Editor, outliner and datatables
  • Local full-text search
  • HTML mirror and Markdown export
  • Works offline, always

Pro

€9.99 / month

or €99.95 a year

For working with other people on documents that are still nobody else’s business.

  • Everything in Personal
  • Document sharing and read-only links
  • Real-time collaboration
  • Invite guests — no account needed
Subscribe

One email when it opens. No list, no newsletter, no sharing.

Launch offer · ends 31 December 2026

Subscribe now and keep 40% off, permanently

Personal

€2.99/ month

was €4.99

or €29.97 a year was €49.95

Pro

€5.99/ month

was €9.99

or €59.97 a year was €99.95

Not an introductory rate that quietly ends after a year. Subscribe by 31 December 2026 and 40% is the discount you keep for as long as the subscription runs — on this price, on whatever we charge for these plans later, and on any subscription we add in the future.

We may change the base prices in future, with the notice the terms set out. Yours move with them and stay 40% below. It is a discount on subscriptions, so anything ever billed by what you use rather than by the month is charged at the ordinary rate. It applies from the day you subscribe, so the waitlist is how you hear that it has opened, not what qualifies you.

Rather run the sync server yourself?

Nobody has to — that is what the subscription is for. But the sync and collaboration backend — Express, the Yjs relay and SQLite — is published in full at github.com/ubimate/ubimate-server. One docker compose up and your Spaces sync between your own machines, with no subscription and nothing of yours on our infrastructure.

Questions

The ones worth asking first

Can I use Ubimate without an account?

Yes, and that is the default. The desktop app has a local database and needs no server, no account and no connection. An account only exists if you want your devices synced or other people editing with you.

What happens if I forget my password?

Your local workspace is unaffected — it is not encrypted on your own machine, and it opens as it always did.

Cloud content is a different matter, and this is the honest answer: your keys are derived from your password, so nobody — us included — can recover what was synced under a password you no longer have. Anything still on a device can be re-synced under new credentials. There is no back door, which is the same property that makes the rest of this page true.

What does not come across from Notion?

Formulas, rollups and Notion's per-page permissions are ignored. The first two are computed columns; the third is a model that does not map onto Spaces, which is where access lives here.

Synced blocks are replicated rather than kept in sync: each place one appeared arrives as its own ordinary copy, and editing one no longer changes the others. Comments do come across.

You will not have to work out which of these applies to you. When the import finishes the app opens a tab for it, listing what came in cleanly and what it could not take.

How can people collaborate if the server cannot read the document?

Collaborative editing uses CRDTs (Yjs), which merge concurrent edits without anything in the middle needing to understand them. The server relays encrypted update blobs between clients and stores them as it received them.

The Space's content key is generated on the owner's device and sealed to each member's public key, so a member unwraps it locally. The server holds wrapped keys it has no way to open.

What can the server see, exactly?

The shape of things and not their content: document ids, parents and types, timestamps, blob sizes, Space membership. Enough to route, order and authorise; not enough to read.

The full list, the reasoning, and the metadata questions we have not solved are on the security page.

Can I get my content out?

Pages export to Markdown and datatables to CSV. The desktop app can also keep a live mirror of every page as semantic HTML on your disk, which is less an export than a second copy that is always current.

And underneath it all is a plain SQLite file you can query yourself.

Can I run the server myself?

Yes. The backend's source is published in full and runs with a single docker compose up. Point the desktop app at your own URL and sync works exactly as it does with ours — no subscription involved.

It is published under the Elastic License 2.0 rather than an OSI-approved licence, so it is fair to call it source-available and not open source. Run it for yourself, your family or your company as much as you like; the one thing it does not permit is selling it on to other people as a hosted service.

Which platforms are supported?

The desktop app runs on macOS and Windows. There is no Linux build of it, and the Linux part of Ubimate is the sync server: that is a Docker image meant to be run on your own machine, and its source is published. On a Linux desktop, the web app will be the way in.

The web app comes with the sync plans at launch. It works in any current browser and deliberately stores nothing locally, which also makes it the right way in from a machine you do not own. Apps for iOS and Android are in development, and will be the opposite of that: a workspace on the device, the way the desktop app keeps one, so a phone with no signal is still a phone you can write on.

What if I stop paying?

Sync and collaboration stop, and what the relay was holding is deleted 30 days later. Nothing on your device changes: the app keeps working with everything already in it, and you can export or self-host whenever you like. Your content was never being held hostage.

Start on your own machine

No account, no trial clock, nothing to cancel. Sync is the part you add when you want it, the app is complete without it.

Download free app Read the server source

macOS 13+ · Windows 10 and 11