UnbentThe short version
Choose Unbent if
- What you keep is mostly paper: scans, receipts, bills and manuals you need to find again by what they say.
- You want a scan read the moment it arrives, from a phone as much as a desktop, and filed with one press: its title, notebook and fields filled in.
- You want fields on your notes (a date, a total, who it was from) and a table to sort them by.
- You want nothing to set up and nothing to run (no sync target, no server, no master password), and your AI assistant working in it over the web.
Choose Joplin if
- You want end-to-end encryption, so no server can read your notes.
- You want it free, and will run your own sync: Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, or a server of yours.
- What you keep is mostly writing, and the files in it are the exception.
- You want native desktop apps, Linux included, to-do notes with alarms, a web clipper, and a plugin for the rest.
Why they differ
Joplin is built so that no server ever reads your notes. With its end-to-end encryption on, the place your notes sync to holds only scrambled copies, and each device unlocks and searches its own. That is a sound rule for a notes app, and it has a cost for scanned paperwork: something has to read a scan before it can be searched or filed, and in Joplin that something is the desktop app. A receipt photographed on a phone is not searchable until a computer running Joplin has synced it and read it, and every device keeps a copy of every note.
Unbent takes the other side of the same trade. Its server reads every scan the moment it arrives, so a receipt is searchable from the phone that took it, and a phone searches the whole archive without downloading it first. The price is that the server can read your notes, and Unbent answers that by making leaving easy: every note is a plain file, the export is plain folders from any browser at any time, and an account that stops paying turns read-only rather than locked.
Side by side
| Unbent | Joplin | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $60 a year for unlimited notes and 10 GB of files (25 GB more for $12 a year). Two weeks free to try. | Free, syncing through Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV or S3. Joplin Cloud is €28.69 a year (2 GB, 10 MB a note) or €57.48 (30 GB). |
| Searching inside files | Note text and the text of every PDF, searched on the server as soon as it arrives, so every device finds it. Photos are read when you press Auto-fill. | PDFs and images, read by the desktop app and searchable everywhere once synced. No handwriting. |
| Fields and tables | Typed fields per notebook (date, amount, select, rating and more), a table view, and filters on any field: receipts by month, warranties by when they run out. | None built in; community plugins. |
| Offline | In any browser, phone included: your notes, notebooks and tags are kept on the device and searchable there, with the files of the notebooks you choose. | Offline first: every app keeps your notes on the device, and sync is optional. |
| Encryption | Encrypted in transit and at rest. Not end-to-end: the server reads your notes, so it can search all of them without every device downloading them first. | End-to-end encryption on every app, off by default. A lost master password cannot be recovered. |
| Export | Everything, any time, from any browser: a folder per note, its Markdown saved exactly as you typed it and its files beside it. Opens with nothing installed. | JEX, Markdown, HTML and PDF from the desktop app; the library is on your disk already. |
| Apps | A web app for any desktop or phone browser, installable. Android and iOS apps are coming. | Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and a terminal app, with a web clipper. A web app in beta. |
| AI and assistants | Auto-fill reads a scan and fills in its title, notebook and fields. An MCP server that Claude, ChatGPT and others connect to over the web, with every edit an assistant makes kept in the note's history. | AI chat, semantic search and an MCP server on the desktop since version 3.7, in beta; the MCP server is local to the computer. |
| Sharing | One person per account. | Shared notebooks on Joplin Cloud Pro and Teams. |
| Source | Source-available (Elastic License 2.0). You can run your own on Cloudflare's free tier. | The apps are open source (AGPL). Joplin Server is under its own personal-use licence. |
What Unbent does better
- Reading paper as it arrives. Every PDF is read on the server the moment it is added, from any device, and a photo when you press Auto-fill, so a receipt scanned on a phone is searchable from that phone straight away. Joplin reads PDFs and images too, but only in its desktop app: nothing is searchable until a desktop has synced it and run over it.
- Filing a scan for you. Press Auto-fill and Unbent reads the scan and fills in its title, its notebook and its fields, from the date to the total.
- Fields you can sort by. A receipts notebook can carry a date, a total and a shop on every note, shown as a table and filtered by any of them. Joplin has notebooks and tags, and leaves the rest to plugins.
- Any browser, nothing to run. Sign in and it is there, on every device, in a browser or installed from one, offline too. No sync target to choose and look after, and no master password that loses everything if it is forgotten. Joplin’s web app is a beta that keeps its notes in that one browser.
- Assistants over the web. Claude, ChatGPT and others connect with a sign-in and work in your notes from anywhere, with every edit kept in the note’s history. Joplin’s MCP server is a desktop beta that only that computer can reach.
What Joplin does better
- Privacy. With end-to-end encryption on, the place your notes sync to holds only ciphertext, and each device decrypts and searches its own copy. Unbent’s server can read your notes, which is what lets it read your paperwork and search a whole archive without every device downloading it first.
- Price. Free, with a sync target you already have: Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV or S3. Joplin Cloud, for nothing to run, starts at €28.69 a year. Unbent is $60 a year.
- Being a notes app. Native apps for Windows, Mac and Linux, to-do notes with alarms, a web clipper, a Markdown editor with a plugin for most things, and an AGPL codebase you can read and change. Unbent is source-available, not open source, has no plugins, and does notes, files, fields and search for one person.
Trying Unbent beside Joplin
Unbent does not import Joplin's own export yet. What it takes today is files: drop a folder of PDFs and photos on the note list and each becomes a note with its file attached, searchable by the text in it. If you are mainly here for the paperwork, that is the part worth trying first, and your Joplin library stays where it is while you decide.
What this page says about Joplin was checked in October 2026, against the sources below. Prices and features change; if something here has, we would like to know.
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