UnbentThe short version
Choose Unbent if
- Most of what you keep is files: receipts, bills, statements, manuals, scans.
- You need to find a PDF by a word inside it, not only by its title.
- You want your notes to work offline on a phone’s browser, and on the web.
- You want a price that does not depend on how many seats or AI credits you use.
Choose Notion if
- You work with other people in the same pages.
- You need relations, formulas, rollups, boards, calendars and timelines.
- You build wikis, project plans or published sites.
- Your notes are mostly writing, not files.
Why they differ
Notion is a workspace that stores files; Unbent is an archive that reads them. In Notion a PDF is an attachment on a page: found by its name, opened to know what it says, and kept under 5 MB on the free plan. In Unbent the file is the point: the text of every PDF is read as it arrives and searched from every device, a photo of a receipt is read when you press Auto-fill, and the note's fields hold what the paper said. Notion's databases do more than Unbent's notebooks in every other way, so the question is less which is better than what you are keeping: a workspace of pages, or a drawer of paperwork.
Side by side
| Unbent | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 for one person, with 5 MB per upload. Plus from $10 a member a month billed yearly; Business, with the full AI features, from $20. |
| 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. | Ordinary search does not read an uploaded PDF’s text; Notion AI can read a file when asked, and Enterprise Search, in beta, reaches inside files. |
| 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. | Databases with typed properties, relations, formulas and rollups, and many views of each. |
| 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. | In the desktop and phone apps since August 2025, not in the browser. Pages are downloaded by hand, or recent ones automatically on paid plans; a database’s first 50 rows. |
| 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. | Encrypted in transit and at rest on AWS. Not end-to-end. |
| 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. | A whole workspace as Markdown and CSV or HTML, emailed as a link; PDF with sub-pages on Business and above. |
| Apps | A web app for any desktop or phone browser, installable. Android and iOS apps are coming. | Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and the web, with a web clipper. |
| 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. | Notion AI across the workspace on Business and above, agents on credits, a public API and a hosted MCP server. |
| Sharing | One person per account. | Real-time collaboration, comments, guests and published pages. |
What Unbent does better
- Finding a file by what it says. Every PDF’s text is searched as soon as it arrives, on every device, and a result says which file matched. In Notion an uploaded PDF is found by its name.
- Built for files. Drop a stack of PDFs or photos on the list and each becomes a note with its file attached, up to 95 MB a file where Notion’s free plan stops at 5 MB.
- 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.
- Offline in the browser. Your notes and the files of the notebooks you choose are kept on the device, in the browser too, so a phone finds them with no signal.
- One price. $60 a year, with no seats and no AI credits to count.
What Notion does better
- Databases. Relations between databases, formulas, rollups, and boards, calendars, timelines and charts over them. Unbent’s fields are values on a note, with a table and filters.
- Working together. Many people in the same page at once, with comments, mentions and permissions. Unbent has no sharing.
- Everything that is not paperwork. Wikis, project plans, docs, published sites and a large library of templates. Unbent is for keeping and finding, not for building a workspace.
Moving from Notion
Export the workspace from Notion as Markdown & CSV, including files, and open the zip on Unbent's import page. You choose which databases and pages to bring in; each becomes a notebook, a database's columns become its fields, and attached PDFs become searchable by what they say. Nothing has to move all at once: bring the paperwork and leave the rest where it works.
What this page says about Notion 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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