Beaver Notes
by Beaver Notes · Local-first open-source notes app that keeps notes on your device
BenchRank score
Screenshots of Beaver Notes
Homepage
Overview
Beaver Notes is a local-first, MIT-licensed notes app that keeps notes on your own device rather than on a server, with no accounts and no telemetry. Notes are written using markdown, commands and keyboard shortcuts, and can contain links to other notes, tags, PDFs and other files, images, audio, drawings and LaTeX equations. Syncing across devices is optional and uses a cloud provider you choose.
- Best for
- People who want a local-first markdown notes app with no accounts, cloud or tracking
- Pricing
- No prices are shown; the page offers a free download, states the app is MIT-licensed open source, and links to a donate page.
- Runs on
- macOSCLI
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Notes stored on the device; no accounts or servers needed
- MIT-licensed open source with no telemetry
- Markdown, commands and keyboard shortcuts built in
- Note linking, tags, files, drawings and LaTeX maths included
Trade-offs
- Sync requires you to supply and configure your own cloud provider
- No accounts or hosted service, so recovery relies on your own backups
- No AI features, by design
- Pages describe no team or real-time collaboration
How Beaver Notes markets itself
A structured read of the promise, proof and page design on Beaver Notes’s captured homepage.
Homepage capture
“Your notes never leave your device.”
- Angle: Open source / ownership
- Hero: Product screenshot
Pricing
Published plans and prices from Beaver Notes’s own pricing page.
How this score is made up
Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.
MCP support
Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.
API quality
Public API surface: machine-readable spec, official SDKs, documented auth, errors, rate limits and versioning.
Documentation
Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.
Agent friendliness
How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.
Changelog
A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.
Marketing site structure
Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.
Page speed
How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.
Operational trust
Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.
Measured, but not part of the score
Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.
Openness
Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.
Maintenance
Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.
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Where this comes from
The Beaver Notes pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.
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Is this your product?
Claim Beaver Notes to manage its profile. Claiming lets you suggest edits to the descriptive fields — it never changes scores or rankings.