Apple Freeform is the whiteboard that comes with every Apple device. It shipped in December 2022 with iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2, and macOS Ventura 13.1; Apple’s launch release called it “a powerful new app designed for creative collaboration,” and it delivers exactly that: an infinite canvas of sticky notes, shapes, ink, photos, video, and PDFs, synced through iCloud and shareable with up to 100 collaborators who see each other’s edits live. It costs nothing and requires learning nothing. For millions of Mac users, Freeform is the first infinite canvas they ever touch.
Acres is an infinite-canvas note app for macOS and Windows — a 14-day trial, then $59 once. It makes the same gesture — ideas arranged in space, connected with arrows — but the canvas is made of different material. Every card is a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter. Every board is readable JSON. All of it lives in a folder you pick on your own disk, with no account, no subscription, and no telemetry. The files are the product; the app is a view over them.
Price is the easy part: Freeform is free, and Acres is $59 once after a 14-day trial. What decides is what happens to your thinking after you close the window. In Freeform it stays a picture on a board. In Acres it becomes files you can search, link, and hand to an agent. This page is for the person who filled a few Freeform boards, went looking for something they wrote in one of them, and felt the walls.
What is a Freeform board actually made of?
A Freeform board lives inside Freeform’s iCloud storage. There is no document you can locate in Finder, open in another app, grep, or check into a git repo. The board exists only where Freeform can show it to you. Apple’s user guide documents exactly one way out: File > Export Board as PDF. The suggested route to an image is a screenshot, which is less an export format than a fire escape. However rich the board, it leaves as a picture.
An Acres vault is the opposite arrangement. cards/interview-notes.md is a Markdown file any editor opens; boards/research.board.json is pretty-printed JSON you can actually read. The vault is a normal folder, so whatever already backs up your documents backs up your notes. The same card can sit on many boards, because content lives once, as a file, and boards merely point to it. Nothing to export, because nothing was ever locked in.
A Freeform board is a picture of your thinking. An Acres board is the thinking itself, stored as files you keep.
Can Freeform work as a real note system?
Give Freeform its due first: its search is better than critics remember. The search field matches typed and handwritten text across all your boards, and ⌘F finds — and replaces — inside a single board. If you half-remember a phrase, Freeform will usually surface the board it lives on.
The walls are elsewhere. Text on a Freeform board is rich text, not Markdown. A note can’t appear on two boards. Boards can’t link to each other, so there are no backlinks and no trail from one idea to a related one. There are no tags, and the board list is one flat pile of recents and favorites. Search is the only way back in, and search is retrieval, not structure. Nothing accumulates. After a year of use you have a stack of islands.
In Acres, the connective tissue is the point. Type [[ and link any card to any card; backlinks gather on the target automatically, as “Linked references.” Tags and eight property types (text, number, select, date, rating, and more) turn cards into data, and a Database tab shows every card as a row you can filter, sort, and group. A journal gives every day a page, and those entries are ordinary cards you can place on any board. One caveat: the ⌘K palette matches titles and snippets; the full-text engine that searches whole card bodies is the one your agents use, through the AI panel, MCP, and CLI.
None of this is a flaw in Freeform. It was never trying to be a note system. The mistake is asking it to be one.
Who should stay with Freeform?
More people than comparison pages usually admit. If your boards are sketches, moodboards, lesson plans, trip maps — things you make, use, and let go — Freeform is the right tool, and you already own it. On an iPad with an Apple Pencil it is excellent, and Acres has nothing to say about that: there is no Acres iPad app. If you plan boards with other people, Freeform’s real-time collaboration over iCloud handles up to 100 participants. Acres has no collaboration at all; it is one person, on their own machines. And Freeform is on every device already, while Acres is something you install.
If your boards lean image-first — client moodboards, reference collections — the closer comparison is Acres vs Milanote, where that job is the whole product.
Stay with Freeform when a board is a drawing you’ll never need to search. Switch when you notice you keep needing to.
What can AI and agents do with your boards?
With Freeform: nothing. There is no API and no agent access, so no assistant can read a board, add to one, or answer a question from what’s on them. The work on your boards is invisible to every AI tool you use.
Acres is built for the opposite. The built-in AI panel is bring-your-own-key — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and four other providers, or Ollama running locally with no key at all — and it is not a metered tier — your own keys, no subscription. Beyond the panel, Acres ships an MCP server inside the app itself: 29 tools (7 read, 22 write), no Node install, and a one-click connect that configures Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode, or Claude Desktop. Agents can full-text search the vault, create cards, wire labeled arrows, frame sections, and grow mindmaps. They stay supervised: destructive edits arrive as proposals with word-level diffs, and the agent ledger attributes every agent edit to its actor, with one-click revert. The line Acres uses for this is “Not a chatbot about your notes — a collaborator in them.” The details live at Acres for agents.
If agents matter to you at all, this section is the comparison. Everything on a Freeform board is locked away from them; everything in an Acres vault is a plain file they can work in, on the record.
How do sync and other devices compare?
Freeform wins mobile outright. iCloud sync is automatic, free, and immediate across iPhone, iPad, and Mac; a thought captured on a phone is on the Mac before you sit down. Acres runs on macOS and Windows — no iPhone app, no iPad app — and neither tool has a web version; iCloud.com does not include Freeform. The Windows build cuts the other way: it is the one path here for notes that can leave the Apple ecosystem.
For Acres, multi-device works the way files work: the vault is a plain folder on disk, so you can sync it however you like, and an optional end-to-end encrypted sync service exists.
Switching
There is no Freeform importer, and there couldn’t be much of one: Freeform exports a PDF, so there is no structured data to convert. Switching to Acres is a fresh start. That is less painful than it sounds. Freeform is young, and most people have a handful of boards from the last year or two, not a decade of archives. The boards worth keeping are usually few, and you know which ones they are.
The practical path:
- Export the boards that matter as PDFs (File > Export Board as PDF). Drop them onto an Acres board — PDFs render on the canvas and open in Acres’s reading desk, where you can highlight passages and extract highlights into linked cards. The old board becomes a source document instead of a dead end.
- Rebuild the two or three boards you still actively think in, as cards. Retyping feels like a cost; in practice it is the first pass of turning a picture into notes, and the rebuilt board is usually sharper than the original.
- If you keep Markdown notes anywhere else, drop the
.mdfiles into the vault’scards/folder — Acres adopts them live, frontmatter intact. - Keep Freeform installed. It remains the best free sketchpad on the iPad, and nothing about Acres asks you to give that up.
If you’re shopping further up the spectrum — canvas tools built for heavy research — read Acres vs Heptabase and Acres vs Obsidian Canvas. Freeform is the on-ramp; those are the deep ends. Acres sits between them: the same easy canvas Freeform taught you, made of Markdown files you own. Bought once, on macOS and Windows.