Milanote is a visual workspace for creative projects. You gather notes, images, links and files onto boards, shape them into moodboards, briefs and storyboards with help from a large template gallery, and share the result with teammates or clients — live editing, comments, edit/comment/view permissions. It runs in the browser, with apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android and a web clipper for collecting inspiration. Creative teams like it because a project looks organized and presentable within an hour of starting it.
Acres is a local-first, infinite-canvas note app for macOS and Windows. Notes are Markdown cards, boards are readable JSON, and all of it lives in a folder you pick on your own disk — the files are the product; the app is a view over them. The app is a one-time purchase — a 14-day trial, then $59 once — with no account, no card cap, no telemetry.
The two tools look alike — cards, arranged spatially, on boards — and are built for different lives. Milanote is project-shaped: a board exists to collect material, get an idea approved, ship the thing. Acres is archive-shaped: a card you write today is a plain text file you can still open, search and build on years from now, in whatever app exists then. That difference decides nearly everything below.
What does Milanote cost, and what do you get free?
Milanote’s plans page lists the free tier at 100 notes, images or links plus 10 file uploads, with unlimited shared boards; the paid plan is $9.99 per person per month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly. A hundred notes sounds roomy until you notice one moodboard can eat twenty of them before lunch. In practice the free plan holds two or three small projects, and then Milanote is a subscription.
Two things in Milanote’s favor. The free plan never expires. And the cancellation policy is fair: Milanote’s help center says that if you downgrade with more than 100 cards, you can still view, edit and export everything you’ve made. You just can’t add more.
Acres skips the arithmetic. The full app is one purchase — no tier, no card count, because there is no server counting cards. Notes accumulate in your folder at the speed you think, and nothing meters them.
Does Milanote work offline?
No. According to Milanote’s help center, “You’ll need an internet connection to view and edit boards.” The Mac and Windows apps are clients of the cloud service, so the flight, the dead spot at a location shoot and a server outage all mean the same thing: your boards are out of reach until you’re back online. Offline editing has been a long-standing request among Milanote’s users.
Acres works offline the way a text editor works offline: there was never a connection to lose. The app reads and writes files on your disk, and no account exists to sign into. Your notes are plain files on disk you can sync however you like, and an optional end-to-end encrypted sync service exists.
Where do your notes live, and what leaves with you?
Milanote keeps your work on its servers, in its own format. Export is real but bounded: one board at a time, as PDF, PNG, Word, Markdown or plain text, plus a ZIP of a board’s uploaded files. The Home board can’t be exported at all. What comes out is a document or a picture of a board, not the board; the spatial arrangement doesn’t survive as data you could load anywhere else.
In Acres the question never comes up. Cards are Markdown files with human-readable frontmatter; boards are pretty-printed JSON; both sit in a folder your existing backup already covers. Open them in any editor, grep them, script against them. There is nothing to export from Acres, because nothing was ever locked in.
Can AI and agents work in your notes?
Milanote has no built-in AI and no official API; the only programmatic access is an unofficial community wrapper on GitHub. For a visual pinboard that is a defensible choice, but it makes your boards a destination, not something other software can build on.
Acres treats the agent layer as a core feature of the app, not a tier. The built-in AI panel takes your own key from any of seven providers, or runs against a local Ollama with no key at all. Beyond the panel, Acres ships an MCP server with 29 tools and a CLI, so Claude Code, Cursor or Codex can full-text search the vault, write cards, wire labeled connections and grow mind maps on your boards. Supervision is the point: every agent edit lands in a ledger, attributed to the agent that made it, shown as a word-level diff with one-click revert. Destructive changes arrive as proposals, never silent writes. Acres is not a chatbot about your notes; it’s a collaborator in them. The long version is on the Acres for agents page.
Who should pick Milanote — and who should pick Acres?
Pick Milanote when the work is visual planning for a creative project and other people are part of it. Moodboards for a client, a campaign brief the team edits together, a storyboard a director reviews from her phone — this is what Milanote is for, it does it with real polish, and Acres doesn’t compete: Acres has no collaboration, no mobile app and no web version. If your canvas needs are collaborative but more note-shaped than image-shaped, Acres vs Scrintal covers that closer call. And on a Mac, Apple’s free preinstalled whiteboard is worth ruling out first — Acres vs Apple Freeform is that comparison.
Pick Acres when the boards are for you and the notes are the asset. Research that accumulates, a zettelkasten with geography, project thinking you’ll want long after the project ships — notes you keep for years belong in files you own, not in cards on someone else’s server. Acres runs on macOS and Windows — desktop only. If that rules it out for you today, fair enough.
Switching
There is no Milanote importer in Acres, so moving is manual. Here is what it looks like.
Milanote exports one board at a time: open the board, choose Export, pick a format. For a move to Acres, Markdown is the format you want; the Home board itself can’t be exported, and a board’s uploaded files come down separately as a ZIP. Drop the exported .md files into your Acres vault’s cards/ folder and Acres adopts them as cards — body preserved, titles derived, any frontmatter kept. Images you still care about, you drag back onto Acres boards by hand.
What doesn’t move is the layout. Milanote exports documents and pictures of boards, not board data, so the spatial arrangement gets rebuilt by hand on the Acres canvas. If your boards are mostly words, Markdown export plus adoption does most of the work; if they’re mostly images, budget an honest afternoon per project you want to keep. For contrast, Acres does ship real importers — for Heptabase (Acres vs Heptabase) and Obsidian — that preserve board geometry; Milanote’s export simply doesn’t carry the data an importer would need.