Acres is our first recommendation for a personal visual note system with AI agents. At $59 once, it gives you Markdown cards, readable JSON boards and a bundled MCP connection for tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex. Your working notes remain ordinary files in a folder you choose.
Noteey is one of the closest alternatives. It is an offline visual workspace too, with useful tools for learning from PDFs, videos and audio. Someone who studies recorded lectures or presents from their boards should give those tools serious weight.
The three-way guide to Heptabase, Noteey and Acres covers the broader shortlist. This page focuses on what changes between these two local apps.
Acres Plus is also available for $9/month, including app access, Sync, and Publish with no upfront purchase. The $59 lifetime option covers local use.
Price: compare the desktop license, then the extras
The current Acres early-adopter license is $59 once. Noteey’s pricing page lists Desktop Pro at $99 and Pro Plus at $159 as one-time purchases. That puts Acres $40 below Pro’s listed desktop price.
List prices aren’t the entire story. Noteey showed an OFF20 coupon when we checked on September 30, 2026. Its free plan may also be enough for a small collection. We compare advertised license prices here, not a guarantee about your checkout total.
The paid features differ too. Noteey includes some publishing with Desktop Pro and sells a separate Premium cloud bundle for AI summarization and related services. Acres’ optional cloud services and hosted provider usage are separate costs. If you mainly need a local desktop workspace, the lower Acres entry price is compelling. If a Noteey-specific feature saves you hours, its price may be worth it.
Local storage is a shared strength
Noteey’s official instructions say the core product works offline without logging in. Data stays on your device, and project copies can be exported and shared. Describing Noteey as a cloud-only tool would be wrong.
Acres takes local storage a step further for people who want to work directly with their notes. Card content lives in Markdown files; a board’s positions and connections live in JSON. Open a card in another editor or let an agent read it with Acres closed. Note links use Acres’ own addresses and boards use its own schema, so another editor can read the prose without reproducing the whole workspace.
Noteey documents Markdown export for cards and project backups. Those are useful exits. Acres makes the Markdown file the working copy, so another tool does not need a fresh export just to read your latest note. That is the difference we care most about.
AI that can help build the board
Acres combines a built-in assistant with external agent access. Use your own cloud-provider key, or run supported models through Ollama or LM Studio. Hosted usage is paid to the provider; local inference depends on your hardware and model.
MCP lets an agent search the vault, create cards and connect or organize material on a board. Activity history shows supported changes for review and guarded revert. The in-app assistant presents card rewrites and larger layout changes for approval; some additive actions apply immediately. The local MCP guide walks through a practical workflow, and Acres for agents lists the broader capabilities.
Noteey’s AI tools focus on summarizing and understanding source material. Its official site advertises PDF and video summarization and transcription tools. In the official product pages and instructions reviewed for this comparison, we found no documented first-party MCP connection for an external agent to edit boards. Third-party tools may exist, and integrations can change.
For an agent that turns your own research into linked notes, we prefer Acres. For convenient media summaries, compare Noteey’s specific tools with the sources you work on.
The Noteey features we’d miss
Noteey’s annotation system handles more than PDFs. You can attach notes to moments in video and audio, put those highlights on a board and jump back to the source. It also documents presentation mode and floating windows for working with several sources at once.
That is a meaningful advantage for lectures, interviews and teaching. Acres has PDF highlights and source-linked cards, but it doesn’t provide equivalent coverage for every media workflow. A cheaper app that can’t do your daily task is poor value.
Acres is also newer and less mature. It runs on Mac and Windows, with no mobile app or real-time collaboration. Recent releases show improvements to search, imports, shortcuts and local AI. They don’t establish that every interface or feature is as settled as an older product.
Moving without losing your source material
There is no dedicated Noteey importer. Keep a full project backup and test with a small export first. Bring available Markdown notes into an Acres vault, copy source files separately and check that your important references still make sense.
Expect to rebuild the spatial arrangement. Timestamped annotations, presentation sequences and app-specific links may need manual work. Don’t delete the Noteey project just because its text has arrived elsewhere.
The 14-day Acres trial gives you time to build one real board and try the agent connection. If your priority is an affordable canvas built on files you can keep using, Acres is where we’d start. Our infinite canvas guide covers other alternatives if media annotation or a free plan matters more.