Scrintal is a cloud-based visual note tool from a Stockholm team, built for researchers, students, and anyone who thinks better when ideas are laid out in space. Notes are docs and blocks you arrange on boards, wire together with arrows and bi-directional links, and — the defining feature in this category — edit with other people in real time. It runs in any browser, with desktop clients for macOS and Windows, and has been iterating on the same idea since 2021; the homepage counts more than 10,000 learners and researchers. There is one plan: Scrintal Pro, $9 per month billed annually. In 2026 the team also released Gobu.ai, an AI research assistant built on Scrintal’s canvas.
Acres is a local-first visual note app for macOS and Windows. It draws the same picture — cards on an infinite canvas, connected and grouped — but each card is a plain Markdown file and each board a readable JSON file, in a folder you pick on your own disk. The app is a one-time purchase: a 14-day trial, then $59 once, with no subscription, no account, and no feature gates. It runs on the desktop only — no web, no mobile. That’s the shape of it.
If you got here by searching “Scrintal vs Heptabase,” you’re in the right neighborhood. Scrintal and Heptabase are the two best-known cloud takes on card-based visual thinking, and Acres is the plain-files answer to both — the Heptabase corner of the triangle has its own page. This one is about Scrintal.
The core difference: a service or a folder
Scrintal is a service you sign in to. Acres is a folder you point an app at. Nearly every other difference on this page falls out of that one sentence.
Scrintal’s model buys real things: your boards follow you to any machine with a browser, a colleague can join a board and edit beside you, and nothing depends on which computer you’re sitting at. Acres’s model buys the opposite set: no account, no server between you and your notes, an app that works the same on a plane as at your desk, and files that any editor, script, or AI agent can open.
Neither trade is wrong. They’re just different answers to where your thinking should live, and it’s worth deciding that on purpose rather than by default.
Who owns your notes — you or the service?
In Scrintal, the working copy of your notes is a record in their database, behind your account. To Scrintal’s credit, the exit is real and documented: you can export your entire archive as a zip of Markdown files, and single docs as Markdown or PDF. Their support docs put it plainly — boards “will be transformed into markdown files, preserving all the essential references as clickable links.” Read that sentence twice — it’s the good news and the limit. Your text and links leave cleanly, but a board comes out as a linear document. The spatial arrangement — the part a visual tool exists for — doesn’t survive the trip.
In Acres, there is no trip. Cards are Markdown with human-readable frontmatter; boards are pretty-printed JSON you can open in a text editor. Grep them, back them up with Time Machine, version them with Git. Nothing to export, because nothing was ever locked in. Your notes are plain files on disk you can sync however you like — iCloud Drive, anything that moves a folder — and an optional end-to-end encrypted sync service exists.
What does each one cost?
Scrintal Pro costs $9 per month billed annually — as of August 2026 it’s the only plan on the pricing page, covering unlimited docs, boards, and file uploads, plus real-time collaboration. There’s no free tier today; Scrintal’s own comparison pages describe a free plan as coming soon, and its support docs explain that the way to try it free is a 14-day trial via an invite link shared by an existing user on X — the docs call it a golden ticket, which is charming and also means you can’t just download the thing and start.
Acres is a one-time purchase — not a free tier, not a subscription. $59 after a 14-day trial, no account, no telemetry, and the AI features are included: bring your own key from any of seven providers, or run Ollama locally and pay no one.
What happens when you’re offline?
According to Scrintal’s own comparison material, its apps combine live collaboration with offline capability — you can keep working without internet and changes sync when you reconnect. That’s a fair claim for a cloud tool, and better than many. But offline is the exception state: the desktop apps are clients of the cloud service, and the canonical copy of your work is on their servers.
Acres flips the polarity. Offline is the default state, because there is no server in the loop; the app just reads and writes files in your folder. Airplane mode isn’t a degraded mode. It’s Tuesday.
Can AI agents work in your notes?
This is where the two tools stop being variations on a theme. Scrintal’s AI story is assistance: an AI assistant in the product, and Gobu.ai as a dedicated research companion for understanding articles and papers. If you want AI to help you read, that’s a reasonable answer. But as of August 2026, Scrintal documents no API, no CLI, and no MCP server — there’s no sanctioned way for your own agents to open your notes and work in them.
Acres was built around exactly that. A bundled MCP server (29 tools, no Node install) connects Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode, or Claude Desktop in one click, and a CLI covers the same ground. Agents build, they don’t just answer: they full-text search the vault, create cards, wire labeled connections, grow mindmaps, and organize boards. Every agent edit lands in a ledger with word-level diffs and one-click revert, and destructive changes arrive as proposals you approve. Agents do the work; you stay editor-in-chief. If that’s the part of this page you came for, Acres for agents goes deep.
Who should pick Scrintal?
Plenty of people, honestly. Pick Scrintal if you work from more than one kind of machine — it runs in any browser, and ships desktop clients for both macOS and Windows, while Acres has no web version. Pick Scrintal if your boards are shared: real-time collaboration is its genuine differentiator in this category, and Acres is single-player. And if “shipped and settled” matters to you, that’s Scrintal too — in production since 2021, while Acres is an app you have to wait in line for. If what you’re really making is shared visual reference boards for clients rather than a knowledge base, also look at Acres vs Milanote — that’s a different job again.
Switching
There is no Scrintal importer in Acres, so here’s what moving looks like. Export your archive from Scrintal — the Docs page has an Export All that produces a zip of Markdown files. Unzip it and drop the .md files into your Acres vault’s cards folder. Acres adopts foreign Markdown live: bodies are preserved byte-for-byte, titles are derived from frontmatter or the first heading, and existing frontmatter is kept as properties. Your text arrives whole.
Your boards don’t. No tool can change that: Scrintal’s export flattens each board into a linked Markdown document. The layouts you’ll rebuild on the Acres canvas by hand, or by pointing a connected agent at the imported cards and letting it propose an arrangement you approve. If you’re weighing other plain-file homes while you’re at it, Acres vs Logseq covers the outliner side of that street.
Both tools believe thinking is spatial. The question this page can’t answer for you is where the canvas should live: someone’s cloud, or your own folder. Scrintal is the best cloud answer in this category. Acres exists because we think the folder is the one that lasts.