Notebook.ai Alternative

What does Notebook.ai offer today?

Notebook.ai has been around for more than ten years. It runs in the browser, its source code is open, and commits were still landing on GitHub in November 2026, so it's under active development. You sort your worlds into universes and fill each one with pages for characters, locations, items and more. Every page type comes with a template you can customize, and Notebook.ai generates questions about your pages and saves each answer to the right field. Mention another page and a two-way link appears; documents you write in the built-in editor link to the pages they mention.

According to the plan definitions in Notebook.ai's open source code, the free Starter plan gives you 5 universes, unlimited character, location and item pages, unlimited documents and 50 MB of image storage, and inviting collaborators to a universe is free too. Premium is billed monthly, quarterly or yearly (check Notebook.ai's site for the current price) and adds unlimited universes, 25 more page types such as creatures, planets, religions, magic and languages, timelines, collections and 10 GB of storage. Premium also unlocks AI tools. Document Analysis, still in beta, reviews documents you write in Notebook.ai for readability, style and emotion, and lets you link the characters and places it finds to your pages or create new ones; it's built for English prose and may be less accurate in other languages. Basil turns what you've written on a page into an image, and your first 100 images are free. The interface is English only.

Why might you look for an alternative?

The free plan's scope can settle it: every page type beyond characters, locations and items, including creatures, races, groups, religions, magic systems, lore and languages, needs Premium. Long question lists spark ideas for some writers and feel like forms to fill in for others. You might also want to work in a language other than English, see family ties drawn as a tree, or write in a tool with no AI features at all.

When is Notebook.ai the better fit?

If answering questions gets you moving faster than a blank page, or you share a universe with a co-author or your gaming group, Notebook.ai is the better fit; inviting collaborators is free. The same goes if you want to draft scenes right next to your world's pages, or need ready-made page types that run from planets and foods to sports and technologies. On the free plan it's also more generous if you'll keep a lot of characters, locations and items: those three have no limit, while yazar.io's free plan allows 15 records per type in each book. It's a strong pick, too, if you want AI analysis and image generation, or your data as TXT, Markdown, JSON, XML, YAML or CSV. yazar.io has no collaboration, no built-in manuscript editor and no AI features.

What does yazar.io do differently?

In yazar.io, each book is a workspace of its own. When you create one, you choose its genre and the matching sections open; you can switch the others on or off at any time. The record sections are Characters, Locations, Organizations, Lore, Races, Creatures, Items, Spells, Beliefs and the Glossary, and alongside them sit Notes, the Event Flow, the Family Tree, Quotes and Boards. All of them are on the free Yazar plan, which gives you 2 books and up to 15 records in each of the nine record types per book; the Glossary, Notes and Event Flow don't count toward that limit. No field is required: Field Templates let you shape each section's profile for your book, and you can rename sections to suit your world. For types with no match, such as flora, foods or vehicles, Yazar Pro lets you open three Custom Sections with a name and icon you choose.

Type @Name in any text and the link is made, showing up on the other page as a backlink. Make a character a member of an organization, or choose a child's parents, and the tie appears on both sides; family ties are drawn in the Family Tree. Events in the Event Flow link to the characters who take part and the place where they happen. When you're ready, the per-book Shareable Wiki publishes your world as read-only pages. You use the same account on the web and in the iPhone, iPad and Android app, with the interface in any of 15 languages.

What about AI?

yazar.io has no AI features: it doesn't write text, fill in pages or draw pictures. Its Content and Intellectual Property Policy commits in writing that your books, characters and notes are never part of an AI training dataset. That commitment covers what you don't publish: pages you publish on your wiki are like any other open page on the web, as our FAQ on AI training explains. The body text of your records, the values in their profile fields and your notes are stored encrypted in the database (AES-256-GCM); this isn't end-to-end encryption, and the server decrypts content when an authorized request comes in. On Notebook.ai, you start the AI tools yourself: you request an analysis for each document, and Basil only makes an image for the page you choose.

Moving your pages over

There's no direct import. Notebook.ai exports your notebook as TXT, Markdown, JSON, XML, YAML and CSV; yazar.io doesn't read those files, but a Markdown or text export makes copying easier. Most page types have a home in yazar.io: groups go to Organizations, races to Races, religions and deities to Beliefs, magic to Spells and creatures to Creatures; planets, countries, towns and buildings fit in Locations, traditions in Lore, and a language's words in the Glossary. It goes faster if you create your characters and places first, with their summaries and key fields, and then add @Name links in your texts; Linked Pages fill in as the connections grow.