Valutorio vs Supernotes: Their cards vs your files (2026)

A Supernotes card is a bounded thing. It has a title, markdown content, links to other cards, and a place in a shared graph. That constraint is the point: cards are quick to make and quick to read, and the app is fast because nothing gets long.

Valutorio has no cards. A note is a file, one paragraph or fifty thousand words, and the app is built to survive the large end of that. Keystroke latency in a 1 MB note is 0.1 ms and a 300 MB file opens in under a second. Those numbers exist because long documents are normal in a folder of markdown files and abnormal in a card system.

Neither model is correct. Card people find long files sprawling. File people find card limits arbitrary. Pick the one that matches how your writing already behaves.

Supernotes is cloud-native. The cards sit in their proprietary store, marked up in markdown but not stored as files you can open, and export is a feature rather than the storage layer. Offline editing works. Ownership stays with the service.

In Valutorio the vault is a folder on your disk and the files in it are the notes. Nothing is imported, nothing is converted, and uninstalling the app leaves every file where it was. Sync between Macs is an optional subscription: automatic, in the background, encrypted in transit and at rest, 0.56 s a cycle on the 2,000-file benchmark vault and roughly 30 seconds for the first full pass. Conflicts resolve in three tiers, from a three-way merge down to keep-both artifacts, and no conflict marker or conflicted copy ever lands in your folder.

Supernotes is genuinely keyboard-driven, and users who live in it rarely touch a mouse. It also runs on web technology, which sets a floor under how native it can feel on a Mac.

Valutorio is Swift and AppKit over a Rust engine, with no Electron and no JavaScript runtime anywhere in the stack. The measured numbers on a 2,000-file, 55 MB vault: cold index 1.07 s, full-text search between 1.8 and 6.6 ms, wikilink autocomplete under 0.5 ms, backlink lookup 0.65 µs. Supernotes publishes no comparable figures, so treat this as a claim about Valutorio rather than a benchmark against them.

Supernotes' free plan allows 100 new cards, extendable through referrals, and then you pay for Unlimited. Users have also criticized the pace of feature releases and called the mobile apps underpowered, which matters if mobile is where you capture.

Valutorio has no free tier. It is a paid Mac App Store app, and syncing between Macs is a separate optional subscription, so both apps end up with a recurring line if you want your notes on more than one machine. Two different ways to pay for the same problem, and neither is free of cost.

Collaboration is where Supernotes clearly wins. Cards are shareable, editable by other people, and commentable, which makes it usable by a small team. Valutorio has no real-time collaboration, no comments, and no shared workspace.

Valutorio Sync moves a vault between your own Macs and nothing more. It is not a multi-user feature and I am not going to stretch it into one. The nearest thing to another party working in your notes is the personal MCP endpoint included with a Sync subscription, which lets an MCP-capable assistant such as Claude search, read, and write the vault. That is an assistant, not a colleague.

Supernotes gives you 100 new cards free, expandable by referral, then charges for its Unlimited plan, with the current figure on their pricing page. The subscription covers the storage, the sync, and the mobile and web clients, so it buys real infrastructure. Valutorio is a paid Mac App Store app whose price is not announced yet, and its sync is an optional subscription that is also unpriced so far; inventing either number here would be worse than saying so. What is settled is the structure: the purchase covers the editor and local vaults forever, and the subscription covers automatic sync between Macs plus the MCP endpoint.