Scrinium vs Google Keep: when the free option costs more than it looks

How Google Keep handles encryption

Google Keep is encrypted in transit and at rest using keys Google manages. That is the same protection level as most consumer cloud services, and it means the content of your notes is reachable by the operator — for product features, for automated processing, in response to legal process, or through a compromise of the account or the service. There is no end-to-end encryption option for notes.

The second consideration is the account itself, not the cryptography. A Keep note lives inside a Google account that is also your email, your files, and your search history, protected by one password and one recovery flow. Losing that account means losing the notes with it, and the blast radius is everything at once.

Scrinium separates the two. The notes vault is encrypted with keys derived from a password that only unlocks the notebook, the server receives ciphertext and a login verifier, and a recovery key exists specifically so that forgetting a password does not mean losing the notes.

Who can read your notes

Keep’s export through Google Takeout produces HTML or JSON. It is a real export and it is not a useful archive: no Markdown, no clean structure, and one file per note in a folder tree that takes work to reassemble.

There is also the platform question that comes with every free service. A product that is free at this scale is funded by the ecosystem around it, and its roadmap is set somewhere other than its users.

Scrinium stores Markdown and exports Markdown. The notes move to any editor without conversion, the backend can be self-hosted if you want to stop paying attention to vendors entirely, and the format is older than the product.

Editing: Google Keep vs Scrinium

Keep is optimised for capture. There is no Markdown, no code fences, no tables, no nested structure beyond lists and checkboxes, and there is a character ceiling on a note. For a phone number, a recipe, or a checklist on the way out of the door, that is exactly right.

Scrinium is optimised for the notes you return to. Inline Markdown rendering while you type, syntax-highlighted code, tables, task lists, math and diagrams, folding for long documents, and local full-text search that runs over decrypted notes in memory.

Pricing: what you actually pay for

Keep is free, at the cost of being a Google service with the account and data relationship that implies.

Scrinium is also free, with unlimited notes, unlimited encrypted sync, and unlimited devices — and the free tier does not depend on analysing your content. Paid tiers add features such as encrypted attachments, version history, burner notes, and a graph view.

Where Google Keep is the better choice

Keep is the right tool for friction-free capture: a shopping list shared with a partner, a photo of a receipt, a note-to-self on the way to a meeting. It is fast, it loads everywhere, and it asks nothing of you.

If your notes are throwaway and unremarkable, paying for privacy would be theatre. Keep them where they are.

Where Scrinium is the better choice

Choose Scrinium for the notes that accumulate meaning: journals, client notes, research, drafts, decisions, anything you would think twice about pasting into a free web service. Those notes deserve a format you own and a server that cannot read them.

It is also the better fit once your notes need structure — headings, tables, code — because Keep’s plain-text model starts costing you time the moment a note wants to be a document.

Moving from Google Keep to Scrinium

Export from Google Takeout and you get HTML and JSON copies of every note. Convert the HTML to Markdown with any of the common converters, or paste the notes that matter — Keep libraries are usually smaller than they feel.

Import the Markdown into Scrinium, and keep the Takeout archive as a backup until you are satisfied nothing was missed. Shared lists are the usual casualty and are worth checking by hand.

Questions people ask