Yewmark vs Penzu

Yewmark or Penzu?

Penzu has been a private online journal for over fifteen years. If you came here from a search, you’re probably weighing both. Here’s an honest take on where each one fits.

We’re not going to pretend Yewmark replaces Penzu. Penzu has a long, stable history, a clear privacy posture, and a free tier a lot of people have used for years. For some people, that’s the right call — no contest.

What follows is where the two apps go in different directions, and how to figure out which one fits you.

Pick Penzu if…

You want optional encryption on individual entries. Penzu’s paid plans add per-entry locks and AES encryption on top of transport security. Yewmark does TLS in transit and disk-level encryption at rest, but entries are server-readable by design — the AI features depend on it. If per-entry locking is non-negotiable, Penzu fits better.

You’ve been using it for years and want continuity.Penzu started in 2008. If you have a decade of entries there, the sensible move is to stay put. We’re not going to talk you out of that.

You want photos attached to entries. Penzu supports photo uploads on most plans. Yewmark is text-first — voice transcribes into text, but there’s no image storage and probably won’t be.

You want the older, more customisable look. Penzu leans into the “digital paper” aesthetic with fonts, paper textures, and per-journal theming. Yewmark has one quiet ink-on-paper theme (with a dark mode); that’s the whole design system.

Pick Yewmark if…

You want AI as a real part of the journal. Yewmark has a multi-provider AI router (Groq / Cerebras / OpenAI) built into every entry. Four chooseable personalities (Companion, Scholar, Minimalist, Coach). Per-entry digest, opt-in daily and weekly summaries, “continue in chat” from any entry. Penzu has none of this.

You don’t want streaks or reminders pushing you.Penzu’s engagement design leans on email reminders and consistency cues. Yewmark deliberately doesn’t — the only emails are opt-in summaries and a Sunday thread. (Why: /blog/why-slow.)

You want a free tier you can live on. Yewmark’s Quiet plan is free, no card, and includes three real AI requests per day, unlimited written entries, and full JSON + Markdown export. The free Penzu tier is usable but more limited; the recurring paid tiers add features at $5–20/month.

You want clean, fast Markdown writing. Yewmark’s page is one big textarea. No font picker, no paper-texture chooser, no per-journal theming. Open the tab, write a paragraph, close the tab. The page that opens is the page that does the job.

You want a guarantee your words won’t train a model. Yewmark never sends entries to AI providers for training, and the providers it routes through (Groq, Cerebras, OpenAI) commit to the same on their business APIs. Penzu has its own privacy posture; this is just where Yewmark draws the line explicitly.

What we’re honest about not having

We don’t want to pretend. Penzu has a long list of things Yewmark doesn’t do and probably won’t for a long time:

Per-entry encryption locks
Native iOS and Android apps
Photo attachments inside entries
Custom fonts and paper textures
Email reminders to write
Fifteen-plus years of refinement

If any of those is load-bearing for you, try Penzu. That’s a real recommendation, not a feint.

If you want to try both

Both apps work in a browser. Open Yewmark in one tab and Penzu in another; write a week into each; see which one you keep returning to. Yewmark’s free plan needs no card and there’s a one-click export and account delete if it isn’t for you.

If you have a Penzu export on disk and you’d like to try moving entries over, write to [email protected] — we can run a one-off migration for you.

Begin a Yewmark journal.

The Quiet plan is free. No card. Open a page and write a sentence.

Begin writing