Record all of life. Keep it yours.
Arcalox is a free, open place for your notes, secrets, and moments. Encrypted on your device the second you save, with no account, no servers, and no way for anyone else, including us, to read a word of it. Built for people whose records could be turned against them.
Encrypted and offline by design
What Arcalox is
One private vault for everything that matters
Notes, passwords and secrets, photos, video and voice, documents. All of it in one place, all of it encrypted, all of it on a device you hold. No cloud account stands between you and your own records.
Notes that link
Markdown with backlinks, tags, folders, and full-text search. A security-aware reader that never loads a remote image, so nothing you open can phone home.
Secrets, held close
Passwords, 2FA codes, and hidden fields live inside your notes, with a built-in password generator. Kept out of search, held in the same always-encrypted vault.
Capture in the moment
Voice, photo, and video notes taken right in the app. Photos are stripped of location and hidden metadata before they are encrypted.
Grounding, woven in
Grounding and breathing exercises are reachable from anywhere in the app, for the moments a record alone is not enough.
Encrypted, always
AES-256-GCM at rest with a SQLCipher whole-database key, derived through Argon2id. Encryption is on from the first launch and is never a setting you can forget.
Offline and yours
No outbound network calls. No analytics. No account. Your identity is a keypair created on your device, restorable anywhere with your passphrase.
When someone is looking over your shoulder
Protection for the hard moments
Most apps assume the worst that can happen is a lost phone. Arcalox assumes the person holding your device may be forcing you to open it. These defenses have no equal in a mainstream notes app.
Duress PIN
A second passphrase opens a normal-looking decoy and can silently destroy the key to your real data.
Decoy state
The decoy is seeded with realistic, mundane content, so the app never looks like it is hiding something.
Panic wipe
Remove your real vault fast when you have to, leaving nothing to recover.
Quick exit and lock
Leave and lock instantly. The app locks itself on background, on inactivity, and behind a privacy shield in the task switcher.
Sync
Move between your devices without trusting a stranger
Today, Arcalox syncs by exporting a single encrypted file that you keep and move between your own devices, through a folder or cloud you already control. Only ciphertext ever leaves the device, so no provider and no company, including ours, can read it. Direct device-to-device peer-to-peer sync over the Veydrin Community Network is on the roadmap, not a claim we make yet.
How it compares
Honest next to the field
Arcalox does not try to win every feature checkbox. It wins on the axes that protect a person whose safety is genuinely at stake. Here is where it stands, stated plainly.
| Arcalox | Standard Notes | Notesnook | Joplin | Obsidian | Signal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Freemium | Freemium | Free, paid cloud | Free, paid sync | Free |
| Encryption always on at rest | Yes | Yes | Yes | Noopt-in | Noplaintext by default | Yes |
| No account, email, or phone | Yes | No | Partialemail for sync | Partial | Partial | Nophone number |
| Coercion defense (duress, decoy, panic wipe) | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Sync without a company's server | Yesyour storage | Partial | Partial | Partialself-host / WebDAV | Partial | No |
| Open source | YesAGPL-3.0 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Notes, secrets, and media in one vault | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | No |
Comparison reflects the default configuration of each product as of August 2026. Signal is a messenger included as a threat-model peer, not a notes app. Where a competitor offers a capability only behind a paid tier or optional setting, it is marked Partial.
Where it runs
Available now, and growing
Android
Linux
Windows
macOS
iOS
Privacy
Your data. Your device. Period.
No tracking
Zero analytics, zero telemetry, zero crash reporting to us. We do not know who you are, and we built it so we cannot find out.
No accounts
No login, no email, no phone number. A cryptographic identity is generated on your device on first launch.
No third-party sync
No Dropbox or Google Drive requirement, no plugins, no external services. When you sync, only ciphertext leaves the device.
Open source
AGPL-3.0. The full source is on Codeberg. Read every line, build it yourself, or fork it. The app is yours.
Who built this
The Veydrin Order
A small team building free, open, privacy-first tools for the people who need them most. Not platforms. Not products to be taken back. Tools, given permanently, with every line of code in the open.