Tolaria vs Notion: File-First Markdown Notes for Windows Power Users (2026)

Paul Thurrott has never been shy about his love-hate relationship with note-taking apps. In his latest “Switcher 2026” column, published May 2026, Thurrott chronicles his most recent and perhaps most radical attempt yet to break free from Notion’s walled garden. The weapon of choice this time is Tolaria, a new open-source, file-first Markdown notes app built from the ground up for Windows power users who demand local control, blinding speed, and plain-text permanence.

The review lands at a pivotal moment. Notion, the darling of productivity enthusiasts for the better part of a decade, has increasingly pushed its AI features and cloud-only workflows, leaving a growing contingent of users feeling locked in and fed up. Thurrott’s high-profile defection to Tolaria is reigniting a conversation that many thought had been settled: can a simple, local-first tool really replace Notion’s all-in-one platform?

The Tolaria Pitch: Your Notes, Your Rules

Tolaria isn’t just another Markdown editor. It’s an architecture. The app treats your file system as the primary database, storing every note as a plain .md file in a folder structure of your choosing. No proprietary formats, no hidden caches, no lock-in. Open any note in Notepad, VS Code, or your terminal-based editor of choice, and it’s just text — perfectly readable and fully editable.

This file-first philosophy stands in stark contrast to Notion’s approach, where everything lives inside a cloud-hosted database. Notion exports are clunky and often lose metadata; Tolaria exports require nothing because they’re already native files. For Thurrott, this was the killer feature. “I need to know that twenty years from now, I can still open my notes without reverse-engineering a JSON dump,” he writes.

Under the hood, Tolaria combines a Rust-based indexing engine with a Fluent Design front end that feels at home on Windows 11 (and the freshly previewed Windows 12 builds). The app launches in under a second, even with a vault of 10,000 notes, and search is instantaneous.

What Tolaria Gets Right

Thurrott’s 2,500-word deep dive highlights several areas where Tolaria outshines Notion for his specific needs. Here are the standouts:

1. Real Offline Access

Notion’s offline mode has been a perennial pain point. Pages often fail to load without a connection, and sync conflicts can corrupt data. Tolaria, by contrast, is offline by design. Everything is local; optional cloud sync (via OneDrive, Dropbox, or Git) works like any normal file — no special handling required.

2. Lightweight and Focused

While Notion has evolved into a workspace behemoth with databases, wikis, and project management, Tolaria does one thing: notes. There are no tables, kanban boards, or relational databases. For Thurrott, that’s a feature, not a bug. He can write distraction-free, manage daily logs, and organize research without the temptation to build another unnecessary dashboard.

3. Markdown That Works Everywhere

Tolaria supports CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown out of the box, with live preview that doesn’t break when switching between source and rendered modes. Embedded images, code blocks with syntax highlighting for 40+ languages, and LaTeX math rendering are all present. Notably, Tolaria respects your existing front matter (YAML, TOML, or JSON), making it a natural fit for users migrating from Obsidian or Logseq.

4. True Multi-Folder Vaults

Unlike Notion’s single-workspace model, Tolaria allows simultaneous access to multiple vaults — each simply a folder on disk. You can keep work notes completely separate from personal journals, yet search across all vaults with a single keystroke. This resonated strongly with Thurrott, who juggles content calendars, podcast notes, and personal finance.

5. Privacy and Longevity

With no server-side component, Tolaria never sees your data. The app is open-source (MIT licensed), and its active GitHub community ensures that even if the original developer disappears, the tool can live on. For a journalist who has been burned by Evernote’s enshittification and Notion’s opaque roadmap, that’s peace of mind.

Where Notion Still Wins

To his credit, Thurrott doesn’t pretend the transition was painless. The Switcher column is brutally honest about what’s lost when leaving Notion:

• Databases and linked views: “I miss the ability to turn a bullet list into a filtered table in two clicks. Tolaria doesn’t even try to replicate that.”
• Collaboration: Tolaria is a single-player app. There’s no real-time co-editing, no comments, no @mentions. Teams are not the target audience.
• Web clipper and integrations: Notion’s web clipper and API ecosystem have no equivalent in Tolaria. Thurrott now relies on separate tools for saving web pages and automating workflows.
• Mobile access: As of May 2026, Tolaria lacks a mobile companion app. You can edit files via any text editor on your phone, but the dedicated reading/editing experience isn’t there yet. Thurrott uses OneDrive and Markor on Android as a stopgap, but calls it “clunky.”

For users deeply embedded in Notion’s database paradigm, switching to a plain-text system means rethinking entire workflows. Thurrott admits it took him three weeks to adapt his content pipeline.

Performance Benchmarks: Tolaria vs. Notion

In his testing, Thurrott pitted Tolaria 1.0.4 against Notion 3.1 (Windows desktop app) on a three-year-old Dell XPS with 16 GB RAM. The results were telling:

These figures underscore the efficiency gains of a file-first architecture. Thurrott notes that Notion’s Electron-based desktop client has grown increasingly bloated, while Tolaria’s native Rust core keeps things lean.

Community Reaction: Windows Power Users Weigh In

Though Thurrott’s article came first, it quickly sparked discussion on Reddit, Hacker News, and the Windows enthusiast forums. The consensus is mixed but trending positive.

Many power users echo Thurrott’s frustration with Notion’s direction. “Notion’s AI pop-ups are the final straw for me,” wrote one Redditor. “I just want to write notes, not chat with a bot.” The promise of a fast, keyboard-driven, local app resonates strongly with developers, sysadmins, and technical writers.

However, others question whether Tolaria can sustain momentum. “We’ve seen this movie before — Obsidian, Logseq, Dendron,” one commenter pointed out. “What makes Tolaria different?” The answer seems to be its uncompromising performance and Windows-native design. Unlike Electron-based alternatives, Tolaria feels like a built-in Windows utility.

Feature requests on the Tolaria GitHub tracker have exploded since Thurrott’s article. Top asks include:
- Mobile app with sync (iOS/Android)
- Web clipper extension for Edge and Chrome
- Customizable themes (beyond the default light/dark)
- Optical character recognition (OCR) for embedded PDFs
- Basic table support

The project’s maintainer, known only as “Moss,” has acknowledged the influx and promised a public roadmap by June 2026.

Should You Switch? A Practical Checklist

Thurrott concludes his piece with a checklist that could help any Windows user decide:

Thurrott himself landed in the “hybrid” camp: he now uses Tolaria for personal notes, blog drafts, and research, but keeps Notion for shared team projects and client deliverables.

The Bigger Picture: File-First Apps on the Rise

Tolaria’s arrival is part of a broader renaissance for local-first software on Windows. Tools like Obsidian have proven that users will pay for a notes app that respects their data sovereignty. Microsoft’s own Loop, while powerful, remains cloud-centric and raises similar lock-in concerns. In the developer space, neovim and VS Code extensions already demonstrate the power of plain-text workflows, but Tolaria brings that ethos to a broader audience.

Thurrott’s Switcher series has chronicled these shifts for years. His previous experiments included Logseq (too quirky), Anytype (too abstract), and Craft (too Mac-centric). Tolaria, he writes, “is the first tool in a decade to make me feel I’m not sacrificing speed for features. It’s a blank canvas, not a shopping mall.”

What’s Next for Tolaria

Based on commits to the main branch, upcoming features include:
- Plugin API (Rust and JavaScript) for community extensions
- Graph view with local-only processing
- Export to PDF and DOCX via Pandoc integration
- Web app for quick viewing on other devices (read-only mode)

The project is young — version 1.0 dropped in March 2026 — and it lacks the polish of a mature product. But if Moss can execute on the roadmap without bloating the core, Tolaria could become a permanent fixture in the Windows power user’s toolkit.

Thurrott promises to revisit Tolaria in six months. For now, his recommendation is clear: “If you write code, manage complex projects, or just value your digital independence, give Tolaria a weekend. You might not go back — and if you do, your Notion workspace will still be there, with all those AI pop-ups you’ve grown to hate.”

Tolaria is available now as a free download from Tolari.app. The source code lives on GitHub under the MIT license. Windows 10 and 11 are supported, with a Windows on ARM build also available.

For Thurrott’s full Switcher 2026 column, visit thurrott.com/switcher-2026-tolaria. A follow-up Q&A with the developer is expected later this month.