Vellum and Notion.
Notion is a cloud workspace built for teams. Vellum is a private notebook that runs on your device. They suit different jobs.
At a glance
| Vellum | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your content lives | On your device | On Notion’s servers |
| Account | None | Required |
| Offline | Fully, after the first visit | Limited; it is a cloud service first |
| Collaboration | Single user; share runnable .html files | Real-time editing, comments and permissions for teams |
| Structure | Notebooks, links, tags, properties, status | Pages, databases with views, many integrations |
| AI | Optional, runs on the device, cites your pages | Notion AI, processed in the cloud |
| Code | Runs 25 languages in pages | Code blocks for display |
| Format | Markdown; full backups | Exports to Markdown, HTML and PDF |
| Cost | Free | Free plan; paid plans for more |
When to choose which
Choose Notion for team wikis, shared databases, project tracking and real-time collaboration.
Choose Vellum for personal writing, research and analysis that should stay private, work offline and need no account, especially when code or documents are part of the work.