About Leo
A modern commonplace book for the Mac.
Leo is a Mac-native notepad for the way people actually read and think now: alongside videos, podcasts, articles, and books scattered across half a dozen apps. One keystroke anywhere and you have a place to put the thought before it disappears, automatically filed next to the thing that inspired it.
The commonplace book is a 2,000-year-old tradition. Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Locke, Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Jefferson, and da Vinci all kept one, in their own idiosyncratic way. The practice faded when personal libraries shrank and information moved online, but the underlying idea, your own notebook of the thinking that shaped you, was never replaced. Most note-taking apps are organised around projects and tasks. Leo is organised around what you find worth remembering.
What we believe
- Capture should be friction-free and source-aware. A hotkey from any app, with automatic context: the video timestamp, the podcast episode, the article URL. You shouldn't have to remember where you found something.
- Your notes belong to you. Local-first, exportable, and yours to move. Leo is designed so you can walk away with everything you've captured, in formats other tools can read.
- AI should help you recall, not replace the thinking. Ask your own notebook questions. Find the thread you half-remembered. The model reads what you've saved, not the whole internet.
- Mac-native, not cross-platform lowest-common-denominator. Leo is built for the Mac ecosystem and the workflows that live there, not a web app wrapped in Electron.
What Leo is not
Not a project manager. Not a team wiki. Not another Obsidian-style graph-first PKM tool aimed at power users who love configuring. Not a Notion-style databases-everything workspace. If you want any of those, we've compared the leading alternatives. Leo is for the person who wants a quiet, fast place to collect what they find worth remembering.
How we write the blog
The comparisons and guides on this site are written in-house. We use AI tools for research and first drafts; every article then gets a hand edit before it ships. Pricing and feature claims are dated inline so you can see when we checked. If anything looks out of date or wrong, the contact form reaches us directly.
Made by CurrentLabs
Leo is a product of CurrentLabs, a small software studio based in Amsterdam. We're independent and self-funded.
Recent writing
- The 7 Best Evernote Alternatives in 2026 . For anyone actually planning to leave Evernote, not just thinking about it.
- The 7 Best Obsidian Alternatives in 2026 . What else fits if Obsidian's plugin culture doesn't.
- Best OneNote Alternatives for Mac in 2026 . For Mac users stuck with a second-class OneNote port.
- The Commonplace Book: A 2,000-Year-Old Thinking Tool . The pillar on the tradition behind Leo.