About Atlas
We believe your thoughts belong to you—not locked in someone else's cloud.
Our Mission
Atlas exists to give you the power of AI without sacrificing ownership of your knowledge. In a world where most productivity tools force you to upload your most valuable ideas to corporate servers, we're building something different: a cognitive operating system that runs entirely on your machine.
We believe the future of personal knowledge management is local-first. Your notes, files, and memories should live as plain markdown files on your own device—readable, portable, and completely under your control. AI should enhance your thinking, not surveil it. Privacy should be the default, not a premium feature.
Atlas combines the best of both worlds: the intelligence of modern language models with the sovereignty of local-first software. We've built a system where you can talk with your notes, discover hidden connections, and maintain a living knowledge graph—all while keeping your data exactly where it belongs: with you.
Who We Are
Atlas Notes is built by a team dedicated to creating thoughtful software for knowledge work. We're researchers, engineers, and lifelong learners who believe that tools should amplify human intelligence without compromising autonomy.
Our approach is deliberate and methodical. We don't chase trends or build features for the sake of complexity. Every design decision in Atlas—from our hybrid vector search to our conversation memory system—is guided by a simple question: does this help you think more clearly?
We're building Atlas in public, listening to early users, and shipping improvements every week. If you have feedback, questions, or ideas for how Atlas could better serve your workflow, we want to hear from you.
Your Data Stays on Your Machine
Atlas is built on a foundational principle: your notes, files, and personal knowledge never leave your device unless you explicitly choose to use cloud AI features.
When you use Atlas in offline mode, everything runs locally. Your vault lives as plain markdown files on your hard drive. Search, file management, daily notes, task tracking, CRM, and calendar integration—all of these features work without any network connection. No telemetry, no tracking, no upload to our servers. You own your data in the most literal sense possible.
We offer optional cloud AI features—conversational chat, voice transcription, text-to-speech—for users who want AI assistance. Even then, only the specific text you send in a conversation reaches our servers, and it's immediately processed and discarded. We don't train models on your data, don't build user profiles, and don't sell anything to advertisers. Your vault contents—your notes, files, memories, and relationships—remain entirely local.
Because Atlas stores everything as markdown files, you can open your vault in any text editor, sync it with Git, back it up to any storage system, or migrate to a different tool at any time. No lock-in. No proprietary formats. Just plain text files you control.
Built on Solid Technology
Atlas is a desktop application built with Tauri 2.0—a modern framework that combines the speed and security of Rust with web technologies. This architecture gives us the best of both worlds: native performance and cross-platform compatibility.
Our local search system uses hybrid retrieval: ONNX-accelerated embeddings for semantic similarity combined with BM25 for keyword matching, fused with Reciprocal Rank Fusion. This means Atlas understands both what you said and what you meant when searching your notes.
Knowledge graph visualization, file watcher for real-time vault sync, native wake-word detection for hands-free voice interaction, plugin system for extensibility—we've built Atlas to be powerful out of the box while remaining hackable for advanced users.
For users who choose cloud AI features, we use secure authentication via Supabase, end-to-end encrypted API calls, and Claude Haiku for language understanding. Our cloud backend is stateless—we don't store conversation history on our servers. Everything lives in your local session files as append-only JSONL, giving you complete control and auditability.
Questions? We'd love to hear from you.
Reach out at info@atlasnotes.io or explore our documentation.