Apple's Stickies alternative: Stickies by Coduo

Apple's Stickies is the free sticky-notes app that ships with macOS, and it is the one most people mean when they say "Stickies". Stickies by Coduo is a different Mac app with a similar name: its notes float above other windows by default, tuck away as slivers at the right screen edge when you unpin them, and are built to sync through your own iCloud account. It is not released yet.

Every fact about Apple's app below comes from Apple's Stickies user guide, read on 2026-09-25. Every fact about Stickies by Coduo comes from its source code.

Is Stickies by Coduo the same app as Apple's Stickies?

No. Stickies by Coduo is made by Coduo and has nothing to do with Apple's app beyond the word in its name. It keeps its own notes in its own storage, and nothing in it reads from or writes to Apple's Stickies or Apple Notes. Installing one never changes the other.

What does Apple's Stickies do, and what does it cost?

Apple's Stickies keeps notes, lists and pictures on your desktop, and it costs nothing because it is part of macOS. On a Mac running macOS 26.6.2 it sits in /System/Applications, and Apple's guide gives no price.

You make a note with File > New Note, and Apple's Stickies saves your text automatically. From there you can:

• change a note's color from the Color menu and its fonts from Font > Show Fonts
• drag in a picture or a PDF, then crop, rotate or draw on it with the Markup tools
• start a list with Option-Tab and change its level with Tab and Shift-Tab
• keep one note in front of other windows with Window > Float on Top, or make it see-through with Window > Translucent
• collapse a note to its title bar with a double-click, and group notes with Window > Arrange By
• find and replace text across all notes

The catch is in one line of Apple's guide: "When Stickies is closed, notes don't appear on your desktop." Apple's guide also describes no sync. To see the notes on another device, Apple's route is File > Export All to Notes, which copies every note into the Notes app, sorted into a folder per color, and leaves the originals in Apple's Stickies.

What does Apple's Stickies do better?

Apple's Stickies is richer, and it is already on your Mac, with nothing to buy or set up.

The notes themselves can hold far more. Apple's Stickies lets you pick any font and size, drag in pictures and PDFs and mark them up, and build lists several levels deep. Stickies by Coduo formats text three ways only: bold, italic and strikethrough. A recipe with a photo, or a checklist nested three levels deep, belongs in Apple's app.

It also has tools Stickies by Coduo lacks: find and replace across every note, translucent notes, a collapse-to-title-bar gesture, and import and export of single notes as plain text, RTF or RTFD. And it has a clear road to your iPhone through Export All to Notes. Stickies by Coduo is Mac only.

Finally, deleting in Apple's Stickies takes two clicks, the close box then Delete Note. Stickies by Coduo deletes a sticky the moment you choose Delete from its menu, with no confirmation and no trash to restore it from.

Where does Stickies by Coduo differ from Apple's Stickies?

Stickies by Coduo is built around two places a note can be, pinned on the desktop or stashed at the screen edge.

Pinned stickies float by default. A pinned sticky is its own borderless window at the floating window level, so it stays above your other apps. It joins every Space and shows over full-screen apps. There is no per-note Float on Top setting to remember, because every pinned sticky floats. The window remembers where you put it.

Unpinned stickies go to the screen edge. Unpin a sticky and its window closes. The note becomes a sliver 12 points wide at the right edge of the screen. Hover over a sliver and a card fades in beside it, wide enough to read its title and first lines, while the others stay put. Click it to open it. That hover preview works for up to seven stashed stickies; past seven, the edge column scrolls instead and has no preview yet. Open a stashed sticky and click somewhere else, and it goes back to the edge by itself. When nothing is stashed, the edge strip goes away completely.

It runs from the menu bar. The Quick Panel in the menu bar composes a new sticky and lists recent ones. ⌘⇧N makes a new pinned sticky from any app. Settings has a Launch at Login switch, so the app starts with your Mac. Like Apple's app, though, Stickies by Coduo shows its notes only while it is running.

It is built to sync through your own iCloud. Sync uses Apple's CloudKit with your private iCloud database, in a zone of its own. There is no Coduo account and no Coduo server. Each Mac keeps its own copy, and when two edits meet, the newer one wins. Settings shows the state as Synced, Syncing… or iCloud unavailable. The sync code is written, but a round trip between two real Macs has not been checked yet, so treat sync as designed rather than proven until release.

Can I move my notes from Apple's Stickies into Stickies by Coduo?

No. Stickies by Coduo has no importer and deliberately never reads Apple's Stickies notes. To bring a note across, copy its text in Apple's Stickies and paste it into a new sticky. Pictures and PDFs have nowhere to go, because a sticky holds text only.

Should I use Apple Notes instead of either?

Use Apple Notes if you want your notes on an iPhone or iPad. Apple's own answer to syncing Apple's Stickies is to export them into Notes, where they show on your other Apple devices. Neither Apple's Stickies nor Stickies by Coduo runs on an iPhone. Notes is a single window of documents, though, not notes that float on the desktop. If you want both, Apple's Quick Note feature is the nearest thing Notes has to a sticky.

How do Apple's Stickies and Stickies by Coduo compare?

Which should you pick?

Keep Apple's Stickies if your notes carry pictures, PDFs, fonts or nested lists, if you want find and replace, or if you just want something free that is already there.

Consider Stickies by Coduo if what bothers you about Apple's app is the window juggling: notes that disappear behind other apps unless you set Float on Top one at a time, notes that are either on the desktop or gone, and no sync between your Macs. It trades rich formatting for notes that float by default, hide as slivers at the edge, and are built to follow you through iCloud. It is not released yet; the plans page has the details.