SideNotes alternative for Mac: Stickies by Coduo

SideNotes and Stickies by Coduo both keep notes at the edge of a Mac screen, and the difference is the unit. SideNotes is one panel that holds all your notes. Stickies by Coduo treats each note as its own card: a colored sliver at the edge that you can peek at, open, or pull out onto the desktop as a floating window.

Facts about SideNotes below come from its maker's site and its Mac App Store listing, read on 2026-09-25. Facts about Stickies by Coduo, a Mac app that is not released yet, come from its source code.

What is SideNotes, and what does it cost?

SideNotes is a Mac app that shows your notes in a panel at the side of the screen, on top of every other app. Its App Store listing calls it "SideNotes – Screen Edge Notes", and on 2026-09-25 it cost $19.99 on the US Mac App Store. Its maker describes it as a one-time payment covering SideNotes 1.x, with SideNotes 2 to be a paid upgrade. It needs macOS 13 or newer.

The panel is always on top: its maker says it stays above other apps in full-screen mode, in regular windows and in Stage Manager. You show or hide it with a keyboard shortcut, by clicking its Open Bar, or by moving the pointer to the screen edge, which SideNotes calls Hot Side mode.

Inside the panel you get folders, note colors, tasks, images, file shortcuts, Markdown formatting with the markup hidden, and notes you can fold or pin to the top of the list. Notes are stored on your Mac and, if you turn it on, synced through your private iCloud account. SideNotes Mobile for iPhone and iPad is a separate purchase.

What does SideNotes do better?

SideNotes is a fuller notes app, and it is shipping today. If you keep dozens of notes, its folders, reordering and pin-to-top keep them in order. Stickies by Coduo has no folders; its edge column is simply ordered with the most recently edited sticky first.

SideNotes holds more kinds of things. Tasks, screenshots, file shortcuts and Markdown all live in one note. A sticky in Stickies by Coduo holds a title and text formatted bold, italic or strikethrough, and nothing else.

It reaches more places. SideNotes Mobile runs on iPhone and iPad; Stickies by Coduo is Mac only. SideNotes also plugs into automation, with Apple Shortcuts, an AppleScript API and a URL API, plus ready integrations with Alfred, Raycast, PopClip, Hookmark and Dropzone. Stickies by Coduo has none of these.

Finally, safety: SideNotes makes automatic backups. Stickies by Coduo deletes a sticky the moment you choose Delete, with no confirmation and no trash.

How does Stickies by Coduo's edge stash work differently?

Stickies by Coduo stashes each note separately. Every unpinned sticky is its own sliver at the right edge of the screen, 12 points wide and 84 points tall, or 42 for an empty one, 4 points from its neighbour, colored so you can tell one from another. The slivers stack in a column centred on the edge, the most recently edited at the top.

Here is what happens when you reach for one:

1. Move the pointer into the 20-point strip along the right edge, over a sliver.
2. Rest there for a tenth of a second. A card for that sticky fades in at 264 × 176 points, showing its title and first lines, while its neighbours stay slivers.
3. Click the card to open it as a window, or move away; the card retracts 0.20 seconds after the pointer leaves.

The short pause before a peek means brushing past the edge does not throw cards at you. The edge strip is a panel that never takes keyboard focus, so peeking does not pull focus from the app you are typing in. There is one strip on each display, and when nothing is stashed the strip is gone.

SideNotes shows you the panel of notes; Stickies by Coduo shows you one card at a time. Which is better depends on whether you usually want to scan many notes or grab one.

Two limits on this. Stickies by Coduo stashes on the right edge only; there is no left-edge or top-edge option. And past seven stashed stickies the column scrolls instead, and that scrolling column has no hover peek yet.

Can a note float on the desktop instead of in the panel?

Yes, in Stickies by Coduo: pin it. A pinned sticky leaves the edge and becomes its own borderless window at the floating window level, so it stays above other apps, on every Space and over full-screen apps. Move and resize it, and it remembers where you left it. Several pinned stickies can float at once, anywhere on the screen.

Unpin it and the window closes; the sticky goes back to the top of the edge column. Open a stashed sticky without pinning it, click elsewhere, and it returns to the edge by itself. ⌘⇧N creates a new sticky already pinned, from any app.

SideNotes' maker describes its notes living in the panel, which is always on top as a whole; its site does not describe pulling a single note out as a separate floating window.

How do SideNotes and Stickies by Coduo compare?

Which should you pick?

Pick SideNotes if the side of your screen is where your notes library lives: many notes, sorted into folders, with tasks and images, and a phone app to match. It is shipping, it costs a one-time $19.99 on the Mac App Store, and on organisation it does more than Stickies by Coduo.

Look at Stickies by Coduo if you think of notes as separate stickies rather than a list: a handful of cards resting at the right edge, one peeked at a time, any of which you can pin out onto the desktop as its own floating window. It gives up folders, tasks and images for that. It is not released yet; the plans page has the details.