Apple Notes MCP

Let Claude read your local Apple Notes over the Model Context Protocol.

Free· Free / open-source (MIT). No hosted service; runs locally on your Mac.MCP Servers

Best for

Mac users on Claude Desktop who want their existing Apple Notes searchable and quotable inside chats without exporting to Markdown or a third-party service.

Skip if

Windows or Linux users, teams that need write-back to Notes, or anyone relying on password-protected notes, attachments, or checklist semantics.

Apple Notes MCP is a small, open-source Model Context Protocol server written in Python that exposes your local Apple Notes database to any MCP-compatible client, most obviously Claude Desktop on macOS. Once installed and granted Full Disk Access, it reads directly from the SQLite store that Notes.app keeps under ~/Library and turns each note into something Claude can query on demand. The server ships three tools: get-all-notes to enumerate everything you've ever written, read-note to pull the full body of a specific note, and search-notes to keyword-hunt across the corpus. That surface is deliberately narrow but genuinely useful, because Apple Notes for most people is a decade-deep sedimentary layer of half-written ideas, meeting scraps, recipes, passwords they shouldn't have saved, and travel itineraries; being able to say 'Claude, what did I write about the Lisbon trip?' and have it actually find and quote the note is the moment MCP clicks. It's aimed at Mac power-users, researchers, and anyone building personal-knowledge workflows on top of Claude who wants their existing notes in the context window without exporting to Markdown or piping through a third-party sync service. Installation is a one-liner with uv (uvx apple-notes-mcp) plus a small JSON block in claude_desktop_config.json. Everything stays on-device: no cloud round-trip, no API key, no telemetry — Claude sees only what you ask it to search. The trade-off, which the README is refreshingly honest about, is that the server is read-only and skips several Notes features: encrypted/password-protected notes, pinned-note filtering, cloud-sync status, attachment content, and checklist state are all unhandled, and there is no create-or-edit path. The repository is also now archived by the author, so treat it as a stable reference implementation rather than an actively maintained product.

Editor's take

This is exactly the kind of MCP server the ecosystem needed early on — small, honest, on-device, and solving one concrete personal-context problem well. The archived status stings, but the code is 200 lines of Python you can fork; the read-only scope is the right choice for a first release, and the README's explicit 'Missing Features' list is a model other MCP authors should copy.

— The AI Tool Bible editorial team

Pros

✅ Genuinely local: reads the on-disk SQLite database directly, so notes never leave your Mac
✅ Trivial install via uv/uvx and a short claude_desktop_config.json block
✅ Exposes the three operations that matter most — list, read, search — with a clean MCP surface
✅ MIT-licensed Python, small enough to audit or fork in an afternoon
✅ Works with any MCP client, not just Claude Desktop, so it composes with other servers
✅ No API keys, no subscriptions, no accounts — zero ongoing cost

Cons

⚠️ Read-only: cannot create, edit, or append notes from within Claude
⚠️ Skips password-protected notes entirely (ZISPASSWORDPROTECTED is unhandled)
⚠️ No attachment content, no checklist state, no pinned-note filtering, no iCloud sync awareness
⚠️ macOS-only by design, and requires granting Full Disk Access to the runner
⚠️ Repository is archived by the maintainer — bug fixes and new features are unlikely without a fork
⚠️ Search is basic keyword matching against the SQLite text, not semantic retrieval

Use cases

Personal knowledge retrieval from Apple NotesSearching decade-old meeting notes during a Claude chatPulling travel or recipe notes into a planning conversationSummarising a specific note by titleBuilding a local MCP toolchain alongside filesystem and browser serversReference implementation for writing your own macOS SQLite-backed MCP server