Self-Hosted Notion Alternatives

AFFiNE is a collaborative knowledge base and productivity suite designed as a private-first, local-first platform. It provides an integrated workspace that combines structured documents with an infinite digital canvas, allowing users to organize complex information through a block-based model. By prioritizing local data persistence, the platform ensures immediate responsiveness and data sovereignty while maintaining a distributed state for real-time synchronization across multiple devices. The platform distinguishes itself through a canvas-integrated database engine that enables transitions between free-form whiteboarding and structured tabular views. It utilizes conflict-free replicated data types to manage concurrent edits, ensuring consistent collaboration. Users can extend the workspace with modular artificial intelligence integrations, which use natural language prompts to generate, summarize, and transform content into various visual or structured formats. The software is built for self-hosting, allowing teams to maintain full control over their data and infrastructure. It supports container-orchestrated deployment, providing tools for managing private workspaces, authentication, and production-ready environments. The system is designed to be installed and configured on personal or team-managed infrastructure, ensuring that all sensitive information remains within a private, secure, and scalable environment.

Leanote is a collaborative Markdown editor, hierarchical note manager, and self-hosted blogging platform. It functions as a knowledge base that uses a document store to organize structured notebooks and rich-text documents. The system enables real-time co-authoring, allowing multiple users to simultaneously edit documents and brainstorm ideas. It also includes a publishing engine that transforms private notes into public-facing blogs using customizable themes and multi-contributor management. The platform provides tools for knowledge management through notebooks and tags, supporting both rich-text and Markdown editing. Additional capabilities include a role-based permission system for managing shared access and utilities for exporting notes to PDF.

MiaoYan is a local Markdown editor and personal knowledge management tool. It functions as a system for writing and organizing documents stored as local files, supporting the creation of a connected information network through bidirectional links and backlinks. The project includes a specialized tool for converting Markdown documents into slide-based presentations by using specific content separators. It also provides a command-line interface for managing files, allowing users to create, search, and open documents without a graphical file explorer. The editor features a side-by-side live preview with synchronized scrolling and supports the rendering of technical diagrams and mathematical formulas. Additional capabilities include local document versioning to track note history and a search-and-replace utility that operates across both the editor and the preview panes.

Docmost is an open-source knowledge management system designed as a collaborative documentation platform for teams. It functions as an enterprise wiki that centralizes organizational information into structured, searchable workspaces, enabling users to create, organize, and share content through a hierarchical system of spaces and pages. The platform distinguishes itself by integrating artificial intelligence directly into the documentation lifecycle. It utilizes vector-based semantic search to allow for natural language queries across stored content and provides AI-assisted tools for drafting, summarizing, and refining documents. To support team workflows, it features a block-based editor for rich text authoring and visual diagramming, paired with real-time collaboration capabilities that synchronize changes across multiple users. The system is built for enterprise environments, offering granular access control, multi-factor authentication, and identity provider integration for centralized user management. It also includes programmatic access through a REST API, allowing for the automation of resource management and integration with external software tools. The platform supports flexible deployment with configurable storage backends and automated security certificate management. It is designed to be self-hosted, providing the necessary infrastructure to manage documentation security and lifecycle workflows within an organization.

Trilium is a local-first personal knowledge management system designed to store and organize information on a user's own device. It functions as a hierarchical knowledge base where every note acts as both a standalone document and a container for nested children, allowing for complex information relationships and deep categorization. The platform distinguishes itself through a component-based interface that dynamically renders diverse content types, including rich text, diagrams, and executable scripts. All data is persisted within a single relational database file, which supports a versioned archive and a soft-delete lifecycle to protect information integrity. This architecture enables users to manage large volumes of interconnected data within a unified, extensible workspace. The system provides a comprehensive environment for digital asset organization, combining document management with scriptable automation. It utilizes a combination of server-side rendering and client-side orchestration to maintain a responsive interface for navigating and searching through structured information.

Blinko is a personal knowledge management system and an LLM-powered knowledge base that enables users to capture and organize thoughts through a bi-directional knowledge graph. It functions as a RAG-enabled note-taking application and a self-hosted Markdown editor, allowing for the creation of permanent documentation and fleeting notes. The project distinguishes itself by integrating retrieval-augmented generation to provide conversational querying and AI-powered analysis of private document libraries. It supports both cloud-based and local AI model integration, enabling users to perform semantic searches across multimodal content, including PDFs and images, while maintaining data privacy. The system covers a broad surface of capabilities, including hierarchical tagging, bidirectional linking, and a plugin-based extensibility framework with a dedicated marketplace. It manages data through a combination of hub-based and peer-to-peer synchronization, with support for S3-compatible object storage and automated archiving. The application is available for cross-platform deployment on macOS, Windows, Linux, and Android, and can be self-hosted using Docker containers.

AppFlowy is a local-first knowledge base and collaborative workspace platform designed for structured information management. It functions as a modular productivity suite where users organize content through a block-based document model, allowing for flexible nesting and granular manipulation of data. The system prioritizes data sovereignty by enabling self-hosted storage, ensuring that sensitive information remains under user control while maintaining offline accessibility. The platform distinguishes itself through a decoupled architecture that separates its high-performance, memory-safe core logic from the user interface. This design supports an event-driven synchronization engine that maintains consistency across local caches and collaborative sessions. Users can extend the system via a modular plugin architecture, which facilitates the integration of external or local intelligence models to automate content creation, summarize datasets, and assist with complex organizational tasks. Beyond its core document capabilities, the platform provides tools for structured data management, including relational tables that allow for the categorization, filtering, and visualization of information. The interface is built on a cross-platform rendering framework to ensure consistent performance across desktop and mobile environments.

Whitebophir is a collaborative whiteboarding application designed for real-time visual collaboration. It enables multiple users to brainstorm and create content together on a shared virtual canvas using freehand sketching, geometric shapes, and text labels. The platform focuses on private workspace management, allowing the creation of restricted boards via unique URLs and token-based access control to manage editing permissions. It integrates real-time state synchronization for drawing updates and a built-in chat system for text communication between collaborators. The workspace includes tools for canvas navigation, stroke customization, and data persistence across sessions. Users can export their visual work as scalable vector graphics or save workspace states to local files. The system includes administrative infrastructure for server performance monitoring, request rate limiting to prevent abuse, and content moderation tools to ban users. The interface supports global use through a multi-language localization system.

Joplin is an open-source, cross-platform note-taking application designed for secure, private knowledge management. It functions as a local-first productivity platform, maintaining a complete relational database on the user's device to ensure offline availability and high-performance data retrieval. The application prioritizes data sovereignty by implementing an end-to-end encryption layer, which secures all information locally with a master key before any synchronization occurs. The platform distinguishes itself through a delta-based synchronization engine that transmits only specific file changes, optimizing performance across multiple devices and operating systems. Users can extend the core environment through a plugin-based architecture that supports custom themes, scripts, and UI components. For professional or collaborative environments, the software offers self-hosted synchronization options and team management capabilities, allowing organizations to maintain full control over their data infrastructure and security policies. Beyond core note-taking, the application supports rich multimedia content, including embedded files, diagrams, and mathematical expressions. It provides a comprehensive web-clipping tool for archiving online research and a RESTful API that enables programmatic access to notes and metadata for external integrations. The system is built on a cross-platform abstraction layer to ensure consistent behavior across desktop and mobile environments.

Org-roam is an Emacs-based note-taking system that builds a bidirectional network of plain-text notes, functioning as a personal knowledge base manager. It maintains both forward and backlink references in a SQLite database, automatically updated on file save, and uses persistent unique identifiers for notes instead of file paths to enable stable links across renames and moves. The system integrates directly with Emacs through custom interactive commands and hooks that access the database and buffer state, and it generates static graphs of note interconnections using Graphviz to reveal relationships between ideas. Org-roam also registers custom URI schemes to capture external content into new notes, and it creates notes from user-defined templates with placeholders for title, date, and content. Beyond its core linking and graph capabilities, Org-roam supports daily journal entries that integrate with the same backlinking system as regular notes, exports notes to HTML or PDF while preserving ID-based links, and provides migration tooling to convert notes from Roam Research or upgrade from version 1 to version 2. Users can search and jump to any note by title using a fuzzy completion interface, view backlinks and reference relationships in a dedicated buffer that updates as the cursor moves, and publish notes to a remote site with a navigable graph.

fsnotes is a markdown notes manager and cross-platform markdown editor for macOS and iOS. It functions as a personal knowledge base that organizes plain text and markdown files across folders using tags and bidirectional links. The system provides a secure environment through an encrypted plain text notebook that protects individual notes and folders. It implements Git-based note versioning to track document changes and maintain backups, while relying on external cloud storage services to synchronize files across devices. The application renders mathematical formulas, diagrams, and syntax-highlighted code. It monitors the file system in real time to maintain synchronization when files are modified in external third-party text editors.

Notable is a local-first markdown note taking application and document manager. It functions as a personal knowledge base that persists notes as plain text files on the local disk to ensure data portability and user ownership. The application provides a markdown editor featuring a split-pane live preview for real-time rendering of content, including mathematical expressions and diagrams. Information is organized through a hierarchical tagging system that allows for nested labels and multi-dimensional categorization. The software includes tools for bulk note management to apply operations across multiple files simultaneously and a minimalist interface mode for distraction-free writing.

StackEdit is a browser-based Markdown editor designed for structured document authoring and collaborative content creation. It functions as an offline-first web application, allowing users to maintain full access to their documents and editing tools without an active internet connection, with changes automatically synchronized once connectivity is restored. The platform distinguishes itself through its support for real-time multi-user collaboration, utilizing operational transformation to merge concurrent edits from multiple participants. It features a modular architecture that supports specialized content rendering, including mathematical expressions, diagrams, and musical scores, alongside a plugin-based system for extending Markdown syntax. Users can configure specific Markdown flavors to ensure compatibility across different technical environments. Beyond its primary interface, the project provides an embeddable editor component that can be integrated into external websites via sandboxed frames. It includes built-in cloud storage adapters for file synchronization and publishing, and supports containerized deployment within cluster environments.

This project is a web-based rich text editor designed for markdown content authoring. It provides a dual-mode interface that synchronizes raw markdown syntax with a visual WYSIWYG editing experience, allowing users to toggle between modes while maintaining a consistent document state. The editor distinguishes itself through a modular architecture that supports custom content blocks and plugin extensions. This system enables the integration of specialized features such as code syntax highlighting, chart rendering, diagram generation, and complex table formatting. It also includes a live preview mode that coordinates the vertical scroll position between raw input and rendered output for real-time feedback. Beyond core editing, the project offers a read-only viewer mode for displaying formatted content and supports interface localization for global accessibility. It is built to be embedded into web applications through specialized wrapper components that facilitate integration with various frontend frameworks.

BlockNote is a block-based rich text editor and a real-time collaborative workspace. It uses a JSON-based data model to organize content into draggable, nestable blocks rather than a single flat document. The system functions as a high-level interface built on ProseMirror that abstracts document state into discrete, manipulatable content blocks. The project serves as a framework for integrating large language models into document editors, enabling context-aware text generation and AI-driven workflows. It also acts as a document export engine capable of converting structured block data into formats such as HTML, Markdown, PDF, and Word. The editor supports real-time collaboration with automatic synchronization, conflict resolution, and inline discussion threads. Additional capabilities include custom block schema configuration, media file uploads to remote storage, and a pluggable synchronization layer for maintaining state across multiple users.

Siyuan is a self-hosted knowledge management platform designed for private note-taking and information organization. It functions as a local-first application that stores all user content as plain text files on the local file system, ensuring data ownership and offline availability. The platform utilizes a block-based document model, which structures information as a tree of independent content blocks to facilitate granular manipulation and bidirectional linking. Users can extend the core functionality through a sandboxed plugin architecture, allowing for the development of custom themes and scripts that modify the editor behavior and user interface to suit specific workflows. The software is built as a containerized application, supporting deployment within isolated environments to standardize dependencies and simplify maintenance across various hosting infrastructures. It maintains consistency across multiple devices through a persistent socket connection that propagates state changes in real time, while the interface utilizes virtual document object model reconciliation to manage updates efficiently.

Logseq is a privacy-focused, local-first knowledge base designed for personal information management and networked thought mapping. It functions as a bi-directional graph editor that organizes content into hierarchical, outliner-based structures, allowing users to connect related concepts through automated backlinking and visual relationship mapping. The platform distinguishes itself by maintaining all user data in plain text markdown files stored directly on the local device, ensuring offline availability and long-term portability. It employs a logic-based query engine to perform complex relational searches across the graph of notes and metadata, while a content-addressable storage model ensures data integrity for every information block. The application supports a broad range of information management tasks, including academic research synthesis and structured project documentation. Users can extend the core functionality through a sandboxed plugin system that allows for custom interface components and data manipulation. The software is documented through a dedicated resource library to assist with setup and configuration.

This project is a self-hosted note-taking platform and collaborative markdown wiki. It functions as a real-time markdown collaborative editor, allowing multiple users to create, organize, and share documents simultaneously. The platform is designed for self-hosted knowledge management and collaborative markdown documentation, providing a private environment for teams to maintain shared technical notes.

HedgeDoc is a self-hosted documentation platform and real-time collaborative Markdown editor. It serves as a digital workspace for creating shared technical notes and managing knowledge through a privately hosted system. The platform enables multiple users to write and format Markdown documents simultaneously in a shared live environment. It integrates external identity providers such as LDAP, SAML, and social platforms via OAuth2 to manage user access and authentication. The system includes capabilities for content publishing, including exporting notes to GitHub Gists and generating automated tables of contents. It also supports interactive task lists, customizable image dimensions, and the ability to store media in either local disks or remote cloud object storage. Administrative tasks can be performed via a command line interface, and system security is supported by request rate limiting and instance data backups.