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org-roam

Plain-text personal knowledge management for Emacs

Notes & Knowledge Base ★ 6k stars Medium setup GPL-3.0

Org-roam is a plain-text personal knowledge management system for Emacs that brings Zettelkasten-style note-taking on top of Org-mode files. It maintains a database of links between notes for backlinks and graph views.

Official siteSource code

Key features

  • Zettelkasten workflow
  • Backlinks panel
  • Org-mode based
  • Link graph

Strengths

  • Released under the GPL-3.0 license
  • Mature project with 6k GitHub stars
  • Written in Emacs Lisp
  • Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM

Is org-roam secure?

OSV.dev has no published security advisories for org-roam's repository. No known vulnerabilities is not proof of security: it means none have been publicly catalogued.

Source: OSV.dev, checked 2026-10-14. How this is measured.

org-roam replaces

Self-hosted Roam Research alternativesSelf-hosted Obsidian alternatives

Health badge

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SelfHostIndex: 65 · good

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