SHSelfHostIndex

Notes & Knowledge Base

Own your notes, wikis, and documentation with self-hosted alternatives to Notion, Evernote, and Confluence.

70 self-hosted apps · 546 comparisons

All notes & knowledge base apps

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 455 words

One question sorts this entire category: whether you want your notes to live as plain files you could grep in twenty years, or inside a server whose features justify the lock-in to its database. Everything else — sync method, editor style, collaboration — follows from that answer, and people who skip the question usually migrate twice.

How to choose a notes app

Files first, or server first. Logseq and Joplin keep notes as portable Markdown; if the project dies, your notes are still sitting in a folder. Trilium and Outline store notes in a database and pay you back with features files can't do well: Trilium's note attributes, relations, and scripting, or Outline's real-time collaborative editing. I treat portability as the tiebreaker, not the veto — Trilium users have been getting by fine with its export tools since 2017.

Second, solo or team. Most of this category is single-player. Outline is the exception built for organisations: fast search, SSO, granular permissions, at the price of running PostgreSQL and Redis and accepting a BSL license that is not fully open source.

Third, how structured your thinking is. Quick capture wants Memos (64 MB of RAM, a timeline of Markdown snippets). Networked thought wants Logseq or SiYuan and their bidirectional links. Long-form hierarchies want Trilium's tree.

Where to start

Joplin is the safe first pick: Markdown notes and to-dos, apps on every platform, a web clipper, and end-to-end encrypted sync through whatever you already run — a Joplin Server container, Nextcloud, or plain WebDAV. Its editor is less polished than rivals', which is the honest trade for its flexibility. Trilium suits the power user building one big knowledge base: a single Docker container (port 8080, one data volume), a steep learning curve, and more structural depth than anything else here. Outline is where I'd point a team leaving Confluence.

Why the star counts mislead here

AppFlowy (75,954 stars) and AFFiNE (71,881) lead the category, and both are genuinely good Notion replacements as desktop apps. The self-hosting story is the younger half of each project: AppFlowy's sync backend is newer than its client, AFFiNE wants 1 GB of RAM and its server deployment is still maturing. The stars measure enthusiasm for escaping Notion, not the ease of running the escape hatch. Check the server docs, not the readme badge, before committing your second brain to either.

Default for a first-timer: Joplin with encrypted sync over WebDAV. It is Easy difficulty, 256 MB, and the worst-case outcome is a folder of Markdown you can take anywhere — which is exactly the failure mode a notes system should have.

Curated picks

Easiest Notes & Knowledge Base to self-hostBest API Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Cross-Platform Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Docker Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Encrypted Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Free Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Lightweight Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Mobile App Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Multi-User Notes & Knowledge BaseBest No-Database Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Offline-First Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Plugins Notes & Knowledge BaseBest PostgreSQL Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Real-Time Notes & Knowledge BaseBest Single-User Notes & Knowledge BaseBest SSO Notes & Knowledge Base

Notes & Knowledge Base comparisons

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