Joplin vs Trilium Notes

Last reviewed Aug 22, 2026 · 624 words

These two answer different questions. Joplin asks "how do I have my notes everywhere, privately?" — it's an offline-first Markdown app for every platform, with sync as a layer you can point at almost anything. Trilium asks "how do I organise ten thousand notes so they stay findable and connected?" — it's a knowledge-base engine wearing a note app's clothes. People bounce off each when they wanted the other, so start from which question is yours.

Joplin: portability as a first principle

Notes are Markdown, apps exist for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, and sync is pluggable: Nextcloud, WebDAV, S3, Dropbox, or the self-hosted Joplin Server. End-to-end encryption means the sync target never sees plaintext — you can sync through a commodity cloud without trusting it. The web clipper is mature, the plugin ecosystem is large, and export to plain Markdown keeps your exit route permanently open. Its trade-offs are equally clear: organisation is notebooks-and-tags (hierarchy exists, deep structure fights you), the editor is functional rather than delightful, and sync conflicts — while rare and handled — are a thing that exists, as with any multi-master design. For most people the sync server is genuinely optional: an existing Nextcloud already does the job.

Trilium: structure as a first principle

Trilium's tree is the product: notes nest to arbitrary depth, a note can live in multiple places at once (clones, not copies), and every note can carry typed attributes and relations you can query — "every book note where author = X and status = unread" is a saved search, not a dream. Add relation maps, day-journal notes, protected (encrypted) notes, and user scripting that can automate the base from inside, and you have something closer to a private wiki-database than a notes app. The costs: it's server-plus-clients (Docker container, desktop apps, web UI) with sync only between its own pieces, mobile is the weak flank — the web UI works, but there's no first-party app store presence to rival Joplin's — and it's essentially single-user by design. A household shares a Joplin server fine; a Trilium instance is one person's second brain. One history note: the original author archived Trilium in 2024 and the community continues it as the actively developed TriliumNext — which is the lineage our catalogue tracks.

The migration reality

Both import Evernote's ENEX format well, and Trilium imports Markdown trees, so entering either is easy. Leaving differs: Joplin's plain-Markdown export drops into any other Markdown tool losslessly; Trilium exports Markdown too, but attributes, relations, and clones — the reasons you chose it — have no destination format. The deeper you use Trilium as designed, the more the structure itself becomes the lock-in. That's not a flaw so much as the price of structure; know you're paying it.

Decision table

What I'd do

Default to Joplin: the multi-device workflow fits how most people actually take notes, and its portability means the decision is cheaply reversible. Switch to (or add) Trilium the day your notes stop being notes and become a corpus — when you're cross-referencing hundreds of interlinked entries at a desk, its structure repays the mobile compromise many times over. Running both — Joplin for capture, Trilium for the curated base — is less silly than it sounds and how several of us actually work.