SilverBullet

SilverBullet is a browser-based, programmable markdown knowledge base released under the MIT license, built with a TypeScript client, a Rust server, and an embedded Lua scripting runtime called Space Lua. Where Notion gives you a fixed block model, SilverBullet exposes a query language (SLIQ), page templates, custom commands, and widgets that you author yourself in Lua over your markdown files.

The server is a single Rust binary that serves a web UI to any modern browser, so you can run it on a homelab box, VPS, or a container. The official zefhemel/silverbullet image is the most common deploy target, and installation guides cover Docker, bare-metal Linux, and bare-metal macOS. Your content is stored as a folder of markdown files (a Space) on the host's filesystem, so backups are just tar of that directory.

You do. Notes are plain .md files in a directory you control, indexed by the server but never locked into a proprietary format. Because everything runs in your own browser against your own server, there is no third-party telemetry or cloud storage in the default install — making it well suited to private knowledge bases and personal wikis.

SilverBullet is positioned as a personal knowledge base, so it does not aim to replicate Notion's multi-user live cursors. It is single-writer per space by design; concurrent users would conflict on the same files. For shared documentation workflows you would run separate spaces or use SilverBullet alongside a wiki tool that supports multi-author editing.