TriliumNext Notes
Hierarchical personal knowledge base with powerful note-taking, rich text editing, and scripting capabilities.
TriliumNext Notes (a community fork of Trilium Notes) is a powerful, open-source personal knowledge base application focused on building large, hierarchical note collections. It supports rich text editing, markdown, code blocks with syntax highlighting, diagrams, relation maps, and advanced scripting via JavaScript.
Notes are organized in a tree structure, but each note can appear in multiple places through clones — a flexible approach that lets you organize information in interconnected ways. Trilium also features a powerful attribute system for tagging and templating notes, and a scripting API that enables custom automations.
For self-hosters, Trilium can be deployed as a web server and accessed from any browser. It syncs across multiple instances, supports end-to-end encryption for sensitive notes, and exports to standard formats. It is an ideal alternative to Notion or Obsidian for users who want complete data ownership and a deeply customizable note-taking system.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is TriliumNext Notes different from Notion?
TriliumNext Notes is a hierarchical, tree-based personal knowledge base released under AGPL-3.0, with the desktop client written in TypeScript on Electron. Notes can be nested arbitrarily deep, richly typed (text, code, mind maps, canvases, geo-maps), and extended with custom JavaScript scripts and CSS themes that run inside the app. It targets users building very large personal wikis rather than team workspaces.
Can multiple people collaborate on a TriliumNext knowledge base?
Out of the box, TriliumNext is a single-user app per database, but the optional sync server (also AGPL-3.0) lets you run a self-hosted instance that multiple clients can connect to. Each user has their own local database that syncs against the server, so it is more like Git-style convergence than Notion-style live multi-cursor editing on the same document.
How do I self-host TriliumNext?
The desktop app is a normal install from the Releases page, while the server edition runs on Linux via Docker (the official triliumnext/trilium image) or as a Node.js service. A nightly Docker tag is also published for users who want the latest features. The server stores its database on disk as a single SQLite file plus an application.ini, which is straightforward to back up.
What does TriliumNext do for data ownership and encryption?
TriliumNext is local-first: the canonical copy of your notes lives in a single-file SQLite database on your own machine, with no required cloud account. Notes can also be password-protected with per-note encryption, and the sync protocol can be configured to keep the server from seeing plaintext, giving you end-to-end control over sensitive content.
Repository details
Updated 8/12/2026, 1:00:47 PM
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