10 ms·

Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

308 points by thunderbong 2y ago

gwelson 2y ago
This looks nice but nearly identical to Obsidian. How does it differ from Obsidian's features?
- alwayslikethis 2y ago
  It seems to be open source, which is a big plus compared to obsidian
  - kelsolaar 2y ago
    Why is it a big plus, genuine question? You do not need Obsidian to use your Markdown written content and are not vendor locked in as such.
    - adhamsalama 2y ago
      The same reason it is a plus for any other open source software. You can modify it and fork it if it's discontinued.
    - jraph 2y ago
      Open source / Free software comes with all the usual benefits: - you can fork and adapt to your needs - should the original authors stop developing it or take a direction you don't like but your started depending on it, someone can take over the development of a fork - you can study how it works - you can reuse some of the code to build an alternative product - you can contribute patches if the project accepts them - if you have to migrate, even if the format is specific, you can at least check how it works That thing being open source is a big plus, and Obsidian using a standard format is a big plus.
    - colordrops 2y ago
      That's like saying "you do not need oracle to use your bytes on disk". I may be mistaken but doesn't obsidian provide a ton of functionality on top of markdown?
      - veidr 2y ago
        No, just a little bit. Your docs remain 98% compatible with other Markdown editors. The functionality is mainly around a.) better UI for editing Markdown, b.) plugin ecosystem (optional), c.) paid sync (optional, and achievable otherwise e.g. SyncThing, your own rsync script, etc), and d.) optional (and very bad) "publish-as-a-website" feature.
        Tomte 2y ago
        If you only use standard Markdown. But the advocacy often focuses on DataView and a thousand other features that are simply not available without Obsidian.
        veidr 2y ago
        True, but it seems very obvious that if you add a bunch of plugin dependencies (or even one), you are deliberately choosing to forego "standard" Markdown (there's actually no such thing, but roughly speaking). That's why they're plugins. I do use the Excalidraw plugin, but nothing much else, and that is why I have an easy time making my Obsidian notes web-accessible (currently, via SilverBullet, but any tool that makes markdown web-editable will work — as long as you don't go nuts with plugins, that is). Having said that, I think the reason Obsidian "failed" — to the extent that Notion and some others have massively more adoption amongst organizations larger than me and my gray beard – is that they failed to combine their (super awesome) files-and-folders approach with a web editable solution. They thought - obviously wrongly, in hindsight — that web accessible would be enough. It's not. It's the 10%, Notion etc cover the 90% (but with fairly bad tradeoffs, they have export and it works, but you can't easily interop with your data where it lives). But I've had such an easy time making my Obsidian web-editable that I suspect in a few minutes (or months) Obsidian will be like heyyyyy... edit yo vault via web yo — and for free! and then we will all be like woo Obsidian boo Notion!! But we'll see
  - brunoqc 2y ago
    Not fully open source. It seems you need to pay to get the privilege to "Export PDF/Image with watermark". https://b3log.org/siyuan/en/pricing.html https://b3log.org/siyuan/en/pricing.html
    - elashri 2y ago
      It doesn't have to be free everything to qualify for open source. The source and licence are available. You can actually bypass payment if you want to do that as the source ia there.
      - brunoqc 2y ago
        Right but it's a bit unusual. I was expecting the "pro" features to be in a separate repo or something. I don't think I would even bother to update a local patch on every releases. I'll just use another foss app without silly "pro" features.
    - oefrha 2y ago
      The code is indeed entirely AGPL, I looked at license headers in the specific files implementing paid features. I wonder if it’s an oversight. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514304 for details.
- skaragianis 2y ago
  The file format isn't markdown, instead a proprietary format in JSON
  - adhamsalama 2y ago
    Is it not open source?
    - skaragianis 2y ago
      It locks your efforts to the vendor/project which is different to Obsidian
      - adhamsalama 2y ago
        It is still open source, not proprietary, and you can export files to Markdown anyway.
  - Pooge 2y ago
    I'm not an Obsidian user, but I agree with their "file over app" philosophy.[1] If SiYuan stops being developed, are the files still readable/parse-able? [1]: https://stephango.com/file-over-app https://stephango.com/file-over-app
    - pg999w 2y ago
      Yes, if SiYuan stops being developed, you can still get your notes exported as markdown files. Since SiYuan is open-source, you can also use the internal code to parse the JSON format notes.
    - adhamsalama 2y ago
      It's open source, so yes, and you can export files to Markdown anyway.
    - princevegeta89 2y ago
      Yes, your existing installations on your devices, whatever they are, can read your data as long as you use the correct Repo keys that are used to encrypt stuff. In the worst case, you can deploy the docker instance with older images to keep going on.
- adhamsalama 2y ago
  Isn't Obsidian limited to markdown files? This uses a different format so it can add more features like databases.
  - rlupi 2y ago
    No, Obsidian is quite more powerful. Obsidian has built-in support for markdown, images, PDFs, canvas (via JSON Canvas which they developed and open sourced https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas), and others. For databases, you can add fields/properties both in the markdown frontmatter or in the text and query it via very popular plugins: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview There are tons of community plugins that support all kind of stuff: tasks, kanban, LLM/Copilot, graph analysis of links, charts. It can also be extended in JS, both writing your own plugins or via a few plugins that allow limited JS support. --- Obsidian is actually quite good as a NoCode prototyping platform for personal apps :-) E.g. CRUD: - Use templates, via Templater: to define the content of your data - Use links and tags to define relations and connections - Use dataview or graphs for views - There are even plugins to define buttons and the actions they perform, if you need commands
- tcper 2y ago
  Obsidian sync feature is paid service, this project you can setup your own service
  - hxii 2y ago
    There are free alternatives, e.g https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync
  - shim__ 2y ago
    You can just sync Obsidian with nextcloud, Dropbox or whatever
  - number6 2y ago
    Also you need a license for anything work related. Since I code in my work time and my free time I can't separate this clearly. To be compliant I would need a license
  - SamPatt 2y ago
    I use Syncthing with Obsidian. Free and open source.
  - echelon 2y ago
    Obsidian has a free git plugin.
- TnS-hun 2y ago
  Its editor is fully WYSIWYG, so it does not switch to raw Markdown when you want to modify something.
cyberax 2y ago
Notion.so, but free. Nice!
- k_bx 2y ago
  I can't find how their multi-user collaboration looks like. Do they even have one?
  - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
    Apparently it's on their roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/siyuan-note/projects/1/views/1 https://github.com/orgs/siyuan-note/projects/1/views/1
adhamsalama 2y ago
I absolutely love this program and recommended it multiple times on HN.
eddywebs 2y ago
Not bad ! Is there way to migrate existing evernote notebooks/notes to this ?
Kamillaova 2y ago
[dead]
la_fayette 2y ago
I am using markdown files in a private GitHub repo for personal knowledge management. For me this works just fine... Is there any feature you think I might miss from tools like these?
- adhamsalama 2y ago
  Graph view, backlinks and databases.
  - mxuribe 2y ago
    I see the value in backlinks (I assume you mean backlinks between said markdown files, right?), and graphview might come in handy once in a while...but am not seeing the value brought by databases here? Unless the db becomes part of a top/management layer for said files, which adds other things like maybe possibly faster search or easier query of content (that is, easier than find/grep, etc.)? Not knocking if DBs can be used, with all apologies, am genuinely curious how DBs could help here? (Context is that if this person is using simple markdown files in folders/repos, then they probably don't need/want more than that and typical file management tools)
    - rmnclmnt 2y ago
      When people mean DBs in these note taking tools, they are usually referring to the Notion like databases: a lightweight Airtable-like table allowing a few data manipulations and analysis. Basically a CSV file with a nice UI on top if you will
      - mxuribe 2y ago
        Ah-ah, Ok, i can see that something like that could help. Thanks for the clarification!
- pglevy 2y ago
  This is what I do with my Obsidian repo. Feels like best of both worlds to me. I have my files in open format in my repo. And I use Obsidian primarily for the editing experience. If I want to quickly capture a thought on my phone, I use the GitHub app to create an issue in that repo and process it later.
praptak 2y ago
It seems AGPL but also has a paid tier which makes me wonder what their business model is. Is it only the hassle of self hosting that stops potential customers from having the paid features for free?
- SuperShibe 2y ago
  Welp it appears from what I could find on their website that the Pro tier is needed to use all features even for selfhosted instances. Am I missing something here or couldn’t people just fork this and pull off a vaultwarden?
- phforms 2y ago
  I believe convenience and actually wanting to give something back to the creators would have many people pay for pro features, since it’s actually “Pay once, use for life”, which is a rare and welcome sight in this subscription-flooded world. And it still leaves people with low income the option to (legally?) circumvent payment. Not sure how sustainable this is as a business model, but I think it’s pretty nice compared to being forced into continuous payment.
mano78 2y ago
I’ve been self-hosting it for three months now, and I am happy. I came from Joplin; I lost the offline access, but it’s much more “expressive” and nice, so to speak. I don’t miss any other feature, even in the pro version. Doesn’t depend on other docker containers, I just used authelia for auth, and while it uses its own file format I backup the data volume and it’s possible to export manually in simple markdown. The web UI is responsive for mobile use and yes, I am happy. Fits my case better than the others.
- princevegeta89 2y ago
  Same here. I am self-hosting it on the web on my VPS instance so I can access it from any device and anywhere in the world. And then, I use a self-hosted S3 instance to sync all my installations on devices, including OSX and Android/iPhone. Sync has worked wonderfully well. I felt with the number of features it has, this program simply knocks out Obsidian in comparison. I would say it is more of a Notion equivalent. I am currently working on a small self-hosted companion for Siyuan that lets users share notes publicly.
r3verse 2y ago
I tried to give it a shot a few months back, but the lack of vim bindings were a blocker for me, and seems like it isn't planned yet. Hope to try it sometime in the future.
coldblues 2y ago
I keep seeing these note-taking tools pop up again and again. I am heavily invested into Logseq already and the new database version is coming out soon. Unless these tools provide import and export utilities to convert your notes between the most popular applications like Logseq and Obsidian, only new users will use them and people with very few notes who can put in the time to move.
- janwillemb 2y ago
  Creating a note taking, personal productivity app is an elaborate but common procrastination technique for developers.
  - K0balt 2y ago
    I feel exposed lol
  - sbt567 2y ago
    After forcing myself to learn and adapt to some note-taking system, I too didn't find it useful for me yet. But i keep pushing myself through because I still believe that there must be some value that I could take from taking notes. Just I didn't find a system that suits me well...? One thing that i find the real benefit/value from all this learn and adapt is "writing as a way to think" (is it by feynmann?). When doing complicated work, writing really help to ease your cognitive load and help you find the gaps in your line of thought. But, I couldn't find a suitable method when dealing with general/every day note-taking. I still have that "graveyard for thought" problem when writing general notes
  - randomcatuser 2y ago
    right up there with creating your own personal website
    - diggan 2y ago
      At least you didn't create a new language for your Personal Home Page and even later rewrote it to be some sort of general hypertext processor.
ahmedfromtunis 2y ago
What I miss from this type of apps, including notion, is the ability to "inherit" properties from databases. I would like, for example, to create a superdb with basic task properties (title, deadline) and then create subdatabases that add more project-specific properties. This, I'll be able to create a single view with all my tasks for the day in a single place, but also add all the info I need for individual tasks. Unfortunately, for some reason, nobody (that I know of) built something like this into their apps.
- Dyac 2y ago
  I think Tana can do this with the "supertags" feature. https://tana.inc/docs/supertags https://tana.inc/docs/supertags
- neodymiumphish 2y ago
  Tana has had this for a long time with super tags, and Logseq has it (at least in the test builds of their DB version; I can’t speak to the traditional MD-based version) in their sub-tagging functionality. I agree that it would be great across the board, though!
- int0x29 2y ago
  Trilium has attribute inheritance and is scriptable. The default task implementation uses templates though, not inheritance. So you would need to script it.
- axelthegerman 2y ago
  It sounds like you're looking for a project/task management tool rather than a knowledge base? Most complex tools have task types, some are customizable, some not - e.g. Jira would do what you describe?
sourraspberry 2y ago
I've been using this for a couple of years on my home-server. It's an Obsidian knock-off. It's pretty janky and the documentation is lacking. It's open-source which is nice... But the company behind it is ??? I don't know. They are Chinese but I couldn't find much about them. I use it because I can self-host it, it has most of the features Obsidian has, and I can use it in a web-browser from anywhere - which is the biggest feature for me that Obsidian lacks.
- rukshn 2y ago
  I also installed it on my computer to give it a try, but then as you mentioned I could not find who are behind it other than it's based in China. So decided to just keep with Obsidian
  - oefrha 2y ago
    Took me like a minute to find out who are behind it. Committers on GitHub project point to two profiles: - https://github.com/88250 https://github.com/88250 - https://github.com/Vanessa219 https://github.com/Vanessa219 The first profile has a README (zh-CN, easily translated) introducing themselves as a married couple as well as their career trajectory leading to their current company. Googling the company name leads me to https://www.tianyancha.com/company/3153162387 https://www.tianyancha.com/company/3153162387 showing the company’s legal structure, the legal names of the couple, their address, etc. (again, zh-CN but easily translated). Looks like I can view their financial reports too if I have a subscription. The profiles also link to their social media accounts (on their own dev-focused community). What more is there to know? At least it’s more than the average ShowHN asking for your email and sometimes credit card. I don’t understand these “couldn’t find much about them” claims.
    - bflesch 2y ago
      The link you posted gives me "According to relevant legal regulations, access is temporarily not supported in your current location." and "If your device or the Wi-Fi environment you are in is using a VPN service, please disable it and try again." I'm not using any VPN. Normal internet from Germany
oefrha 2y ago
The licensing is kind of strange. Self-hosted syncing is supposedly a paid feature, and there are indeed license checks in the code, but unlike your typical open core product with a separately licensed ee/ directory, this one including license checking code is entirely under AGPL, and FAQ specifically stresses “SiYuan is completely open source”. As such one can patch out the license check (literally a one line change if I’m not mistaken, I only scanned the code) and still completely license-compliant, and one can even distribute binaries of the patched out version, though that would be a major jerk move. So, is that intended? Only selling convenience of prebuilt images?
- jraph 2y ago
  My company does exactly this intentionally for everything we sell at our extension store. Everything under LGPL, license checks that you could bypass with not much effort. It allows selling actually free software and can work well if you do this well.
  - oefrha 2y ago
    Yeah I know this is a fairly well-trodden model recommended by FSF (okay, maybe I shouldn’t have called it kinda strange). I’m not confident it works out in most cases, though. So I’m wondering if it’s intentional in this case.
    - jraph 2y ago
      > I know this is a fairly well-trodden model Actually, if you have other examples of this happening in the wild, I'd be quite interested. The other widespread example I have in mind (which seems to work well) is WordPress extensions with premium features, but I've not encountered this too often neither. Edit: thanks all for your examples :-)
      - aldonius 2y ago
        The Ardour DAW is kinda like this. Downloads of prebuilt images through the website are paid, but you can download and build yourself from source. (Most Linux users probably have free access via distro package manager anyway.)
ghgr 2y ago
I can also recommend Trilium Notes [1], which I have been happily using for years. It's currently in "maintenance mode", which I personally see as a feature (no risk of bloatware). Self-hosted, great webapp, optional native clients and works offline. https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium
- McSido 2y ago
  As another fan of Trilium Notes for years, I just want to add that there is now also an active community fork continuing the work on the tool. https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes
sunshine-o 2y ago
Looks cool, but as I have been on this knowledge management / productivity journey like everybody. Here are my findings: If you are reasonably comfortable with computers / Unix. - You need to first rely on a directory structures, filenames, plaintext, lists and maybe markdown. Stick with a "File over app", Unix approach. - Try to sort things with universal concepts: locations, things, people, events, metrics, howtos. A bit like the 5Ws approach. - Leverage good Unix tools: unix commands, make/justfiles, (rip)grep, git, fzf, etc. - Do not try to solve the problem through the Web. Because you will end up trying to solve web problems instead of basic knowledge management and productivity issues. - The smartphone/touchscreen is a major problem, but as with the Web do not try to solve it. Use your file manager or even fzf in termux can be adapted to be reasonably usable on a touchscreen. Something I have been wondering about is the "backlink" feature. It would be cool to link items/notes together through references. What I would be looking for is a Unix tools that can scan my text files for references to other files in the hierarchy.
- echelon 2y ago
  Obsidian lets you live on top of the filesystem structure using markdown files, and it gives you links, tags, topic clouds, and more. If you use it with reasonable conventions, you can compile and deploy a web version with ghost or zola or something automatically run in CI. It's backed up, synced, and comes with desktop and mobile apps. It has vim key bindings and git plugins. It's a pretty sweet system that works nicely with Unix, and it adapts to multiple navigational and organizational paradigms. I've tried a lot of things, and nothing has ever come close to Obsidian.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  I've been experimenting with Flatnotes (https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes) for a while and really like the design. No notebooks or even folders, just a single directory with markdown files and decent search & tagging. It feels a lot like what happened to email when we gave up all the up-front structuring with deep hierarchies and just said index it and we'll find it when we need to. The project is just "good enough" for what I need, and aside from tiny bugs whenever I find a gap I can either work around it or live without. Constraints are a powerful motivator for both creativity and getting stuff done.
Beijinger 2y ago
I use folders for my data. a-z. This is the basic directory structure. b->books->management for example. Does not solve the fundamental problem of a file system that you also could file this under m->management->books I use recoll to index and find things. https://www.recoll.org/ https://www.recoll.org/ And yes, I have a 20 TB HDD. Quite a bit of data and media. If someone knows how to make an encrypte mirror of my drive with https://www.opendrive.com/ https://www.opendrive.com/ I would be interested. No incremental backups, if possible I would like to access it like a drive. For my notes I just use light speed fast nvpy with simplenote.com to synchronized with several computes. https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy My notes don't follow the a-z approach but have regular headlines. I use nvpy as a mixture between a to do list and a knowledge database. For to do I have recently thought of using paper cards for kanban, but I am not sure. Suggestions welcome.
- ninalanyon 2y ago
  > Does not solve the fundamental problem of a file system that you also could file this under m->management->books You can use symbolic links to connect directories and file to multiple parents.
  - Beijinger 2y ago
    I know. But this is asking and would get messy very fast. And what if an item has 10 attributes? John Doe has Birthday on December 12th would have at least 5 already.
    - ninalanyon 2y ago
      I've been thinking about writing a FUSE filesystem for precisely this sort of thing with regard to my collection of photographs.
dmje 2y ago
Obsidian. That is all.
sigmonsays 2y ago
I can second the recommendations i've read here. My approach to knowledge management has been super simple. Everything is in git, in a big directory structure i've organically grown over time. I have so many notes.. 7 to 8 thousands of them. Keeping it in git has allowed me flexibility to use it how i see fit. Sometimes i'm in emacs/nevom. Most the time i'm in sublime text because I have workspaces per project/concept. Finally, for mobile, I push them all to my own gitea instance. I rarely need access to my notes on mobile but it's been something i've been thinking about more. If anyone has any recommendations on how to read a directory of text files on android, i'm all ears.
- embeng4096 2y ago
  When I was on Android, I used Markor for text editing and Termux for command line git. For iOS, I now use Working Copy for git commit/push/pull, and Obsidian to edit text, and I like Obsidian's interface a lot for making quick Markdown edits. I believe Obsidian has an Android version as well, but I have not used it. I'm not sure if there is an Android version for Working Copy but there may be similar GUI git apps.
kodemongos 2y ago
[dead]
sroerick 2y ago
org-roam is pretty good. I came from Obsidian and wanted to build out some extra personal features for Bible notes. I made the switch to org-roam because i wanted to use elisp to develop instead of JS obsidian plugins. It took me a while to get over the learning curve but I’m very happy with it
- sudhirkhanger 2y ago
  The number of apps that offer note-taking functionality is exploding. It solidifies Emacs' community's point of view that all these custom tailored solutions become a limiting factor for many. But to learn Emacs and Elisp is not trivial. * Any particular resources you followed to learn Elisp. * What sort of time investment did it require for you to build your own system based out of Emacs? * How are you syncing your files?
syngrog66 2y ago
notes.txt add choice of encryption, vcs, backup. solved for many decades
cyp0633 2y ago
Have been hosting this with Docker for ~2years. It's quite stable now except from some expected minor bugs on firefox (because they "don't have time to maintain").
nxobject 2y ago
I'm a fan of tables with feature parity with Notion! As much as everyone says "we should have one step above Excel somehow", there aren't too many apps that have put a lot of thought into that.
xiaodai 2y ago
can't bring myself to trust anything about privacy from a software with a weird-ass Chinese name.
gbraad 2y ago
Do not rely on the tooling; forced structure might work for some, but it never worked for me. I eventually settled on markdown and structure this myself. As sunshine-o also said, tooling around this can help to retrieve information, but it is not essential if you organize. but this is different for everybody. I eventually started to use obsidian, but also nextcloud notes, quillpad and webdav to get access to my notes. I am happy, but it took a long time to get to something that worked. this tool looks 'complicated'... as it needs an infrastructure to operate.
Mazzen 2y ago
A wiki. Am I mistaken or is the term just not in trend any more?
sudhirkhanger 2y ago
What is the good solution to sync text files? I haven't found a good solution that is open source and self-hosted. Ideally, eventually, my setup should give me real time syncing the same level as multiple people editing the same file. But that is a stretch goal. I am currently using Syncthing but unfortunately it's client app has been removed from Google Play [1]. I am managing with Syncthing-Fork. [1] https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064 https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064
athinggoingon 2y ago
I use org-mode for note taking and personal knowledge base. In my notes.org file, I collect all kind of snippets, knowledge, ideas, how-tos, and such stuff. Outlines make it possible to hide parts of the text in the buffer. A headline starts with one or more stars. A heading has one star, a sub-heading two, etc. Use the linking feature in ordmode to link items/notes together through references. Stick with a "File over app", Unix approach. You need to first rely on a directory structures, filenames, plaintext, lists and orgmode. Leverage Unix tools: unix commands, (rip)grep, git, fzf, etc.
lakomen 2y ago
Personal Knowledge Management. I expected something different. Let's say I'm researching how to get into IRL streaming right now. So I'd make a topic, "IRL Streaming". In there I'd like to put links to videos, links to documents/documentation/tutorials/guides/howtos. I'd also like to take notes. And in the end I would've learned this topic. Maybe I'd create a sub-topic in there, to research "SRT and SLS vs RTMP". People claim it's like a Obsidian clone. Looking at the Obisidan website it says it's a tool that helps you write a book. This however calls itself PKM (short). I guess they're related, from looking at the screenshots, but not really what I'm looking for, I think. I don't want to do what the top comment suggests, folders with files. No I want a web app that I can access from anywhere and where I can dump links and notes to and about resources categorized by topic. Reading the readme of siyuan-note it does seem to be able to do this. Only 1 question, does it support multiple users? So I can host it for my town's community.

308 points by thunderbong 2y ago

gwelson 2y ago

This looks nice but nearly identical to Obsidian. How does it differ from Obsidian's features?

alwayslikethis 2y ago
It seems to be open source, which is a big plus compared to obsidian
- kelsolaar 2y ago
  Why is it a big plus, genuine question? You do not need Obsidian to use your Markdown written content and are not vendor locked in as such.
  - adhamsalama 2y ago
    The same reason it is a plus for any other open source software. You can modify it and fork it if it's discontinued.
  - jraph 2y ago
    Open source / Free software comes with all the usual benefits: - you can fork and adapt to your needs - should the original authors stop developing it or take a direction you don't like but your started depending on it, someone can take over the development of a fork - you can study how it works - you can reuse some of the code to build an alternative product - you can contribute patches if the project accepts them - if you have to migrate, even if the format is specific, you can at least check how it works That thing being open source is a big plus, and Obsidian using a standard format is a big plus.
  - colordrops 2y ago
    That's like saying "you do not need oracle to use your bytes on disk". I may be mistaken but doesn't obsidian provide a ton of functionality on top of markdown?
    - veidr 2y ago
      No, just a little bit. Your docs remain 98% compatible with other Markdown editors. The functionality is mainly around a.) better UI for editing Markdown, b.) plugin ecosystem (optional), c.) paid sync (optional, and achievable otherwise e.g. SyncThing, your own rsync script, etc), and d.) optional (and very bad) "publish-as-a-website" feature.
      - Tomte 2y ago
        If you only use standard Markdown. But the advocacy often focuses on DataView and a thousand other features that are simply not available without Obsidian.
        veidr 2y ago
        True, but it seems very obvious that if you add a bunch of plugin dependencies (or even one), you are deliberately choosing to forego "standard" Markdown (there's actually no such thing, but roughly speaking). That's why they're plugins. I do use the Excalidraw plugin, but nothing much else, and that is why I have an easy time making my Obsidian notes web-accessible (currently, via SilverBullet, but any tool that makes markdown web-editable will work — as long as you don't go nuts with plugins, that is). Having said that, I think the reason Obsidian "failed" — to the extent that Notion and some others have massively more adoption amongst organizations larger than me and my gray beard – is that they failed to combine their (super awesome) files-and-folders approach with a web editable solution. They thought - obviously wrongly, in hindsight — that web accessible would be enough. It's not. It's the 10%, Notion etc cover the 90% (but with fairly bad tradeoffs, they have export and it works, but you can't easily interop with your data where it lives). But I've had such an easy time making my Obsidian web-editable that I suspect in a few minutes (or months) Obsidian will be like heyyyyy... edit yo vault via web yo — and for free! and then we will all be like woo Obsidian boo Notion!! But we'll see
- brunoqc 2y ago
  Not fully open source. It seems you need to pay to get the privilege to "Export PDF/Image with watermark". https://b3log.org/siyuan/en/pricing.html https://b3log.org/siyuan/en/pricing.html
  - elashri 2y ago
    It doesn't have to be free everything to qualify for open source. The source and licence are available. You can actually bypass payment if you want to do that as the source ia there.
    - brunoqc 2y ago
      Right but it's a bit unusual. I was expecting the "pro" features to be in a separate repo or something. I don't think I would even bother to update a local patch on every releases. I'll just use another foss app without silly "pro" features.
  - oefrha 2y ago
    The code is indeed entirely AGPL, I looked at license headers in the specific files implementing paid features. I wonder if it’s an oversight. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514304 for details.
skaragianis 2y ago
The file format isn't markdown, instead a proprietary format in JSON
- adhamsalama 2y ago
  Is it not open source?
  - skaragianis 2y ago
    It locks your efforts to the vendor/project which is different to Obsidian
    - adhamsalama 2y ago
      It is still open source, not proprietary, and you can export files to Markdown anyway.
- Pooge 2y ago
  I'm not an Obsidian user, but I agree with their "file over app" philosophy.[1] If SiYuan stops being developed, are the files still readable/parse-able? [1]: https://stephango.com/file-over-app https://stephango.com/file-over-app
  - pg999w 2y ago
    Yes, if SiYuan stops being developed, you can still get your notes exported as markdown files. Since SiYuan is open-source, you can also use the internal code to parse the JSON format notes.
  - adhamsalama 2y ago
    It's open source, so yes, and you can export files to Markdown anyway.
  - princevegeta89 2y ago
    Yes, your existing installations on your devices, whatever they are, can read your data as long as you use the correct Repo keys that are used to encrypt stuff. In the worst case, you can deploy the docker instance with older images to keep going on.
adhamsalama 2y ago
Isn't Obsidian limited to markdown files? This uses a different format so it can add more features like databases.
- rlupi 2y ago
  No, Obsidian is quite more powerful. Obsidian has built-in support for markdown, images, PDFs, canvas (via JSON Canvas which they developed and open sourced https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas), and others. For databases, you can add fields/properties both in the markdown frontmatter or in the text and query it via very popular plugins: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview There are tons of community plugins that support all kind of stuff: tasks, kanban, LLM/Copilot, graph analysis of links, charts. It can also be extended in JS, both writing your own plugins or via a few plugins that allow limited JS support. --- Obsidian is actually quite good as a NoCode prototyping platform for personal apps :-) E.g. CRUD: - Use templates, via Templater: to define the content of your data - Use links and tags to define relations and connections - Use dataview or graphs for views - There are even plugins to define buttons and the actions they perform, if you need commands
tcper 2y ago
Obsidian sync feature is paid service, this project you can setup your own service
- hxii 2y ago
  There are free alternatives, e.g https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync
- shim__ 2y ago
  You can just sync Obsidian with nextcloud, Dropbox or whatever
- number6 2y ago
  Also you need a license for anything work related. Since I code in my work time and my free time I can't separate this clearly. To be compliant I would need a license
- SamPatt 2y ago
  I use Syncthing with Obsidian. Free and open source.
- echelon 2y ago
  Obsidian has a free git plugin.
TnS-hun 2y ago
Its editor is fully WYSIWYG, so it does not switch to raw Markdown when you want to modify something.

cyberax 2y ago

Notion.so, but free. Nice!

k_bx 2y ago
I can't find how their multi-user collaboration looks like. Do they even have one?
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
  Apparently it's on their roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/siyuan-note/projects/1/views/1 https://github.com/orgs/siyuan-note/projects/1/views/1

adhamsalama 2y ago

I absolutely love this program and recommended it multiple times on HN.

eddywebs 2y ago

Not bad ! Is there way to migrate existing evernote notebooks/notes to this ?

Kamillaova 2y ago

[dead]

la_fayette 2y ago

I am using markdown files in a private GitHub repo for personal knowledge management. For me this works just fine... Is there any feature you think I might miss from tools like these?

adhamsalama 2y ago
Graph view, backlinks and databases.
- mxuribe 2y ago
  I see the value in backlinks (I assume you mean backlinks between said markdown files, right?), and graphview might come in handy once in a while...but am not seeing the value brought by databases here? Unless the db becomes part of a top/management layer for said files, which adds other things like maybe possibly faster search or easier query of content (that is, easier than find/grep, etc.)? Not knocking if DBs can be used, with all apologies, am genuinely curious how DBs could help here? (Context is that if this person is using simple markdown files in folders/repos, then they probably don't need/want more than that and typical file management tools)
  - rmnclmnt 2y ago
    When people mean DBs in these note taking tools, they are usually referring to the Notion like databases: a lightweight Airtable-like table allowing a few data manipulations and analysis. Basically a CSV file with a nice UI on top if you will
    - mxuribe 2y ago
      Ah-ah, Ok, i can see that something like that could help. Thanks for the clarification!
pglevy 2y ago
This is what I do with my Obsidian repo. Feels like best of both worlds to me. I have my files in open format in my repo. And I use Obsidian primarily for the editing experience. If I want to quickly capture a thought on my phone, I use the GitHub app to create an issue in that repo and process it later.

praptak 2y ago

It seems AGPL but also has a paid tier which makes me wonder what their business model is. Is it only the hassle of self hosting that stops potential customers from having the paid features for free?

SuperShibe 2y ago
Welp it appears from what I could find on their website that the Pro tier is needed to use all features even for selfhosted instances. Am I missing something here or couldn’t people just fork this and pull off a vaultwarden?
phforms 2y ago
I believe convenience and actually wanting to give something back to the creators would have many people pay for pro features, since it’s actually “Pay once, use for life”, which is a rare and welcome sight in this subscription-flooded world. And it still leaves people with low income the option to (legally?) circumvent payment. Not sure how sustainable this is as a business model, but I think it’s pretty nice compared to being forced into continuous payment.

mano78 2y ago

I’ve been self-hosting it for three months now, and I am happy. I came from Joplin; I lost the offline access, but it’s much more “expressive” and nice, so to speak. I don’t miss any other feature, even in the pro version. Doesn’t depend on other docker containers, I just used authelia for auth, and while it uses its own file format I backup the data volume and it’s possible to export manually in simple markdown. The web UI is responsive for mobile use and yes, I am happy. Fits my case better than the others.

princevegeta89 2y ago
Same here. I am self-hosting it on the web on my VPS instance so I can access it from any device and anywhere in the world. And then, I use a self-hosted S3 instance to sync all my installations on devices, including OSX and Android/iPhone. Sync has worked wonderfully well. I felt with the number of features it has, this program simply knocks out Obsidian in comparison. I would say it is more of a Notion equivalent. I am currently working on a small self-hosted companion for Siyuan that lets users share notes publicly.

r3verse 2y ago

I tried to give it a shot a few months back, but the lack of vim bindings were a blocker for me, and seems like it isn't planned yet. Hope to try it sometime in the future.

coldblues 2y ago

I keep seeing these note-taking tools pop up again and again. I am heavily invested into Logseq already and the new database version is coming out soon. Unless these tools provide import and export utilities to convert your notes between the most popular applications like Logseq and Obsidian, only new users will use them and people with very few notes who can put in the time to move.

janwillemb 2y ago
Creating a note taking, personal productivity app is an elaborate but common procrastination technique for developers.
- K0balt 2y ago
  I feel exposed lol
- sbt567 2y ago
  After forcing myself to learn and adapt to some note-taking system, I too didn't find it useful for me yet. But i keep pushing myself through because I still believe that there must be some value that I could take from taking notes. Just I didn't find a system that suits me well...? One thing that i find the real benefit/value from all this learn and adapt is "writing as a way to think" (is it by feynmann?). When doing complicated work, writing really help to ease your cognitive load and help you find the gaps in your line of thought. But, I couldn't find a suitable method when dealing with general/every day note-taking. I still have that "graveyard for thought" problem when writing general notes
- randomcatuser 2y ago
  right up there with creating your own personal website
  - diggan 2y ago
    At least you didn't create a new language for your Personal Home Page and even later rewrote it to be some sort of general hypertext processor.

ahmedfromtunis 2y ago

What I miss from this type of apps, including notion, is the ability to "inherit" properties from databases. I would like, for example, to create a superdb with basic task properties (title, deadline) and then create subdatabases that add more project-specific properties. This, I'll be able to create a single view with all my tasks for the day in a single place, but also add all the info I need for individual tasks. Unfortunately, for some reason, nobody (that I know of) built something like this into their apps.

Dyac 2y ago
I think Tana can do this with the "supertags" feature. https://tana.inc/docs/supertags https://tana.inc/docs/supertags
neodymiumphish 2y ago
Tana has had this for a long time with super tags, and Logseq has it (at least in the test builds of their DB version; I can’t speak to the traditional MD-based version) in their sub-tagging functionality. I agree that it would be great across the board, though!
int0x29 2y ago
Trilium has attribute inheritance and is scriptable. The default task implementation uses templates though, not inheritance. So you would need to script it.
axelthegerman 2y ago
It sounds like you're looking for a project/task management tool rather than a knowledge base? Most complex tools have task types, some are customizable, some not - e.g. Jira would do what you describe?

sourraspberry 2y ago

I've been using this for a couple of years on my home-server. It's an Obsidian knock-off. It's pretty janky and the documentation is lacking. It's open-source which is nice... But the company behind it is ??? I don't know. They are Chinese but I couldn't find much about them. I use it because I can self-host it, it has most of the features Obsidian has, and I can use it in a web-browser from anywhere - which is the biggest feature for me that Obsidian lacks.

rukshn 2y ago
I also installed it on my computer to give it a try, but then as you mentioned I could not find who are behind it other than it's based in China. So decided to just keep with Obsidian
- oefrha 2y ago
  Took me like a minute to find out who are behind it. Committers on GitHub project point to two profiles: - https://github.com/88250 https://github.com/88250 - https://github.com/Vanessa219 https://github.com/Vanessa219 The first profile has a README (zh-CN, easily translated) introducing themselves as a married couple as well as their career trajectory leading to their current company. Googling the company name leads me to https://www.tianyancha.com/company/3153162387 https://www.tianyancha.com/company/3153162387 showing the company’s legal structure, the legal names of the couple, their address, etc. (again, zh-CN but easily translated). Looks like I can view their financial reports too if I have a subscription. The profiles also link to their social media accounts (on their own dev-focused community). What more is there to know? At least it’s more than the average ShowHN asking for your email and sometimes credit card. I don’t understand these “couldn’t find much about them” claims.
  - bflesch 2y ago
    The link you posted gives me "According to relevant legal regulations, access is temporarily not supported in your current location." and "If your device or the Wi-Fi environment you are in is using a VPN service, please disable it and try again." I'm not using any VPN. Normal internet from Germany

oefrha 2y ago

The licensing is kind of strange. Self-hosted syncing is supposedly a paid feature, and there are indeed license checks in the code, but unlike your typical open core product with a separately licensed ee/ directory, this one including license checking code is entirely under AGPL, and FAQ specifically stresses “SiYuan is completely open source”. As such one can patch out the license check (literally a one line change if I’m not mistaken, I only scanned the code) and still completely license-compliant, and one can even distribute binaries of the patched out version, though that would be a major jerk move. So, is that intended? Only selling convenience of prebuilt images?

jraph 2y ago
My company does exactly this intentionally for everything we sell at our extension store. Everything under LGPL, license checks that you could bypass with not much effort. It allows selling actually free software and can work well if you do this well.
- oefrha 2y ago
  Yeah I know this is a fairly well-trodden model recommended by FSF (okay, maybe I shouldn’t have called it kinda strange). I’m not confident it works out in most cases, though. So I’m wondering if it’s intentional in this case.
  - jraph 2y ago
    > I know this is a fairly well-trodden model Actually, if you have other examples of this happening in the wild, I'd be quite interested. The other widespread example I have in mind (which seems to work well) is WordPress extensions with premium features, but I've not encountered this too often neither. Edit: thanks all for your examples :-)
    - aldonius 2y ago
      The Ardour DAW is kinda like this. Downloads of prebuilt images through the website are paid, but you can download and build yourself from source. (Most Linux users probably have free access via distro package manager anyway.)

ghgr 2y ago

I can also recommend Trilium Notes [1], which I have been happily using for years. It's currently in "maintenance mode", which I personally see as a feature (no risk of bloatware). Self-hosted, great webapp, optional native clients and works offline. https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium

McSido 2y ago
As another fan of Trilium Notes for years, I just want to add that there is now also an active community fork continuing the work on the tool. https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes

sunshine-o 2y ago

Looks cool, but as I have been on this knowledge management / productivity journey like everybody. Here are my findings: If you are reasonably comfortable with computers / Unix. - You need to first rely on a directory structures, filenames, plaintext, lists and maybe markdown. Stick with a "File over app", Unix approach. - Try to sort things with universal concepts: locations, things, people, events, metrics, howtos. A bit like the 5Ws approach. - Leverage good Unix tools: unix commands, make/justfiles, (rip)grep, git, fzf, etc. - Do not try to solve the problem through the Web. Because you will end up trying to solve web problems instead of basic knowledge management and productivity issues. - The smartphone/touchscreen is a major problem, but as with the Web do not try to solve it. Use your file manager or even fzf in termux can be adapted to be reasonably usable on a touchscreen. Something I have been wondering about is the "backlink" feature. It would be cool to link items/notes together through references. What I would be looking for is a Unix tools that can scan my text files for references to other files in the hierarchy.

echelon 2y ago
Obsidian lets you live on top of the filesystem structure using markdown files, and it gives you links, tags, topic clouds, and more. If you use it with reasonable conventions, you can compile and deploy a web version with ghost or zola or something automatically run in CI. It's backed up, synced, and comes with desktop and mobile apps. It has vim key bindings and git plugins. It's a pretty sweet system that works nicely with Unix, and it adapts to multiple navigational and organizational paradigms. I've tried a lot of things, and nothing has ever come close to Obsidian.
skeeter2020 2y ago
I've been experimenting with Flatnotes (https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes) for a while and really like the design. No notebooks or even folders, just a single directory with markdown files and decent search & tagging. It feels a lot like what happened to email when we gave up all the up-front structuring with deep hierarchies and just said index it and we'll find it when we need to. The project is just "good enough" for what I need, and aside from tiny bugs whenever I find a gap I can either work around it or live without. Constraints are a powerful motivator for both creativity and getting stuff done.

Beijinger 2y ago

I use folders for my data. a-z. This is the basic directory structure. b->books->management for example. Does not solve the fundamental problem of a file system that you also could file this under m->management->books I use recoll to index and find things. https://www.recoll.org/ https://www.recoll.org/ And yes, I have a 20 TB HDD. Quite a bit of data and media. If someone knows how to make an encrypte mirror of my drive with https://www.opendrive.com/ https://www.opendrive.com/ I would be interested. No incremental backups, if possible I would like to access it like a drive. For my notes I just use light speed fast nvpy with simplenote.com to synchronized with several computes. https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy My notes don't follow the a-z approach but have regular headlines. I use nvpy as a mixture between a to do list and a knowledge database. For to do I have recently thought of using paper cards for kanban, but I am not sure. Suggestions welcome.

ninalanyon 2y ago
> Does not solve the fundamental problem of a file system that you also could file this under m->management->books You can use symbolic links to connect directories and file to multiple parents.
- Beijinger 2y ago
  I know. But this is asking and would get messy very fast. And what if an item has 10 attributes? John Doe has Birthday on December 12th would have at least 5 already.
  - ninalanyon 2y ago
    I've been thinking about writing a FUSE filesystem for precisely this sort of thing with regard to my collection of photographs.

dmje 2y ago

Obsidian. That is all.

sigmonsays 2y ago

I can second the recommendations i've read here. My approach to knowledge management has been super simple. Everything is in git, in a big directory structure i've organically grown over time. I have so many notes.. 7 to 8 thousands of them. Keeping it in git has allowed me flexibility to use it how i see fit. Sometimes i'm in emacs/nevom. Most the time i'm in sublime text because I have workspaces per project/concept. Finally, for mobile, I push them all to my own gitea instance. I rarely need access to my notes on mobile but it's been something i've been thinking about more. If anyone has any recommendations on how to read a directory of text files on android, i'm all ears.

embeng4096 2y ago
When I was on Android, I used Markor for text editing and Termux for command line git. For iOS, I now use Working Copy for git commit/push/pull, and Obsidian to edit text, and I like Obsidian's interface a lot for making quick Markdown edits. I believe Obsidian has an Android version as well, but I have not used it. I'm not sure if there is an Android version for Working Copy but there may be similar GUI git apps.

kodemongos 2y ago

[dead]

sroerick 2y ago

org-roam is pretty good. I came from Obsidian and wanted to build out some extra personal features for Bible notes. I made the switch to org-roam because i wanted to use elisp to develop instead of JS obsidian plugins. It took me a while to get over the learning curve but I’m very happy with it

sudhirkhanger 2y ago
The number of apps that offer note-taking functionality is exploding. It solidifies Emacs' community's point of view that all these custom tailored solutions become a limiting factor for many. But to learn Emacs and Elisp is not trivial. * Any particular resources you followed to learn Elisp. * What sort of time investment did it require for you to build your own system based out of Emacs? * How are you syncing your files?

syngrog66 2y ago

notes.txt add choice of encryption, vcs, backup. solved for many decades

cyp0633 2y ago

Have been hosting this with Docker for ~2years. It's quite stable now except from some expected minor bugs on firefox (because they "don't have time to maintain").

nxobject 2y ago

I'm a fan of tables with feature parity with Notion! As much as everyone says "we should have one step above Excel somehow", there aren't too many apps that have put a lot of thought into that.

xiaodai 2y ago

can't bring myself to trust anything about privacy from a software with a weird-ass Chinese name.

gbraad 2y ago

Do not rely on the tooling; forced structure might work for some, but it never worked for me. I eventually settled on markdown and structure this myself. As sunshine-o also said, tooling around this can help to retrieve information, but it is not essential if you organize. but this is different for everybody. I eventually started to use obsidian, but also nextcloud notes, quillpad and webdav to get access to my notes. I am happy, but it took a long time to get to something that worked. this tool looks 'complicated'... as it needs an infrastructure to operate.

Mazzen 2y ago

A wiki. Am I mistaken or is the term just not in trend any more?

sudhirkhanger 2y ago

What is the good solution to sync text files? I haven't found a good solution that is open source and self-hosted. Ideally, eventually, my setup should give me real time syncing the same level as multiple people editing the same file. But that is a stretch goal. I am currently using Syncthing but unfortunately it's client app has been removed from Google Play [1]. I am managing with Syncthing-Fork. [1] https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064 https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064

athinggoingon 2y ago

I use org-mode for note taking and personal knowledge base. In my notes.org file, I collect all kind of snippets, knowledge, ideas, how-tos, and such stuff. Outlines make it possible to hide parts of the text in the buffer. A headline starts with one or more stars. A heading has one star, a sub-heading two, etc. Use the linking feature in ordmode to link items/notes together through references. Stick with a "File over app", Unix approach. You need to first rely on a directory structures, filenames, plaintext, lists and orgmode. Leverage Unix tools: unix commands, (rip)grep, git, fzf, etc.

lakomen 2y ago

Personal Knowledge Management. I expected something different. Let's say I'm researching how to get into IRL streaming right now. So I'd make a topic, "IRL Streaming". In there I'd like to put links to videos, links to documents/documentation/tutorials/guides/howtos. I'd also like to take notes. And in the end I would've learned this topic. Maybe I'd create a sub-topic in there, to research "SRT and SLS vs RTMP". People claim it's like a Obsidian clone. Looking at the Obisidan website it says it's a tool that helps you write a book. This however calls itself PKM (short). I guess they're related, from looking at the screenshots, but not really what I'm looking for, I think. I don't want to do what the top comment suggests, folders with files. No I want a web app that I can access from anywhere and where I can dump links and notes to and about resources categorized by topic. Reading the readme of siyuan-note it does seem to be able to do this. Only 1 question, does it support multiple users? So I can host it for my town's community.