TriliumNext Notes
A self-hosted, tree-structured personal knowledge base built for power users with very large note collections.
TriliumNext Notes (the actively maintained community continuation of the original zadam/Trilium, which was archived) organizes notes as an unlimited-depth tree where a single note can be cloned into multiple places — a strong fit for readers building a large, deeply cross-referenced personal wiki rather than simple flat notebooks. It runs as a desktop app or a self-hosted server (Docker image available) with notes stored in a local SQLite database, plus per-note encryption, scripting, and a REST API for automation.
What it does well
- +Handles very large note collections (100,000+ notes) smoothly — a genuine strength over flatter note apps at serious scale
- +Rich structural features (note cloning, relation maps, scripting, kanban/table/geo-map views) well beyond Evernote's flat notebook model
- +Fully free and self-hostable with an official Docker image and active weekly release cadence
- +Per-note AES-128 encryption for sensitive entries
Where it falls short
- −No official mobile app — mobile access is via browser/PWA or an unofficial third-party Android client (TriliumDroid)
- −The steep organizational power (tree + clones + relations) has a real learning curve versus Evernote's simple notebook-and-tag model
- −Notes live in a local SQLite database rather than plain files, so raw-file portability is lower than Joplin's Markdown-file approach
TriliumNext Notes as an alternative to
Where TriliumNext Notes shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
TriliumNext Notes head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.