Trilium

Build your personal knowledge base with Trilium Notes

⭐ 35,874 stars on GitHub · 🍴 2,384 forks · 📜 License: agpl-3.0 · 💻 Language: TypeScript

What is Trilium?

If you want a serious personal knowledge base that stays under your control, Trilium is one of the strongest self-hosted options. Its differentiator is depth: it goes well beyond plain Markdown notes with hierarchy, cloning, attributes, scripting, maps, encryption, and a sync server.

Main components

• Cross-platform desktop app for macOS, Linux, and Windows, built with Electron.
• Self-hosted sync server for keeping notes consistent across devices.
• Arbitrarily deep note tree, with the same note clonable into multiple locations.
• Rich WYSIWYG editor with tables, images, math, Markdown autoformatting, and source-code notes with syntax highlighting.
• Full-text search, fast navigation, note hoisting, and revision history for large knowledge bases.
• Attributes, relations, note maps, relation maps, mind maps, geo maps, and canvas diagrams for structuring complex information.
• Per-note encryption, OpenID/TOTP support, public note sharing, REST API access, and scripting for automation.
• Touch-optimized mobile frontend for phone and tablet access.

Clear use cases

• Build a large personal knowledge base that can scale to tens of thousands of notes without turning into a flat document dump.
• Run a private, self-hosted alternative to Evernote, Notion, or OneNote with local-first desktop usage and your own sync backend.
• Maintain a developer notebook with code snippets, architecture notes, API references, runbooks, and searchable troubleshooting history.
• Organize research where the same item belongs in multiple contexts, such as projects, topics, clients, or timelines.
• Create structured operational documentation with links, attributes, maps, version history, and selective public sharing.

The biggest strength is structural power — Trilium lets you model knowledge instead of just storing pages. The combination of deep trees, cloned notes, attributes, relations, visual maps, scripting, and a REST API gives you a level of control that commercial note tools often hide behind rigid databases or subscription-only features. It is not the most minimal or prettiest note app, but if your notes are becoming infrastructure, Trilium gives you the right primitives.

Best for developers, sysadmins, researchers, and power users who want a self-hosted, highly structured personal knowledge base rather than a simple Markdown folder.

Topics: the project is tagged with popular topics:

• 🏷️ electron
• 🏷️ electron-app
• 🏷️ knowledge-base
• 🏷️ knowledge-graph
• 🏷️ knowledge-management
• 🏷️ knowledge-management-graph
• 🏷️ local-first
• 🏷️ note-managment
• 🏷️ note-taker
• 🏷️ note-taking

📸 Screenshots

Quick install

The project supports Docker Compose:

git clone https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium.git
cd Trilium
docker compose up -d

Check the README in the repo for required env variables.

Minimum system requirements

⚡ Deploy fast on VSIS

Use the VSIS VPS Lite 2GB RAM / 2 vCPU / 25GB SSD (~104k/tháng) plan from VSIS.NET — high-speed VN-based VPS, 24/7 support, ideal for running Trilium smoothly.

🎯 Benefits:

• One-command docker compose up -d deploy in 2 minutes
• Dedicated IPv4, root access, unmetered domestic bandwidth
• Daily snapshot backup
• Free install assistance from the VSIS team

👉 See matching VPS plans at vsis.net

Resources

• 🔗 GitHub: TriliumNext/Trilium
• 🌐 Homepage: https://triliumnotes.org
• 📚 Official docs: see README in the repo
• 💬 Community: GitHub Issues + Discussions

Article compiled from GitHub data on 05/05/2026. Star/fork counts may have changed — see live numbers via the GitHub link.