HedgeDoc

What is HedgeDoc?

HedgeDoc is an open source, self-hosted collaborative Markdown editor that runs in the browser. Multiple people open the same note and write together in real time — you see each other’s cursors and edits live in the same tab — with the whole thing rendered from GitHub-flavored Markdown. It was formerly called CodiMD, the community fork of HackMD.

What is HedgeDoc best for?

HedgeDoc is best for teams that want live collaborative writing without handing their content to a SaaS. It fits meeting notes, shared documentation, technical write-ups, and Markdown-based slide decks — anywhere several people need the same document open at once and you’d rather keep it on your own server. It runs comfortably on small hardware, down to a Raspberry Pi.

What can HedgeDoc do?

• Real-time collaboration — many people edit one note simultaneously with live cursors and instant sync across every open browser session.
• GitHub-flavored Markdown with code blocks, tables, task lists, footnotes, and a live split-screen preview.
• Presentation mode — turn a note into a reveal.js slide deck straight from Markdown.
• Diagrams and math — Mermaid, PlantUML, sequence/flow diagrams, and KaTeX/MathJax formulas.
• Revision history so you can see past versions and revert.
• Per-note permissions — freely editable, editable by signed-in users, locked, or private, set from a dropdown.
• Broad authentication — LDAP, SAML, OAuth2, GitHub, GitLab, Google, Keycloak, Nextcloud, Authelia, and email/password.
• Export and embed — export to PDF and Markdown, and embed notes elsewhere.

Where does HedgeDoc fall short?

HedgeDoc is a flat collection of collaborative documents, not an organized wiki. There are no nested pages, spaces, or a hierarchical tree — notes are found by URL or your own history — so as a structured knowledge base it’s weaker than Outline or Docmost.

Its release situation also needs a clear eye. The stable 1.x line is in maintenance mode — it still gets fixes but no new features. The ground-up 2.0 rewrite (a separate backend and frontend) has been in alpha for a long stretch and is not yet feature-complete, so what you deploy in production today is a codebase the team has stopped actively expanding.

And unlike HackMD, there is no official hosted tier — HedgeDoc is self-host-only, so you run it yourself or you don’t use it.

Is HedgeDoc free?

Yes — HedgeDoc is fully free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no paid edition, seat limits, or feature gating. You self-host it (a prebuilt bundle or the official Docker image) and back it with PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, or SQLite. The only cost is the server you run it on.

What does HedgeDoc replace?

HedgeDoc is a self-hosted stand-in for hosted collaborative editors. It’s most directly a HackMD alternative — same lineage, same live-Markdown editing, but on your own infrastructure instead of per-seat SaaS. For teams that only use Markdown, it can also cover the real-time co-editing that draws people to Google Docs and lightweight shared-notes use of Notion, though it deliberately skips those tools’ rich-text and database features.

FAQ

Is HedgeDoc open source? Yes. HedgeDoc is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and developed in the open on GitHub. It began as CodiMD, the community fork of HackMD, and was renamed to HedgeDoc in 2020.

Can I self-host HedgeDoc for free? Yes. Self-hosting is the only way to run HedgeDoc, and it’s completely free — deploy the Docker image or a release bundle, point it at a database, and there are no license fees or user caps.

Is HedgeDoc a good HackMD alternative? For self-hosted real-time Markdown editing, yes — it shares HackMD’s heritage and core editing experience while keeping your content on your own servers. The trade-off is that HackMD offers polished managed hosting and some team features that HedgeDoc, being self-host-only, does not.

What do I need to run HedgeDoc? A server (or even a Raspberry Pi) with Node.js and a supported database — PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, or SQLite. The official Docker image is the simplest path, and reverse-proxying it behind HTTPS is recommended for real use.