Trilium Notes

What is Trilium Notes?

Trilium Notes is a free, open source note-taking application for building a personal knowledge base. It organizes notes in a hierarchical tree instead of flat folders, and a single note can be “cloned” so it lives in several places at once without duplication. Maintained by the TriliumNext community, it runs as a desktop app, a self-hosted server, or both kept in sync.

What is Trilium Notes best for?

Trilium is best for technical users who keep large, deeply structured knowledge bases — developers building a code-snippet library, researchers organizing papers by topic, sysadmins documenting infrastructure. It suits people who want deep hierarchy, scripting, and full ownership of their data more than a polished team UI or zero-setup cloud.

What can Trilium Notes do?

• Organize notes in a deep tree with cloning, note hoisting, and note-to-note relations
• Write in a rich WYSIWYG editor, plus Markdown, code, canvas (Excalidraw), Mermaid diagrams, and mind maps
• View note collections as tables, calendars, kanban boards, or geo maps
• Protect sensitive notes with per-note AES encryption and passwords
• Extend and automate with JavaScript scripting, custom widgets, and a REST API
• Capture pages with the browser web clipper, and import from Evernote or Markdown
• Search full-text across 100,000+ notes, including OCR of images and PDFs
• Sync across your devices and publish read-only note subtrees to the web

Where does Trilium Notes fall short?

• It’s single-user by design. Trilium has no real-time multi-user editing or shared workspaces, so it replaces a personal Notion or Evernote account, not a team wiki like Confluence. Sync keeps your own devices in step; it isn’t co-authoring.
• The mobile experience lags the desktop. You reach it through a responsive web app / PWA rather than a first-class native app, so the touch UI is functional but noticeably less polished than the desktop client or a hosted note app.
• There’s a real learning curve. The tree, attributes (labels and relations), and scripting are powerful but take time to master — overkill if you just want to jot quick notes, where a lighter tool like Memos fits better.

Is Trilium Notes free?

Yes — Trilium Notes is completely free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no paid tier, seat pricing, or feature-gated edition. Every feature ships in the one version, and there’s no hosted plan upselling you. Your only cost is the machine you run it on — a small VPS, a NAS, or even the laptop running the desktop app is enough.

What does Trilium Notes replace?

Trilium is a self-hosted stand-in for Evernote, Notion, and Microsoft OneNote. It covers the same capture-and-organize job — notes, web clips, notebooks, and a searchable archive — but keeps everything in your own database instead of a subscription cloud. It’s also frequently compared to Obsidian; the difference is Trilium’s server-backed note tree and built-in scripting versus Obsidian’s flat Markdown files and graph view.

FAQ

Is Trilium Notes open source? Yes. It’s licensed under AGPL-3.0 and developed in the open on GitHub by the TriliumNext community, which took over maintenance after the original creator stepped back from the project.

Can I self-host Trilium Notes for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free — you pay only for the machine it runs on. The server ships as an official Docker image, and the desktop app works fully offline on its own if you don’t need a server at all.

Is Trilium a good Evernote or Notion alternative? For a personal knowledge base, yes — you get deeper hierarchy, scripting, and true data ownership with no subscription. If you need team collaboration or a polished native mobile app, a hosted tool may still fit better.

What do I need to run Trilium Notes? Either install the desktop app for Windows, macOS, or Linux, or run the server with Docker on a small VPS or NAS. The two sync, so most people use the desktop app day to day and the server for mobile access and backup.