SiYuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open-source personal knowledge management software
SiYuan is a self-hosted wiki and note-taking tool. Privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open-source personal knowledge management software.
Why self-host SiYuan
The case for running SiYuan at home is straightforward: you get the full feature set, no subscription cost, and no data sitting on someone else’s server.
What it does
SiYuan falls into the Wiki, Note-Taking, Workspace category of self-hosted software. It is designed to be deployed on your own infrastructure, whether that is a home server, a VPS, or a local machine running Docker.
Community traction
The project has 17k stars on GitHub, which is a reasonable proxy for how widely it is used. Active repositories tend to ship bug fixes faster and have better documentation than projects that stall after the initial release.
Deployment
Docker is the most common deployment path. If you are already running containers at home, adding SiYuan to a compose file is a low-friction way to try it.
Alternatives
If SiYuan does not fit your needs, common alternatives include Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, Notion. The self-hosted versions of these tools often differ in resource requirements and feature focus, so it is worth testing the one that matches your workload.
Maturity
The current release is 3.1.2. The project has moved past early development and tends to ship stable, documented releases.
License
It is licensed under AGPL-3.0, making it freely available for personal and commercial use.
Links
SiYuan is worth a look if you are building out a homelab or trying to reduce your dependence on hosted services. The setup cost is usually low and the upside is real data ownership.