Trilium: Hierarchical note taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases

Trilium: Hierarchical note taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases

Trilium is a self-hosted wiki and note-taking tool. Hierarchical note taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases.

Why self-host Trilium

The case for running Trilium 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

Trilium falls into the Wiki, Note-Taking 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 26k 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

Most users run Trilium via Docker Compose. The typical setup involves one or two containers and a volume for persistent data.

Alternatives

If Trilium does not fit your needs, common alternatives include Evernote, Microsoft OneNote. 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 version is 0.63.7, which means the project is still pre-1.0. That is not a disqualifier, but it is worth checking the changelog before upgrading in a setup where stability matters.

License

It is licensed under AGPL-3.0, making it freely available for personal and commercial use.

Whether you are just starting with self-hosting or adding to an existing setup, Trilium is a reasonable pick in the wiki and note-taking space.