Nowen Note is a self-hosted knowledge base where your notes, tasks, daily journals, and mind maps live in one private workspace you control. One tree holds folders, rich-text documents, and Markdown notes side by side, with drag-and-drop ordering, unlimited nesting, colored tags, pinning, and full-text search across everything. Each note can switch between a rich-text editor and Markdown with live preview, split view, outlines, tables, code blocks, math formulas, diagrams, comments, and version history. Connect the AI provider you prefer, such as an OpenAI-compatible API, Gemini, DeepSeek, or local Ollama, to continue drafts, rewrite passages, translate, summarize, and ask questions answered from your own notes. Tasks get list, board, calendar, and timeline views with dependencies, recurring rules, reminders, and templates, while daily journals capture short entries, moods, and photos and roll them into AI weekly and monthly reviews. Teammates edit together in real time, and folder-level permissions, passwords, allow and deny rules, share links with expiry dates, and guest comments decide exactly who sees what. Imports arrive from Obsidian, SiYuan, Word documents, web pages, and plain Markdown, attachments can live on local disk or S3-compatible storage, and scheduled backups travel to email or WebDAV. Keep working offline with a cached workspace that syncs when you reconnect, clip pages from the browser extension, and connect other tools through the OpenAPI, SDK, webhooks, and MCP server. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

Notes on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and the terminal, synced through your own server: Joplin pairs its open-source clients with Joplin Server, the official self-hosted backend that replaces Dropbox, OneDrive, or Nextcloud as the synchronization target. Notes are Markdown with inline attachments (images, PDFs, audio), organized into hierarchical notebooks and sub-notebooks with cross-cutting tags, alongside to-do lists with reminders and alarms. End-to-end encryption is the headline feature: enabled in the clients, it encrypts sync payloads on-device before upload, so the server stores blobs it cannot read - genuine protection even if the host is compromised. The desktop app offers both Rich Text and Markdown editors, extended by a plugin ecosystem, custom themes, and an Extension API for writing your own scripts; a Web Clipper for Chrome and Firefox captures full pages or screenshots straight into notebooks. Joplin Server ships as a Docker image with SQLite for evaluation and PostgreSQL for production, offers a filesystem storage driver for large content, and includes multi-user support and note sharing - all free under AGPL-3.0 when self-hosted. Notes stay in an open format, so the exit path always exists.

For people whose notes number in the tens of thousands, Trilium Notes is the hierarchical note-taking application built specifically for large personal knowledge bases - actively maintained as TriliumNext. Notes arrange into arbitrarily deep trees where every note is both content and container, and cloning lets a single note live in multiple places at once - bash notes belong under both Linux and Scripting, and Trilium refuses to make you choose. A WYSIWYG editor handles rich text, tables, math, and syntax-highlighted code blocks with Markdown-style shortcuts, while dedicated note types cover Excalidraw sketches, mind maps, geo maps with GPX tracks, relation maps that visualize connections between notes, and tables with typed columns. The attribute system is the power layer: labels attach queryable metadata (#year=1999, #author), relations create named links between notes, and both inherit down the tree - feeding full-text search, saved queries, and scripting. Scripting is Trilium's deepest differentiator: JavaScript code notes run on events like note changes or hourly schedules, build custom widgets, and add server-side logic, turning the knowledge base into a programmable platform. Protected notes encrypt sensitive content, note hoisting focuses on subtrees, and the self-hosted server syncs desktop clients across devices.

Poznote serves as an all-in-one personal knowledge base and digital workspace designed to bridge unstructured thinking and structured documentation. The platform pairs a responsive Markdown editor with live side-by-side rendering, KaTeX mathematical notation, and interactive Mermaid diagram compilation. Creative thinkers can switch instantly to an embedded Excalidraw infinite canvas to sketch system architectures, design mind maps, and create interface wireframes alongside their written notes. Every directory within the workspace can be toggled into an agile Kanban board where nested folders become customizable workflow columns and notes transform into draggable task cards. Task management views aggregate checklists across documents into unified priority queues with due date reminders and completion filters. An integrated bi-directional Git synchronization engine connects user workspaces directly to personal GitHub or Forgejo repositories, versioning edits automatically on save. The software also provides an integrated Model Context Protocol server that enables AI coding assistants to search notes, create documents, and query knowledge repositories securely. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.