I wrote a post a while ago comparing various wiki and wiki-adjacent offerings. I've settled on DokuWiki as it's easy to host. The UI is dated (though I don't think it's outright ugly). The vanilla experience is a bit bare-bones but there's a built-in GUI for searching and installing plugins. The only pain point I can foresee is upgrading and long-term management thanks to juggling so many plugins. If the newest version of the base software doesn't play nice with a particular plugin, or if a plugin stops being developed, etc.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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The ui is dated? Lol what?
I didn't understand what you meant by Joplin not being "fully FOSS", so I went looking for the license. Is really quite strange. Basically they've used a "personal license" for some parts and the AGPL for the rest. That's... annoying.
This is surprising... And completely unmanageable from a user's point of view. In order to find what licenses it has I need to browse folder by folder in the code, instead of, you know, having a list of licenses and where they apply.
On a quick look I saw only two places with a special license, one is the example indicated by the developer of the server package which is an odd license that gives me pretty bad vibes for my lack of legal knowledge but probably is ok? It might even be reasonable, but what is the server package? Is that the server I self host? Or the server for paid Joplin? Then I found some other code that was an MIT license... But how deep do I need to go searching in the folder structure to find all licenses? This is irritating. I guess I gotta consider changing to something else then if only to be able to know what license I am using.
Also... What is the legal implications of using a software than upon any update might suddenly add a weird random license? Would that mean I am expected to keep checking all foldernevery time they change something?
find . -name LICENSE.md -print
There, arduous search complete.
I thought it was well known/understood that the server component was how Joplin pays their wages, and thus being under a different license is hardly a big shock; it's entirely optional, and the fact they're still sharing the source seems like a good thing rather than bad.
As for "they could just keep adding licenses!!!" Well, yeah, but so could any project. Apache could stick a proprietary license deep in a folder of httpd tomorrow and unless you were looking, you'd never know. Even a GPL project could incorporate a proprietary licensed component tomorrow provided it wasn't linked into the binary/was a separate piece of software - like, say, the server component of Joplin. You just trust that they won't, and/or properly check changes whenever you pull a new release like you were supposed to be doing anyway for security (hahaha, ok, no you weren't,) or trust that if they did pull shenanigans it would be 'news' and you would hear about it.
That Joplin is open about it, and they retain the original licenses of FOSS they have incorporated instead of deleting/hiding the original license is a good thing. I wish more did it.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| SSO | Single Sign-On |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
[Thread #165 for this comm, first seen 15th Mar 2026, 00:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
This is quite useful, and if someone doesn't like it they can just block the bot.
I built a fully open source multi-user live collaboration notes app, self host with docker, serve at root or a subpath, has an android, windows and Linux client app, plus the usual web UI.
Very promising! If I understand correctly though, I can't even create a note in offline mode to sync later? That would be a bit of a deal breaker for me personally. I couldn't see much details on e2ee either, but maybe I missed that. Anyway, really well done!
Yeah, it's entirely online only. And no e2ee, just relies on web server encryption like SSL.
Thanks for the extra details! I mean, it does make sense the way you are guiding the use case for the project. It's just not my use case :)
In any case kudos for the job you've done!
Do some parts of go-notes have proprietary sources? I can't find the source for the native Android client in the repo or instructions on how to download and build it from elsewhere.
The android, windows and Linux app use propriety parts, the android app is a web view app built in android studio, the Linux and windows apps are just electron apps. I have all the source code I used to build them on my pc, but I didn't create a repo for them. go-notes is fully open source with the backend in go, the clients are just extremely basic frontends.
Edit
Just gone and checked and all the electron apps source code is in my repo, so the Linux and windows apps you can build yourself from the code. I can upload the android code from android studio if you want as well?
It'd be cool if your app was installable from F-Droid, for which the sources have to be somewhere under a free license. I most likely won't be able to contribute code but would indeed like to look through the sources, and maybe help with translation if the code supports internationalization.
Cool. I'll add the android source code to the repo when I get chance 👍
Nice, I'll check it out
you could selfhost AnyType, then if all devices are connected to the same WiFi they sync via P2P.
I find it even better than Notion in fact, because you can define any objects then do whatever you like with them.
What it lacks is the math stuff from tables unfortunately.
I liked AnyType but really missed having a browser-based application. I also had a hard time exporting my data out of AnyType.
What it lacks is the math stuff from tables unfortunately.
It also lacks reminders, alerts, and notifications. I really wanted to like it when I tried it out, but this was a huge deal breaker for me.
I don't think the anytype apps are foss.
So I'm going to try Docmost https://github.com/docmost/docmost
It seems to be the closest thing to what I'm looking for and under a GPL3 license
+1 for docmost, I've been running it at home for nine months now. Very happy with the performance and feature set
FYI to everyone, SSO tax.
What about trillium, is it not fully open source? I've been using it for a while and I think it's amazing
I've got Docmost running now, and fairly happy with it.
It can be improved in some ways, but I might just make those fixes myself in a PR on their project
AFAIK Joplin is FOSS, but be aware that it's markdown format is not compatible with... Markdown. Funnily enough.
That sounds less than ideal
Affine
Maybe take a look at Outline. (Not affiliated, but I host it for myself.)
I also host KitchenOwl, but mostly just as a grocery list.
Outline doesn't work as well as alternatives. There are bugs they are refusing to fix
I've been using HelixNotes and syncing between my devices via git pull/push on a private codeberg repo, but if you're not familiar with git then syncthing and syncthing-android (assuming you have android) should work as well.
I absolutely love HelixNotes so far (been using it for a month or so).
Maybe silverbullet will suit you better? It's very flexible and programmable. The licence is MIT
SilverBullet is absolutely solid, with a simple and elegant architecture. SPA app, offline support, flat file backend, etc. Highly recommended.
Obviously not really Notion like but if it's mostly recipes, any reason you don't want to do something like Mealie for that?
That seems nice, but I'd like if it can handle Markdown well.
Saving my files as Markdown means they're future proof and I can move it to easily in the future
For very simple notes, I use Memos. It doesn't have whistles and bells, and it works great!
I like NocoDB though the self-hosted version isn't as complete as their hosted version. For my needs though it works quite well.
Obsidian?
That's not Open Source right?
Correct but all data is local and there are self host sync options