Open-source UpNote alternatives

AppFlowy is an open-source workspace that brings documents, wikis, project and task management and team collaboration into one app. It is presented as an alternative to Notion, and its topics also tag it as a Confluence alternative, with the emphasis on keeping control of your own data.

The client is built with Flutter and a Rust core, giving apps for macOS, Windows and Linux plus iOS and Android versions. Desktop builds can be downloaded directly or from channels such as Flathub and Snapcraft. AI features are part of the workspace, and a public roadmap and active forum let users propose features. Translations are contributed through JSON files and tools such as inlang.

The project is AGPL-3.0 licensed and has documentation for self-hosting the server side, so organizations can keep content on their own infrastructure. A hosted version is available through appflowy.com for people who do not want to run servers. It suits teams looking for a Notion-style workspace with a privacy-first stance.

Memos is a personal timeline for quick notes that you host yourself. The idea is to write first and organize later: you save a thought in Markdown without choosing a title or folder, optionally attach images and files, and it lands on a chronological feed.

Finding things again relies on search, tag filters and a view of any given day on the timeline. You can pin important memos and save frequently used filters as views. New memos are private, and you decide per memo whether to keep it to yourself, show it to signed-in users or invite specific people, or make it public with a link. The project advertises zero telemetry and a full export of your data.

Memos is MIT licensed and built with Go on the back end, React on the front end and SQLite for storage. The quickest way to run it is a Docker container, with other options in the deployment guide, and there is a live demo to try first. Releases follow a year-and-month version scheme.

Joplin is a note-taking and to-do application, free and open source, that can manage large collections of notes organized into notebooks. Notes are written in Markdown, are searchable, can be tagged, and can be edited either in the app or in your own text editor. Apps are available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS.

The app is offline first, so all your data lives on your phone or computer and stays accessible without a connection. Notes can be synchronized with end-to-end encryption through services such as Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive and Joplin Cloud, and topics also mention WebDAV. Full-text search is available on every platform, and plugins and themes let you customize the app. A web clipper saves pages, and notes exported from Evernote can be imported with formatting, attachments and metadata intact; plain Markdown files can be imported as well.

The repository license is listed as 'Other', so check its terms if you plan to redistribute. Joplin is a popular choice for people who want an Evernote replacement that keeps data local or on storage they already control.

SiYuan is an open-source, privacy-first personal knowledge management system. Its distinctive feature is fine-grained, block-level referencing: any block can be linked to or embedded elsewhere, with two-way links, custom attributes and SQL query embeds. Editing is Markdown WYSIWYG, and the project describes itself as a workspace where humans and AI agents work together. It is local-first and self-hostable.

The editor supports block-style writing, list outlines, block zoom-in, very large documents, math formulas, charts, flowcharts and Gantt charts. Web clipping, PDF annotation links, flashcards with spaced repetition, a database table view, Tesseract OCR and multi-tab split-screen layouts are included. You can export blocks and embeds, standard Markdown with assets, or PDF, Word and HTML. AI writing and Q and A chat can use the OpenAI API, and template and JavaScript or CSS snippets allow customization.

SiYuan is AGPL-3.0 licensed and available as desktop apps, mobile apps for Android, iOS and HarmonyOS, an installation package, a package manager, and Docker, Kubernetes, Unraid and TrueNAS hosting. A command line interface and an app market for extensions exist. Most features are free, even for commercial use.

Trilium Notes is a free, open-source, cross-platform note-taking application focused on building large personal knowledge bases. Notes are arranged in a tree of arbitrary depth, and a single note can be cloned into several places in the tree, which lets you organize the same material along different lines without duplicating it.

The editor is a rich WYSIWYG one with tables, images, math and Markdown autoformatting, and there is also support for source code notes with syntax highlighting. Navigation relies on fast jumps between notes, full-text search and note hoisting. Notes are versioned automatically, and attributes can be used to organize, query and script notes. The interface is available in several languages, and built-in documentation opens with F1.

The project, now maintained as TriliumNext, is AGPL-3.0 licensed and built with TypeScript and Electron. It provides desktop builds as well as a server setup with Docker, so you can keep your notes on your own hardware. Stable releases are recommended, with nightly builds available for those who want the newest changes.

Notesnook is a note-taking app that puts privacy first. Everything is encrypted on your device with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2 before it syncs, following zero-knowledge principles, and the whole thing is open source. It is presented as an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Evernote, aiming to show that privacy does not have to cost convenience.

The repository contains all the code needed to build and use the web, desktop and mobile clients. They are built mainly with TypeScript and React, with Electron for desktop and React Native for mobile, and parts of the code base are still being ported from JavaScript. A server component written with .NET appears in the topics. The website covers the full feature list, roadmap and downloads, and the team encourages community involvement through Discord.

Notesnook is licensed under GPL-3.0. A hosted sync service is operated by the company behind it, and the open-source code lets you inspect how encryption is handled. It suits people moving away from Evernote or other cloud notes who want strong encryption and cross-platform apps.

Anytype Desktop is the official desktop client for Anytype, a personal knowledge base for macOS, Windows and Linux. It lets you collect pages, tasks, wikis and journals and link them together, while keeping data stored locally and encrypted across your devices.

The client is built around composable blocks such as text, databases, kanban boards and calendars, and you can define your own Types to shape the data model. Storage is offline-first with optional peer-to-peer sync, and encryption relies on the any-sync protocol. It is an Electron application written in TypeScript, and it can be extended through a gRPC API and AI agents described in the repository.

Sign-in uses an Any-ID, and installers are published on the releases page and the download site. The code is published under the Any Source Available License 1.0 rather than a standard open-source licence, and the README includes instructions for building from source and updating the middleware.

Standard Notes is a note-taking app with end-to-end encryption, built for digitalists and professionals, aiming to keep notes, files and life's work in one secure place. Only the user can read their notes, and sync across devices is encrypted by default.

You register for an account on the web app and install clients for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. The README highlights fast, free and encrypted sync on an unlimited number of devices, public source code, the option of hosting your own server with a few steps, and a focus on longevity and sustainability. A companion service called Listed turns notes into an online publication with email newsletters, and developers can build and publish extensions.

The web app compiles to static HTML, JavaScript and CSS files that can be served from any web server, and the README includes build and development instructions. Standard Notes is written in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with a forum and help pages for support. It suits privacy-minded users who want encrypted notes with the option to host their own backend.

QOwnNotes is a notepad and to-do list manager for GNU/Linux, macOS and Windows. Notes are kept as plain-text Markdown files, so they stay readable and portable, and the app works together with Nextcloud Notes and ownCloud Notes so the same notes can be reached from other devices.

Around the desktop application the project offers an Android companion app, a web app, and web companion extensions for Firefox and Chrome. Repository topics point to CalDAV task support, bookmark handling, personal knowledge management and local-first design. The program is built with Qt in C++ and the project links to community channels including Matrix, Telegram and IRC.

QOwnNotes is licensed under GPL-2.0 and runs locally on your computer, so there is no server to host unless you choose to use Nextcloud or ownCloud for syncing. It suits people who want a local-first Markdown notes app that works with their own cloud storage.

Simplenote Electron is the open-source desktop and web client for Simplenote, a note-taking service from Automattic. The app is built with React and packaged with Electron, which lets the same codebase run in a browser and as an installable application, with packages producible for macOS, Windows and Linux.

Notes are synchronized through the Simperium library, and the interface is written in TypeScript with ReactJS. The repository documents how to build packages and how to run unit tests. Local development currently requires an existing account on the test server or access to production credentials, because the email-first signup flow no longer allows creating accounts in the test database, and sharing and publishing features do not work in development builds.

The code is released under GPL-2.0 and follows the coding guidelines used by wp-calypso. As a client for the hosted Simplenote service, it is meant for people who already use that service rather than for self-hosting their own notes server.