About Inkstone
Inkstone is a browser-based Markdown notebook for writing, organizing, syncing and backing up personal knowledge, and it runs entirely on Cloudflare Workers. Notes are always plain Markdown, and the deployer keeps control of the database, attachments and runtime, making it a complete self-hosted application. New accounts get two starter notes in Chinese and English.
Writing features include a CodeMirror 6 editor, live preview, split layouts, focus and typewriter modes, autosave and version history. Markdown support covers GFM tables, footnotes, wikilinks, embeds, callouts, math, Mermaid diagrams and front matter. Notes can be organized in nested folders with tags, favorites, archive and trash, with backlinks, block references and a relationship graph, and search uses D1 full-text search with optional semantic search powered by Workers AI. A private remote MCP server with OAuth 2.1 and PKCE is included, along with offline editing, multi-device sync, sharing and WebDAV backups.
Inkstone is built with TypeScript, React, Hono and Cloudflare services such as D1, R2, KV and Durable Objects. The README names the licence as LGPL-3.0-only, while repository metadata lists it as other, and a browser-only demo is available. It suits people who already use Cloudflare and want a private note system they own.
Key features
- Plain Markdown notes with live preview
- Wikilinks, backlinks, and relationship graph
- Full-text and optional semantic search
- Offline editing and multi-device sync
- Private MCP server with OAuth 2.1
- WebDAV and off-site backups
Good fit for
- →Running a private knowledge base on Cloudflare
- →Syncing Markdown notes across devices
- →Letting AI assistants search your notes through MCP
- Tags
- markdown
- note-taking
- cloudflare-workers
- self-hosted
- wikilinks
- mcp
- offline-first
- typescript
- knowledge-base
Inkstone: questions and answers
- What is Inkstone used for?
- Inkstone is a self-hosted Markdown notebook that runs on Cloudflare Workers, with wikilinks, backlinks, offline editing, sync, search and MCP access. It is a good fit for running a private knowledge base on Cloudflare, syncing Markdown notes across devices and letting AI assistants search your notes through MCP.
- Is Inkstone open source?
- Yes. Inkstone is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at shuaiplus/inkstone and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is Inkstone free?
- Yes. Inkstone is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
- Can I self-host Inkstone?
- Yes. Inkstone can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
- What is Inkstone an alternative to?
- Inkstone is an open-source alternative to Obsidian, Roam Research and Reflect. Other open-source alternatives to Obsidian include Foam, Logseq and Notabase.
- Is Inkstone actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Inkstone was on 26 September 2026, and the latest release is v0.8.0, published on 14 September 2026. The project has 1.1k stars on GitHub.
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