What is Nowen Note used for?

Nowen Note is a self-hosted notes and private knowledge base with Markdown and rich text editing, AI Q&A, mind maps, tasks and Docker or NAS deployment. It is a good fit for private knowledge base on a home NAS, and team notes with daily logs and tasks.

Is Nowen Note open source?

Yes. Nowen Note is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at cropflre/nowen-note and is written mainly in TypeScript.

Yes. Nowen Note is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Nowen Note?

Yes. Nowen Note can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Nowen Note an alternative to?

Nowen Note is an open-source alternative to Notion, Evernote, Mem and Saga. Other open-source alternatives to Notion include EdgeEver, Liubai and SiYuan.

Is Nowen Note actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Nowen Note was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.4.16, published on 19 August 2026. The project has 545 stars on GitHub.

Nowen Note: open-source alternative to Notion, Evernote, Mem

About Nowen Note

Nowen Note is an open-source, self-hosted knowledge base, daily log and task workspace. It aims to be personal and team knowledge infrastructure that you control, running on a NAS or server and reachable through the web, desktop and mobile clients. Its documentation is mainly in Chinese, with an English version available.

A single knowledge tree organizes folders, rich-text documents and Markdown documents, with unlimited levels, drag and drop, import, permission inheritance, password protection and sharing. Editors are built on Tiptap and CodeMirror with Mermaid, KaTeX, tables, outlines, comments and version history, and an offline workspace can cache content and sync when back online. The product also includes AI-assisted writing and RAG question answering, mind maps, tasks, daily records, full-text search, tags, bidirectional links and an MCP integration. Attachments can use S3, Cloudflare R2 or MinIO, and backups can go to email or WebDAV.

It deploys with Docker and supports NAS platforms such as UGREEN UGOS and fnOS. Nowen Note is written in TypeScript and licensed under GPL-3.0, with an online trial, downloads and tutorials.

Key features

Unified tree of folders and documents
Markdown and rich text editors
AI writing and RAG question answering
Mind maps and task management
Offline workspace with sync
Docker and NAS deployment

Good fit for

→Private knowledge base on a home NAS
→Team notes with daily logs and tasks

Built with: TypeScript
Tags: note-taking; knowledge-base; self-hosted; markdown; nas; docker; ai; chinese

Nowen Note: questions and answers

What is Nowen Note used for?: Nowen Note is a self-hosted notes and private knowledge base with Markdown and rich text editing, AI Q&A, mind maps, tasks and Docker or NAS deployment. It is a good fit for private knowledge base on a home NAS, and team notes with daily logs and tasks.
Is Nowen Note open source?: Yes. Nowen Note is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at cropflre/nowen-note and is written mainly in TypeScript.
Is Nowen Note free?: Yes. Nowen Note is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Nowen Note?: Yes. Nowen Note can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Nowen Note an alternative to?: Nowen Note is an open-source alternative to Notion, Evernote, Mem and Saga. Other open-source alternatives to Notion include EdgeEver, Liubai and SiYuan.
Is Nowen Note actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Nowen Note was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.4.16, published on 19 August 2026. The project has 545 stars on GitHub.