CherryTree VS Trilium Notes

Compare CherryTree vs Trilium Notes and see what are their differences.

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CherryTree Trilium Notes
59 282
3,542 28,257
1.2% 1.2%
9.2 9.1
5 days ago 7 months ago
C++ JavaScript
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

CherryTree

Posts with mentions or reviews of CherryTree. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-05-17.
  • Cherrytree Releases 1.0.0
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jul 2023
  • Digital notetaking?
    1 project | /r/languagelearning | 12 Sep 2022
  • Personal "database" for storing work experience information?
    1 project | /r/engineering | 25 May 2022
    I am started using CherryTree. (There is a screenshot here.)
  • Ask HN: Using Markdown Files for Notetaking?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 May 2022
    I wonder if an extensible editor (example: Atom) could do both of those things with Markdown files. Assuming by styling you mean things like being able to highlight and custom-style some text, even in a typically text-only view of a markdown file. It wouldn't be a big surprise if that could be done...somehow. Collapsible points ought to be doable for sure.

    Personally I use other methods for styling within markdown, for example emoji, tags, link formatting with brackets (for things that are not really links), etc.

    I also take any list that's longer than 8-10 items and break it up by category or reorganize it so it's less visually overwhelming.

    Otherwise you may find it helpful to look into more rich-editor-style notetaking solutions like cherrytree or Notecase Pro. The latter is proprietary but I used it for years and was very happy with it. Good luck in your search.

    https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

    https://www.notecasepro.com/

  • website down
    1 project | /r/CherryTree | 8 May 2022
  • Journal Writing App
    4 projects | /r/linux | 29 Apr 2022
    I'm kinda surprised no one mentioned cherrytree yet.
  • hierarchical note taking applications
    2 projects | /r/JPCarter_CSS | 26 Apr 2022
    cherrytree
  • Best book writing app?
    2 projects | /r/selfpublish | 20 Apr 2022
    I use FocusWriter. It's a lightweight, full-screen app that does more than enough for a manuscript. I used to use Google Docs with Wavemaker, which has a lot of extra functions like cards and timelines, etc. Docs slowed down a lot with a lot of open windows or really long docs, however. And with WFH the sync isn't that important to me anymore. For notes lately I've been using CheeryTree. All these are free.
  • Share your greatest free tools
    64 projects | /r/sysadmin | 17 Apr 2022
    CherryTree for a general note-taking database. As an Application Packager I can't remember PowerShell scripts I wrote two weeks ago, so saving my recipes in here is priceless.
  • I've reached 2800 mods. Never do that.
    3 projects | /r/skyrimmods | 11 Apr 2022
    How do you keep track of/document everything? I have been using Cherry Tree. It is a fancy open source note taking program that lets you keep notes in a tree like structure.

Trilium Notes

Posts with mentions or reviews of Trilium Notes. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-03-16.
  • French gov's open source alternative to Notion or Outline
    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Mar 2025
    It depends on what subset of Notion you use. Nothing (including Notion) is perfect for me. I'd like to build my own eventually, but I'm currently using Obsidian which doesn't hit your "works in the browser" requirement.

    One option, which is open source and self hosted, is Trilium[sic], found at https://github.com/zadam/trilium It's open source, so if it's close to what you want, you might be able to adjust it to meet your needs.

    Other commercial options include Realm, Tana, and Craft. With varying degrees of "AI".

    I really like the UX of Tana for building out graphs of pages with properties, but it's slow to start up, doesn't support math, etc. So it's mainly a UX example for me.

  • Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Dec 2024
    I can also recommend Trilium Notes [1], which I have been happily using for years. It's currently in "maintenance mode", which I personally see as a feature (no risk of bloatware).

    Self-hosted, great webapp, optional native clients and works offline.

    https://github.com/zadam/trilium

  • Patterns of personal knowledge base (2023)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Oct 2024
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2024
  • Trilium Transitions into Maintenance Mode
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jul 2024
  • Why I Like Obsidian
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2024
    Tried Obsidian for a while, loved a lot about it, but....mmm.

    Obsidian out of the box is a bit limited; plugins are great and add tons of features, but then you start hitting issues with plugin maintainers abandoning plugins you rely on, or needing to make a decision between three different plugins that all do the same thing slightly different. Depending on your use case and expectations that may not be a big deal, but I really missed not having what I personally saw as core features not being officially supported.

    (Also, FWIW, the sync service is a bit pricy for what it is. I get that it's how they're trying to monetise it, but...I would have preferred another pricing model, even if the total cost was just as high.)

    I've personally switched to Trilium Notes which I'm finding nicer. One element I particularly like is that it has first class suport for notes being able to exist at multiple places in a tree simultaneously. I know it's a very personal thing, but for me personally being able to file notes in multiple locations "clicks" in a way that tags didn't.

    Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium

    A nice writeup on ways to use Trilium (although much of it applies to Obsidian too): https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Patterns-of-personal-k...

  • Outline: Self hostable, realtime, Markdown compatible knowledge base
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2024
    Then you come across Trilium and drop the mic

    [0] https://github.com/zadam/trilium

  • Show HN: Heynote – A Dedicated Scratchpad for Developers
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Dec 2023
    I move between machines a lot and prefer an online tool; I'm self-hosting Trilium Notes https://github.com/zadam/trilium ; this looks a bit cleaner but without syncing (or server-side storage) it misses a bunch of potential use cases.
  • Looking for a highlighting-notes-organized-storage app of some sort
    1 project | /r/selfhosted | 8 Dec 2023
  • Ideal Note-Taking Platform?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Nov 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing CherryTree and Trilium Notes you can also consider the following projects:

to-markdown - 🛏 An HTML to Markdown converter written in JavaScript

Joplin - Joplin - the privacy-focused note taking app with sync capabilities for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS.

Wiki.js - Wiki.js | A modern and powerful wiki app built on Node.js

obsidian-minimal - A distraction-free and highly customizable theme for Obsidian.

obsidian-releases - Community plugins list, theme list, and releases of Obsidian.

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