Trilium Notes VS Joplin

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

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Trilium Notes Joplin
284 784
28,622 49,222
0.9% 1.6%
9.1 9.9
9 months ago 9 days ago
JavaScript TypeScript
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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.

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 2025-04-19.
  • Taking Notes with Joplin
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2025
    https://github.com/zadam/trilium#trilium-is-in-maintenance-m... above and beyond the license difference between the two (I'm not looking for trouble, I'm only saying they are different)
  • 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

Joplin

Posts with mentions or reviews of Joplin. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-18.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

AppFlowy - Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI. AppFlowy is the AI collaborative workspace where you achieve more without losing control of your data. The leading open source Notion alternative.

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

logseq - A local-first, non-linear, outliner notebook for organizing and sharing your personal knowledge base. Use it to organize your todo list, to write your journals, or to record your unique life.

notesnook - A fully open source & end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to Evernote.

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InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
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