Trilium Notes: Personal Knowledge Base, Self-Hosted
/Trilium
Trilium Notes is a free, self-hosted note-taking app for building a hierarchical personal knowledge base, maintained by the TriliumNext community after original developer zadam handed the project over. It's worth the setup time if you want a note tree with per-note encryption, scripting, and a REST API under your own control; skip it if you just want a note app that works out of the box with zero server to maintain.
What is Trilium Notes?
Trilium Notes is a cross-platform, open-source note-taking application that lets notes nest into a tree with no fixed depth limit, with a single note able to live in multiple branches at once through cloning. It ships as a desktop app (Electron) or a self-hosted web server, with a WYSIWYG editor for text notes, dedicated code notes with syntax highlighting, and note types like canvas, mind maps, and geo maps.
Core Features for Knowledge Management
- ✓Notes nest into a tree with no fixed depth limit, and a single note can be cloned into more than one branch at once
- ✓WYSIWYG editor for text notes with tables, images, and math, plus markdown autoformatting
- ✓Dedicated code notes with syntax highlighting for editing source directly inside the app
- ✓Note attributes for organizing, querying, and scripting against your notes
- ✓Canvas notes built on Excalidraw for freeform diagrams, mind maps built on Mind Elixir, and geo maps with location pins and GPX tracks
- ✓Relation maps and note/link maps for visualizing how notes connect to each other
- ✓Per-note encryption ("protected notes") so sensitive material can be locked down individually rather than at the whole-vault level
- ✓A REST API called ETAPI for scripting and automation, alongside a built-in scripting layer inside the app itself
Ways to Use Trilium Notes
- •Building a long-lived personal wiki — the README says it scales well upwards of 100,000 notes
- •Clipping and archiving web pages into a searchable tree with the built-in Web Clipper
- •Publishing selected notes to the public internet through Trilium's own sharing feature
- •Mapping relationships between people, projects, or concepts with relation maps and mind maps
- •Migrating an existing zadam/Trilium instance into the actively maintained TriliumNext fork without losing data
Installation and Deployment Options
Installing Trilium Notes depends on how you want to run it. On Windows and macOS, download the binary from the latest GitHub release, unzip it, and run the `trilium` executable directly — no installer involved. Linux users get a distro package where one exists, the same binary release, or a Flatpak (not yet published on FlatHub, per the README). For a server deployment, TriliumNext ships an official Docker image on Dockerhub, and the docs cover the setup from there. Browser access only works against a server install, and the README says only the latest Chrome and Firefox are tested. Mobile works the same way — a mobile browser pointed at your server — or through third-party clients: TriliumDroid and Pocket Trilium for Android (Pocket Trilium runs a full instance on-device with offline support and sync), and Trinote for iOS. To build from source: `git clone https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium.git`, `cd Trilium`, `pnpm install`, then `pnpm run server:start`, which serves the app at `http://localhost:8080`.
Strengths
- ✓Note revisions keep old versions of a note automatically, so you get informal version history without wiring up git for every page
- ✓Login can run through OpenID and TOTP directly, rather than a bolted-on two-factor plugin
- ✓A built-in metrics view pairs with a Grafana dashboard, so you can watch your own instance's health instead of guessing
- ✓The UI itself is scriptable and customizable — sidebar buttons and user-defined widgets — so power users can bend the interface, not just the data model
- ✓Import and export cover Evernote and Markdown directly, so an existing archive in either format doesn't need a manual re-entry marathon to move in
Considerations Before Using Trilium Notes
- △Mobile isn't an official native experience from the TriliumNext team — the sanctioned path is a browser pointed at your server, and the native Android/iOS clients are third-party projects with their own repos and bug trackers, not part of the core project
- △Browser support is narrow: the README says only the latest Chrome and Firefox are tested, so Safari or older browsers are on their own
- △Sync needs a self-hosted sync server (or a third-party service to host one for you), which means setup and maintenance work most cloud note apps don't require
- △The Linux Flatpak build isn't published on FlatHub yet, so a Linux install means picking a distro package, a raw binary, or building from source
- △AGPL-3.0 licensing means anyone running a modified version as a network service has to publish their source changes — a real constraint if you were hoping to fork it into a closed commercial product
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Frequently Asked Questions
Trilium Notes is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPL-3.0), so anyone who modifies it and runs it as a network service also has to publish their source changes.
Trilium Notes supports mobile use through a mobile browser pointed at a server installation, and third-party apps cover native access: TriliumDroid and Pocket Trilium for Android, and Trinote for iOS.
Migrating from zadam/Trilium to TriliumNext/Trilium needs no special steps — install TriliumNext/Trilium as usual and it reuses your existing database. Versions up to v0.90.4 stay compatible with zadam/trilium v0.63.7; later TriliumNext releases bump the sync version and block direct migration from those older instances.
Trilium Notes supports synchronization against a self-hosted sync server, and the docs also point to third-party services that will host that sync server for you if you don't want to run your own.
Trilium Notes ships a REST API called ETAPI, built specifically for automation and scripting against your notes.
Trilium Notes stands apart on structure and control: notes nest into a tree with no fixed depth limit and a single note can be cloned into multiple places, encryption applies per note rather than to a whole vault, and the app is self-hosted and scriptable through its own REST API rather than run as someone else's cloud service.
The problem it solves
A personal knowledge base that grows past a few hundred notes breaks flat note apps and single-parent folder trees — you end up duplicating a note just to file it under two topics, or losing the ability to query anything beyond full-text search. Trilium Notes solves that specific structural problem: notes form a tree that nests as many levels as you need, a single note can be cloned into multiple locations without duplicating the content, and attributes turn notes into queryable, scriptable objects instead of static text files. It also solves the control problem — the whole thing runs on infrastructure you own, not a vendor's sync cloud.
Who should try it — and who should skip
Reach for Trilium Notes if you're already comfortable running a Docker container or a small server and you want a note tree that scripts, queries, and encrypts at the individual-note level instead of a flat pile of markdown files. It also fits if you're already running zadam/Trilium and want an actively maintained fork with no forced migration step. Skip it if you want a note app that works the moment you install it on your phone with zero server to maintain — the mobile story here runs through a browser or third-party apps, not an official native client, and only the latest Chrome and Firefox are tested browsers for the web interface.
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