Trilium Notes is a free, self-hosted, open-source note-taking app with unlimited hierarchy, note cloning, and a WYSIWYG editor. See features and pricing.
Trilium Notes is a free, open-source, self-hosted note-taking application designed for building large, deeply organized personal knowledge bases. It was first released in December 2017 by a developer known as zadam and has since become a well-known alternative to commercial note apps like Evernote, OneNote, and Notion for users who want full control over their data.
The application's defining feature is its hierarchical structure: instead of storing notes in flat notebooks or folders, Trilium organizes them as a tree of unlimited depth, and any note can be cloned to appear in multiple branches of that tree simultaneously without duplicating its underlying content. This makes it possible to build genuinely large, cross-referenced knowledge bases that stay navigable over time.
In January 2024, the original creator moved the project into maintenance mode, and a group of community contributors organized as TriliumNext to fork the project and keep it actively developed. That community fork eventually reunited with the original repository when zadam transferred ownership to the TriliumNext organization, which now continues developing and releasing the project as Trilium Notes.
Trilium's core editor is a WYSIWYG interface that supports Markdown-style shortcuts and slash commands for quick formatting, alongside tables, images, math expressions, and code blocks with syntax highlighting, making it capable of handling both everyday notes and technical documentation. Notes can be tagged with labels and connected through relations, giving users a way to add structured metadata beyond the tree hierarchy alone.
Beyond plain note-taking, Trilium includes a built-in calendar for organizing events with day, week, month, and year views, and a Kanban board mode for tracking tasks or project status directly inside the note tree. A browser-based web-clipper extension lets users capture web pages or screenshots and file them straight into their knowledge base.
All data is stored in a local SQLite database rather than a proprietary cloud format, and users who want to access their notes across multiple devices can run a self-hosted sync server, keeping full control of their data without relying on any third-party service.
Trilium Notes is entirely free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no subscription fees, license keys, or paid tiers of any kind. Since it is self-hosted or run locally, the only associated cost is optional hosting infrastructure if a user chooses to run a personal sync server; development is sustained by the open-source community rather than a commercial revenue model.
Yes, Trilium Notes is completely free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license.
The TriliumNext community organization maintains it, after original creator zadam moved the project to maintenance mode in 2024 and later transferred repository ownership.
No, all data is stored locally in a SQLite database, with an optional self-hosted sync server for accessing notes on multiple devices.
Trilium is self-hosted and open source, and it organizes notes in an unlimited-depth tree with note cloning rather than flat pages or notebooks.
Yes, though the desktop and server experience has traditionally been more feature-complete than mobile.
Yes, the editor supports Markdown-style shortcuts as well as Markdown import and export.
Yes, a browser extension lets users save web pages and screenshots directly into their note hierarchy.
It is released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPL-3.0).