Notes are the hardest category to get right, because the right answer depends entirely on whether you are building a reference library or a stream of thoughts.
Updated 2026-10-03 · 6 options compared
The short answer
Trilium Notes for a deep, hierarchical personal wiki. Memos for a fast capture-inbox you write into all day. SiYuan if you want Obsidian's block model with your own sync. Deciding between them is really deciding how you think.
Notes are the hardest category to get right, because the right answer depends entirely on whether you are building a reference library or a stream of thoughts. A tool that is excellent at one is usually mediocre at the other, and the marketing never tells you which one you are looking at. What follows separates them by how they are actually used rather than by feature count.
| # | Tool | License | Setup | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trilium Notes | AGPL-3.0 | Intermediate | A structured, hierarchical personal knowledge base you will add to for years. |
| 2 | SiYuan | AGPL-3.0 | Beginner | People who want Obsidian's approach without Obsidian's paid sync. |
| 3 | Memos | MIT | Beginner | Quick capture, daily notes and a personal micro-feed. |
| 4 | Actual Budget | MIT | Beginner | Envelope budgeting without a subscription to a finance app. |
| 5 | Mealie | AGPL-3.0 | Beginner | Recipes you have saved from the web and never been able to find again. |
| 6 | Paperless-ngx | GPL-3.0 | Intermediate | Paper: invoices, contracts, receipts, anything you would otherwise scan and lose. |
The single most useful question is whether you browse your notes or search them. A hierarchical wiki rewards someone who builds a structure and navigates it; a flat, tag-and-search tool rewards someone who dumps everything and trusts retrieval. Both are legitimate. What is not legitimate is picking a tool because its landing page looks nice and then discovering six months in that it cannot do the one thing your brain needs.
Best for: A structured, hierarchical personal knowledge base you will add to for years.
A deep tree, strong linking, scripting when you want it, and a note model that scales to a genuinely enormous personal wiki. It is the most powerful option here for structured reference material, and it stores everything in a single SQLite file you can copy anywhere — which makes backup trivially reliable.
Replaces: Evernote, Obsidian Sync, Notion
Best for: People who want Obsidian's approach without Obsidian's paid sync.
The closest self-hostable match to Obsidian's block-reference model, and unlike Obsidian it ships its own synchronisation rather than gating it behind a subscription. Block-level references change how you write once you get used to them, and SiYuan is the most comfortable place to form that habit.
Replaces: Notion, Obsidian, Roam Research
Best for: Quick capture, daily notes and a personal micro-feed.
A timeline of short notes and nothing else, and that discipline is the feature. It is fast enough to be the thing you actually open, and it deliberately refuses the organisational features that make bigger tools slow to use. Treat it as an inbox, not an archive.
Replaces: Simplenote, Google Keep, Bear
Best for: Envelope budgeting without a subscription to a finance app.
Included for the same reason. Budgeting is the other category people wedge into notes apps and then outgrow. Actual Budget does envelopes, bank sync and reports, and runs entirely on your own machine with a local-first data model.
Replaces: YNAB, Mint, Monarch Money
Best for: Recipes you have saved from the web and never been able to find again.
The narrow, well-built case of recipe collection, which is where a lot of note apps quietly fail — recipes want structured ingredients, scaling and shopping lists, not freeform pages. Listed because "I keep my recipes in a notes app" is one of the most common reasons people end up with an unusable notes app.
Replaces: Paprika, Paprika Recipe Manager, Google Keep lists
Best for: Paper: invoices, contracts, receipts, anything you would otherwise scan and lose.
Not a note app, but the same underlying problem — a pile of documents you cannot search — and it solves it better than any general-purpose tool. Optical character recognition, automatic tagging and a full-text index mean a scanned invoice from three years ago is findable by any word it contains.
Replaces: Evernote, Dropbox paper workflows
Superb database-views product. Your pages live on their servers and their API can change under you.
Local files, genuinely good — but sync and publish are paid add-ons and the app is closed source.
The cautionary tale of the category: shrinking free tier, repeated price rises, and a decade of notes behind a vendor's future.