Very timely. I literally ran a Claude prompt "compare and contrast Notion vs Obsidian" and flipped over to HN while it was thinking, and this comes up. Thanks HN!
For a personal knowledge base? I would stay far away from anything proprietary for personal notes. I love logseq though I'm increasingly worried it's abandonware
Logseq was captured by VC a long time ago. They switched from open files to a database, their synching product is closed source (not selfhostable), and they have built-in telemetry.
I don't think I've updated my Logseq since 2022. As far as that is concerned, it's Markdown files that I can sync with an open-source tool like Syncthing-Fork.
Logseq isn't abandonware - they're in the process of rebuilding the app from the ground up to be database-driven, rather than house-brand Markdown as the source of truth and a database constructed from the files afterwards.
I'm not saying it's the most likely project to survive, but they've been working in quiet mode for a good while now.
My use case isn't likely to be a personal knowledge base, I've just never had any traction on that sort of thing beyond a blog/microblog. I'm wanting to use something specifically for organizing the building of a shop/ADU: todo lists, pinterest-like inspiration boards, costing spreadsheets...
For the sake of staying a computer nerd I decided to put all my notes in a private GitHub repo with help of a local 5b Gemma4 LLM. Is working extremely well. It doesn't matter in what format i type. I Use opencode for entering new notes.
Anytype is a well-made product, but its data format is somewhat opaque and like Notion suffers from significant complexity. I switched to Obsidian last year, which while proprietary at least gives me the option to move my data somewhere else if I should need to. Anytype doesn't make it easy to get your data off its platform.
Thanks for the pointers everyone, there were quite a few that weren't on my radar. My use-case isn't a "personal knowledge graph", I'm building an ADU and so I'm looking for a lot of components: todo lists, inspiration boards, costing/spreadsheets, ordering lists, documents.
Notion looks to be pretty capable in that regard, so the knowledge graph options really fell short (Logseq, Obsidian, Joplin, Trilium, Craft). They are likely good if your use case is in their lane.
Anynote looks like a good option, except it doesn't have a web client, just the Android/iOS (and MacOS I guess?).
Milanote sounds like a possible option if my use were more inspiration-board heavy.
I'll probably give Anynote a try, but Notion really does seem to be a compelling product if it weren't for the jackassery that lead to this thread to begin with.
FYI: I spent around 30-45 minutes trying Anynote, trying to match what they were showing in the introduction video (a todo list of tasks, where each task was a list), but it looks like creating a new space results in standard objects like "Task" needing to be recreated; the new Space had like 2 standard objects included. So I switched over to Notion and in <5m I was able to get going.
I was just trying to get a list of building supplies, one of which was the doors I wanted to use, to have a page where I could put a link to the product page for the doors I found.
Anynote looks promising, if I could understand why I didn't have what look to be the "standard objects" in a new space.
I kinda dislike where Notion is heading though, forcing more and more things on their users without any ways to disable them. But yes, it's capable to do what you are looking for.
Maybe Affine could also work though, you can self-host it and it's more customizable: https://affine.pro/
Consider Trilium if the collaboration stuff people use Notion for isn't important. It's open source, uses SQLite, and does automatic daily and weekly backups.
I self host https://www.getoutline.com/ instead, they might not have the latest AI features but it has everything I could ask for from a Notion alternative.
