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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.

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I wrote a more detailed comparison of Notion vs Obsidian here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/notion-obsidian-comparison

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/

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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
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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.
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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.
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Obsidian is at least storing in markdown. Although some plugins probably add additional formatting that isn't standard.
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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...
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https://anytype.io/ is the open-source CC of Notion AFAIK.
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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.
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it's source-available, not open source

https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/anytype/

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You don't lose anything from the proprietary nature of Obsidian because it's just markdown files all the way down.
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Yeah to clarify, I mean Notion was proprietary. Obsidian I would call borderline because as you mentioned, the markdown file storage format.
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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.
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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.

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You could try https://hyperclast.com/ (my project). Here's the comparison vs Notion, Obsidian etc https://hyperclast.com/vs/
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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.
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I switched from Obsidian to Joplin years ago. Its completely FOSS and can sync with your private Nextcloud instance.
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But all the Joplin data is not in Markdown files sadly.
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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.

https://triliumnotes.org/

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