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Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

github.com

11–20 of 160 posts

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#11
post #2

This looks nice but nearly identical to Obsidian. How does it differ from Obsidian's features?

It seems to be open source, which is a big plus compared to obsidian

Not fully open source. It seems you need to pay to get the privilege to "Export PDF/Image with watermark".

https://b3log.org/siyuan/en/pricing.html

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be open source, which is a big plus compared to obsidian

Not fully open source. It seems you need to pay to get the privilege to "Export PDF/Image with watermark". https://b3log.org/siyuan/en/pricing.html

It doesn't have to be free everything to qualify for open source. The source and licence are available. You can actually bypass payment if you want to do that as the source ia there.

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#18
post #14
post #6

Notion.so, but free. Nice!

I can't find how their multi-user collaboration looks like. Do they even have one?

Apparently it's on their roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/siyuan-note/projects/1/views/1

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be open source, which is a big plus compared to obsidian

Why is it a big plus, genuine question? You do not need Obsidian to use your Markdown written content and are not vendor locked in as such.

That's like saying "you do not need oracle to use your bytes on disk". I may be mistaken but doesn't obsidian provide a ton of functionality on top of markdown?

Re: Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software

#20
post #2

This looks nice but nearly identical to Obsidian. How does it differ from Obsidian's features?

Isn't Obsidian limited to markdown files? This uses a different format so it can add more features like databases.

No, Obsidian is quite more powerful.

Obsidian has built-in support for markdown, images, PDFs, canvas (via JSON Canvas which they developed and open sourced https://obsidian.md/canvas), and others.

For databases, you can add fields/properties both in the markdown frontmatter or in the text and query it via very popular plugins:

https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview

There are tons of community plugins that support all kind of stuff: tasks, kanban, LLM/Copilot, graph analysis of links, charts.

It can also be extended in JS, both writing your own plugins or via a few plugins that allow limited JS support.

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Obsidian is actually quite good as a NoCode prototyping platform for personal apps :-)

E.g. CRUD:

- Use templates, via Templater: to define the content of your data

- Use links and tags to define relations and connections

- Use dataview or graphs for views

- There are even plugins to define buttons and the actions they perform, if you need commands

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