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Ask HN: A FOSS Alternative for Notion or Roam Research

by mindfreeze on 6/23/20, 9:58 AM with 6 comments

Hi,

So in my uni, we are having a FOSS Club(amfoss.in), we are looking for a good team notes management thing like collab, edit and do things, share etc.

Currently, we are doing most of the thing using Google Docs,

We have found Roam Research[1], seems promising but the thing is, it is super expensive for us to afford as we are fully student-driven club since 14+ years. So another alternative would be Notion[2], it is for a single user it is free for now. But not sure how long will it be and will it be changed in the middle.

So, we were curious what are some really good alternatives to both which can be collab and used, if it is OSS Solution then would be great, so we can also volunteer for the development too.

Right now I found,

1 Trilium: https://github.com/zadam/trilium

2 Outline: http://getoutline.com/

3 Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

4 Notable: https://notable.app

I haven't used, before trying if some people in HN did use any of these or also Notion/Roam Research, would be a great help to her your views regarding this.

Even if it is only for individuals and it is a good OSS Solution then that would be also fine,

[1]: https://roamresearch.com

[2]: https://www.notion.so

by miguendes on 6/23/20, 2:03 PM
I've been using obsidian [1]. It's free for personal use and the files are stored locally. Very good alternative to Roam. It's not open source tough.
[1]https://obsidian.md/
by mxab on 6/24/20, 5:01 AM
Someone is building an FOSS, selfhosted Roam-Clone here:
https://github.com/athensresearch/athens
by olodus on 6/27/20, 8:53 AM
Tiddlywiki is something I've wanted to try out myself for this use case. It seems like a good solution but I haven't had the time to sit down and set it up. It also hasn't seen any hype/postings about it in quite a while, which either could be seen as it being deaf or that it is working well for everyone using it and they don't feel the need to talk about it.
by cpach on 6/23/20, 2:10 PM
Perhaps wiki.js could be an option
https://wiki.js.org/
by indit on 6/28/20, 6:55 AM
I'm using VNote [1]
[1] https://tamlok.github.io/vnote/en_us/
by meagher on 6/23/20, 2:13 PM
Both have student plans with varying levels of discounts. I would get into contact with them and see if they can help out.
Notion for Students: https://www.notion.so/Notion-for-students-teachers-adc631df1...
Roam Scholars: https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1273423163381039105