# Trilium Notes

16 Hacker News commenters recommended Trilium Notes and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for flexible, low-maintenance note organization with local SQLite storage and optional sync. One recurring caveat: some dislike how notes are stored.

## Why people recommend it

- Flexible note structure and typed notes (3 comments): "needing typed notes is what settled me on Trilium Notes after a foray into a bunch of alternatives" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902483)) "where one note can have many parents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47060771)) "Trilium saves me from a lot of cognitive burden by keeping the shape of the notes collection explicit and visible at all times" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913515))
- Low maintenance, stays out of the way (2 comments): "Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49986800)) "that's why I moved from org-roam to trilium, so I could just stop hyper optimizing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489932))
- Local SQLite storage, offline and syncable (2 comments): "such that your notes (~web pages here) are stored in sqlite locally, offline-available, optionally syncing with a remote" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49722553)) "It's open source, uses SQLite, and does automatic daily and weekly backups." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827553))
- Usable as a website from other devices (2 comments): "I love being able to use Trilium "as a website" to check out my notes on other's devices" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902525)) "Great server and client both." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49427481))

## What people warn about

- Dislikes how notes are stored (1 comments): "the way they save/store the notes is actually one of the things I dislike about it even though I love the application itself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180945))
- Not an outliner (1 comments): "far too busy, and it’s not an outliner" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48910607))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Obsidian](https://hackerapproved.com/p/obsidian.md): 447 recommend
- [Org mode](https://hackerapproved.com/p/org-mode.md): 175 recommend
- [Notion](https://hackerapproved.com/p/notion.md): 91 recommend
- [Logseq](https://hackerapproved.com/p/logseq.md): 52 recommend
- [Apple Notes](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apple-notes.md): 39 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Trilium Notes", https://hackerapproved.com/p/trilium-notes/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).