Side-by-side

Trilium vs Jan

TriliumJan

	Trilium Build a self-hosted second brain and personal wiki. Visit	Jan Run open-source AI chatbots offline on your own computer. Visit
Votes	0	0
Pricing	Free	Free
Category	Note Taking	Chatbots
Tags	practical-ossopen-sourceself-hostedknowledge	practical-ossopen-sourceself-hostedoffline
Best for	—	—
Pros	Handles very large knowledge bases (100,000+ notes) with a deep, cloneable note tree Attributes, scripting, and a REST API enable powerful automation and custom organization Rich editor plus specialized note types: canvas, mind maps, relation maps, and geo maps Self-hostable with sync, per-note encryption, and OpenID/TOTP login Actively maintained community continuation (TriliumNext) of the original project	Runs LLMs fully offline on your own hardware, so conversations stay private by default Simple point-and-click model downloads from Hugging Face, no command line required Genuinely open source under the permissive Apache-2.0 license Exposes an OpenAI-compatible local API server (localhost:1337) for wiring into other apps Optionally connects to cloud providers and supports MCP for agent-style tool use
Cons	Steep learning curve and a power-user, feature-dense interface AGPL-3.0 license may limit some commercial or embedded reuse Self-hosting a sync server adds setup and maintenance overhead AI/LLM integration is relatively new and secondary to the core note-taking features	Local model quality depends heavily on your RAM and GPU; small models are far weaker than ChatGPT or Claude Decent performance effectively needs 16GB+ RAM and ideally a supported GPU Still maturing, with a fairly high open issue count and occasional rough edges Building from source on Windows is involved and requires a full compiler toolchain

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