// the take
SiYuan is a block-based, self-hosted knowledge management app (think Notion/Roam/Obsidian hybrid) with WYSIWYG Markdown editing, bidirectional links, and increasingly AI/agent integration via MCP. It's aimed at privacy-conscious note-takers who want local-first storage but still want sync, flashcards, and AI features without handing data to a SaaS.
Genuinely mature project with 46k+ stars, active commit history, and a real ecosystem of satellite repos (editor engine, mobile apps, plugin API, data repo/sync). The CLI is unusually complete for a note app — full CRUD, SQL queries, search, export, all scriptable with JSON output, which is rare and useful for anyone wanting to automate their notes. Docker/Kubernetes/Unraid/TrueNAS deployment docs are detailed and clearly battle-tested, including OIDC auth support and PUID/PGID permission handling that a lot of self-hosted projects get wrong.
AGPLv3 plus a paid-member tier for cloud sync and some AI features means this isn't fully free for the features people actually want (cross-device sync, cloud storage) — read the pricing page before assuming it's all free. Third-party sync disks (Dropbox/Syncthing-style) are explicitly unsupported and can corrupt data, locking you into their own sync mechanism. Docker deployment has real limitations (no desktop/mobile app connection, no PDF/Word export, no Markdown import) that aren't obvious until you've already set it up. Data format is proprietary JSON .sy files per block, not plain Markdown files on disk, so exporting out cleanly if you want to leave is more friction than tools like Obsidian.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →