Trilium Notes — The Complete Guide: A Hierarchical Knowledge Base for Large Engineering Notebooks
Trilium Notes is a program for notes and a personal knowledge base in a tree structure. Each note can hold sub-notes, labels and relations to other notes — a structure that suits a large engineering notebook: procedures, standard details, lessons learned from projects and code snippets.
Trilium Notes
TriliumNext community
A hierarchical knowledge base for large engineering notebooks — code, canvas, diagrams, encryption and self-hosted sync.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Note types — rich text, Markdown, code, canvas, Mermaid diagrams, mind maps and spreadsheets.
- Full-text search — across the whole knowledge base.
- Revision history — go back to an earlier version of a note.
- Encryption — for sensitive notes.
- Sync — between computers through a server you host yourself.
What to know
Data is stored in an SQLite database rather than plain files, so backup and export need some attention. The project passed from its original developer to the TriliumNext community, which is now the official project. Licensed under AGPL-3.0, free for any use.
Related tools
For simpler notes with sync — Joplin. For notes kept as Markdown files — Obsidian. For mind maps — Freeplane.
Joplin
Joplin
Notes and to-do app with encrypted sync — site diaries, checklists and project documentation.
Get it from the vendorObsidian
Obsidian
A local knowledge base of Markdown files with links and a graph view — for project notes, design decisions and lessons learned.
Get it from the vendor
Freeplane
Freeplane team
Mind maps and tree structures — project breakdowns, fault trees, report planning and study summaries.
Get it from the vendor
Logseq
Logseq
Outliner-style notes and a daily journal kept as local text files — for meeting notes, tasks and technical know-how.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
For anyone whose notes no longer fit in a single folder, Trilium provides structure, search and links — as long as you look after backups.