Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately couldn't see how it improves my experience over Obsidian or VS Code.

The fact that I have to juggle between OpenKnowledge and Codex to engage the AI, while also accepting a barebones Obsidian, is a real bummer. From what I can tell, you are saving me a few key strokes with moving prompts around. What I really want is the AI to live IN the app, like VS Code, and then move around the documents like it is Obsidian. I'll accept a plain terminal, but a pretty UI would feel like a better fit. My sense is that the new value add here is a set of skills and mcp servers, which probably already exist for Obsidian, or could more productively be spun up. I looked at the plugins again in Obsidian and found Claudian, which lets me bring my local models and Codex in the right pane. This is perfect, so sorry your app is not for me (yet), but thanks for getting me to look again at my tooling.

I want to throw my vote in for local models. Gemma4-31b is working well for me on these types of tasks, and not having an easy way to plug that in is a deal breaker. Embeddings should certainly have a local option, as they are cheap to compute. For what it is worth, I use LMStudio which supports OpenAI and Anthropic compatible api endpoints, so it should be easy to wire in.

A big caveat, I'm not trying to share my vault with other people, and I can see making that pain go away being worth switching. That said, I feel like you're targeting a weird market, where you want people technical enough to use LLMs and GitHub, but not so technical they can't customize a shared environment.

I would switch if the whole experience was self contained and "clean." Right now, it feels like a well dressed wrapper for pretty basic functionality.

Fully local, but can't integrate with any local LLM?

I do think a fully OSS Obsidian-like that syncs natively is an impressive accomplishment, though the usefulness of this is limited with OSX being the only supported platform. If an Android app is in the works I'll definitely follow the project!

Congratulations on the launch. It looks neat!

On a side note, I find it interesting that a few recent projects are going for the Open Knowledge name. The Open Knowledge Foundation (https://okfn.org) is one of the first/largest proponents of the open data movement (think of it as a Free Software Foundation but for data, not software). They started in 2004 and developed many of the open data licenses and widely used infrastructure tools like CKAN (an open data portal platform).

Nothing to add, just found it interesting.

Disclaimer: I worked there for a few years.

You should just integrate with pi.dev, like I did for https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw (which has replaced Obsidian for me). I too integrated a terminal and a WYSIWYG Markdown editor (as well as plugins for a mindmap, kanban, etc.)

For ages I've been looking for a way to easily share & sync a simple knowledgebase (HTML/MD and other files in folders) with my team (= including non-technical people), using Git as the sync/versioning layer, without it being too technical, and without getting vendor lock-in with expensive & unnecessarily complex cloud-based platforms.

Having built-in AI integration without relying on sketchy plugins would be the cherry on top (although, seriously missing the option to connect with any openai-compatible LLM provider like someone else mentioned here).

Seems like this might almost offer exactly that? I'll have to try it out...

I'm getting tired of the "second brain" concept, it is mostly a hallucination of the human brain

Is this following the Open Knowledge Format proposed by Google earlier this month or just a name collision?

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-th...

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-th...

Did you look at the OKF repo from Google? Open Knowledge seems to be a common term these days for similar solutions. I think OKF is more of the protocol for wiki-for-llm while you have more of the bells and whistles

This is interesting and a promising start. I gave this a shot.

I'd love to see support for Bases and obsidian plugins that are typescript/open source anyway - I use a few such as excalidraw/mermaid etc.

I also want to use my local model.

When collaborating on Notion, we had to pop into Google docs for comments, suggestions and history. I see this as important even when working with AI on something.

I'm working on a PKM myself, and while wysiwyg won't be my first priority and I'm aiming for a more hackable surface, this is very interesting and I'll most likely take inspiration from it for integrating AI workflows into my notes

I recently moved from Obsidian to a self-hosted Outline. Primarily because I needed an easy to use solution for sharing a knowledgebase with the team. Obsidian doesn't do team. Notion appears to, but Outline fit the bill so well, and was free. It has an MCP server, just like Notion.

I do wish that there was a way to provide filesystem level access to the markdown files to an AI agent. I think that might be faster.

Electron apps tend to fall down in the minutiae of the little things that native apps get right (around things like selection, scrolling, various small affordances across various levels). Would love to see something like this be more native app upfront, than starting out with something that will always leave that top 10% of what makes a nice feeling app unobtainable.

You win hard on this if you have the best possible UX that feels natural to drive. You just also ran if not because obsidian/notion etc. are already there (and have the people to put into those random edge cases that make electron apps bad).

The feature I am waiting for in all of these editors is integrating 'red lining' as a channel for LLM input. This is the best interface for working on a text. https://www.roughdraft.md/ does the core idea pretty well - but is not well integrated with the rest (browsing, etc).

Nice approach.

Personally I’ve been trying very hard to migrate away from git+Obsidian project setup according to the OpenAI Harness Engineering. It works wonderfully in Codex Desktop.

The only gotcha - I want to share knowledge bases with the team in a way that is:

(1) versioned (a la git, not Notion) (2) usable from any chat (a la MCP) (3) basic access controls for team setup. (4) works through the interface that optimizes accuracy and token use across agentic architectures and LLMs.

Funnily enough, 4 is the easiest one (I have a platform for agent training and verification where I publish fun challenges for agents in simulated worlds around agentic commerce and personal OSes. With 98M agentic interactions recorded, that is already enough information for tuning)

Still figuring 1 and 3, though.

I don't understand how Obsidian, a collection of markdown files, isn't already AI friendly. It's hard for me to imagine a more AI-friendly but still usable way to organize your notes.

I wish (in general, not a criticism of this project) there was some way for claude.ai to write to a version controlled KB, ie from chats in the mobile app

This is mostly a Claude problem

So far the closest thing to what I want is using Claude Code in the mobile app to work in some repo and tell it not to write code, just have a discussion, and then eventually ask it to write the md doc or whatever.

I can then add that GitHub repo to a claude.ai 'Project' files and chats within the project can see the contents, but can't write back to it unfortunately.

The “not quite WYSIWYG” of Obsidian is its selling point. Typing ### for heading 3 is what I love about Obsidian.

It's rather easy to ask claude code to make you plugins, although you need to instruct it to break the sandbox in which Obsidian run and I think I'm currently hardcoding some paths.

e.g. I have a plugin that when triggered reads a text and asks the LLM whether there are unclear points and unwarranted leaps of reasoning.

PSA: If your comment includes a variant of "I like releasing directly AI in my vault..." or "My vault as context is required..." I ignore your comment :D

I wonder how it compares to https://github.com/refactoringhq/tolaria They look similarly scoped. I haven't used it yet and it's great that there is more choice now

Good point. But doesn’t Obsidian also support a CLI? In theory, wouldn’t that also work well with agents? I’m still curious what pain points this project solves compared with Obsidian or Notion.

How do you make money, and how will you pay for your salaries?

I see no knowledge graph kinda of things which any replacement of obsidian needs. Currently its probably just a less good obsidian copilot (but at least its open source)

Got this toast/notification message from your desktop app.

> Added ok to your PATH — managed block in ~/.zshrc, ~/.config/fish/conf.d/open-knowledge.fish.

Took a while to see that 'ok' is the name of your product.

Warning for those who use Codex: when I started this, it trashed my Codex config.toml file. I'm sure that it'll be fixed upstream soon, not a deal breaker, just a warning for anyone installing it right this second. Thankfully I had backups.

i think the gap that needs to be bridged between obsidian and notion is:

obsidian: great for LLMs (local markdown files), bad for collaboration (no multiplayer features like multi editor, comments)

notion: not great for LLMs (network round trips, block-based editing), great for collaboration

I've been using my opencode go subscription for Obsidian, saving my Claude sub for actual coding. Any reason why it's limited to Codex, Claude, and Cursor?

Consider making the first image in the readme either static, or move slowly enough that there's reasonable dwell time to understand the UI when it's done with rendering. Right now there's nowhere on the gif that you can focus on to understand that part of the app in any detail, so it's basically a flashy box of randomness.

Good to see CodeMirror and yjs in there.

Rant warning (sorry OP but I have to vent somehow) : AI-first is the proof that things didn't change that much. It's a bit like "Roomba-compatible" flat. If somehow you have to changes your ways for a tool to work then clearly that tool isn't that flexible. It's perfectly fine but to me it's quite tiring when it's about the most hyped industry ever funded.

How does this integrate with Git? is the CRDT stack mainly for syncronizing locally? and then "snapshotted" into git? Or how would the team collaboration part of this work?

I would love to try it, can I sign up for a Linux desktop app notify-list?

Looks solid. The Obsidian migration path is honestly the make-or-break.

I'm a sucker for pretty UIs. I already have a company-mandated knowledge base tool, Slite, can they be used together?

The signature figure on the repo shows file contents alongside a chat window. Is this actually supported by the app? I can't figure out how to open a chat window in the app without handing off to an external AI app.

macos only? shame.

how does the collab work locally. do you add provision for connecting to a yjs sync server? or do you have plan to add this option as premium only in future?

So it's just a Electron editor + "open in %agent" button... I don't see any reasons to use it instead of. obsidian + my agents.

Neat, trying it out now. Are the Open Knowledge skills actually needed, if this is just markdown and folders? The skills are large, I'd prefer not filling up context.

Sounds cool. How do agents know what else is going on in the doc? They have an embedded browser and they do like mutation observer type stuff? Or does the integration do polling?

Looks like a really good alternative of obsidian

Is there a migration path from Obsidian or Notion? Switching costs are usually what keeps people locked in.

It's crazy that AI is goo enough for me to just write my own custom version of stuff like this nowadays.

Nothing personal, but there genuinely ought to be consequences for using "open source" in the context of something like this tied to proprietary AI services.

Local models should be the first choice in that framing.

Looks really neat. Though, it does feel like "yet another KM app" without significant innovations.

Would it possible to support Org Mode?

I think it looks great!

mac only? dead on arrival.

steam machine means everyone is moving to linux.

Looks neat.

how does this differ from Rowboat ?

Interesting using tiptap with codemirror, i guess to get around that tiptap doesn’t really support html very well but a shame that we need to use two editors to get the complete experience. Still, nicely done!

Looks powerful. If you focus on notion-like elements you’ll go far. The product roadmap is there—their pricing is nuts.

Just my personal pref with your roadmap, don't waste time on the electron app, I would never use it. A webapp definitely with OpenCode support big on the list as well.

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Nice. the frontmatter question is the one i'd want answered before trusting it: when an agent edits a file does it round-trip YAML frontmatter and nested code fences cleanly, or does that stuff get mangled? every "wysiwyg markdown" tool i've tried falls apart there. Also is the CLI cross-platform or mac-only like the app?

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