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

53 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by engomez

18 Comments

vitorbaptistaa

10 minutes ago

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.

iamacyborg

17 minutes ago

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...

engomez

13 minutes ago

Two bits:

1. Name collison happenstance. We'd locked in the npm package and domains prior to their announcement.

2. Our templates are Open Knowledge Format compliant and we have an explicit quickstart around making an OKF knowledge base. You can think of OKF as a format/standard for the content, and OpenKnowledge (our app) as an IDE/editor for any type of markdown based content.

pcthrowaway

29 minutes ago

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!

engomez

16 minutes ago

Got it. MCP Server and CLI is agent-agnostic, so should work with local models/harnesses, but we'll look into more explicit docs around this.

What IDE or harness do you use? We'll take a look.

pcthrowaway

9 minutes ago

Personally I just want to see more support for local LLMs. I haven't been doing much coding lately but am interested in setting up Qwen 3.6 if I can obtain the hardware

montroser

21 minutes ago

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?

engomez

10 minutes ago

Right now you'd simply prompt it. Working on more direct integration. Turns out they don't make event based back and forth easy.

claudiacsf

4 hours ago

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

engomez

4 hours ago

Looking into Slite now to check. With OpenKnowledge, the content is just markdown files on-disk, so there shouldn't be anything exclusionary about it. Not sure how/if Slite handles markdown files. Will take a look.

Natfan

38 minutes ago

macos only? shame.

engomez

35 minutes ago

CLI + Web viewer are available for Linux and Windows. We tested it and works pretty well.

devCassius

4 hours ago

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

engomez

4 hours ago

Since Obsidian is just markdown, you can just open an Obsidian vault with OpenKnowledge. We made it so that most Obsidian syntax is supported, like wikilinks.

For Notion, we don't have a migration tool, but you can try the export to markdown approach.

Recommend trying it to get a feel, and if are looking to migrate and facing friction let me know details.