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Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion
An open-source, AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion, offering direct agent integrations and a true WYSIWYG UI for team collaboration on markdown files.
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AI Executive Synthesis
An open-source, AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion, offering direct agent integrations and a true WYSIWYG UI for team collaboration on markdown files.
The market for knowledge management and collaborative documentation tools remains fragmented, with users seeking specific feature combinations. OpenKnowledge targets a clear pain point: the lack of seamless AI agent integration and true WYSIWYG editing in existing markdown-centric solutions like Obsidian, while Notion lacks markdown focus. Its open-source, local-first, and privacy-centric approach, leveraging Git for versioning, addresses data sovereignty concerns prevalent in enterprise adoption. The direct integration with LLMs for "AI Second Brain" and RAG scenarios positions it for developers and technical teams requiring advanced AI assistance within their documentation workflow. This product capitalizes on the growing demand for AI-augmented productivity tools, particularly where data privacy and customizability are paramount. The challenge lies in competing with established ecosystems and ensuring robust, user-friendly AI integrations.
Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge (https://openknowledge.ai/), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and other agents. Available as MacOS app or Web UI+CLI. Fully free/local and OSS.We built this because we wanted a Notion-like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true WYSWIG UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins.So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes shape as:1. A MacOS app with a file navigator, the WYSIWYG editor, and link explorer.2. Integrations with the Claude, Codex, and Cursor desktop apps. The agents can open an OpenKnowledge editor within their embedded web browsers for a side-by-side experience.3. Built-in mcps, skills, and RAG for LLM-wiki and “AI Second Brain” scenarios + spec writing4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first usersOSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/treesOn the architecture side, the interesting eng. challenges included:1. A pipeline to convert ProseMirror to markdown in a bidirectional lossless way. ProseMirror uses ASTs, which are not designed to have byte-fidelity.2. A dual-observer CRDT to keep the ProseMirror and markdown state in-sync.The CRDT + git also power a collaborative experience that shows what Agents are doing in the markdown, have undo/redo, and version history. The “Share” and cloud-sync functionality are geared for team collaboration. They feel “no-code” but leverage git/GitHub under the hood, which also means data stays fully private.In that spirit, we made OpenKnowledge open source for anybody who’s curious or who’d like to contribute.We’re actively thinking about plugins/extensibility and what’s next. If you have suggestions or feedback, would love to hear it.
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Deep-Dive FAQs
What is OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion?
OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion is analyzed by our AI as: An open-source, AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion, offering direct agent integrations and a true WYSIWYG UI for team collaboration on markdown files.. It focuses on The market for knowledge management and collaborative documentation tools remains fragmented, with users seeking specific feature combinations. Ope...
Where did OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion originate?
Data for OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion was aggregated directly from the Hacker News community ecosystem, representing raw developer and early-adopter sentiment.
When was OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion publicly launched?
The initial public indexing or launch date for OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion within our tracked developer communities was recorded on June 26, 2026.
How popular is OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion?
OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion has achieved measurable traction, logging over 326 traction score and facilitating 156 recorded discussions or engagements.
Which technical categories define OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion?
Based on metadata extraction, OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion is categorized under topics such as: AI-first, WYSIWYG markdown editor, Claude, Codex.
Is OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion recognized by media or academic researchers?
Yes. It has been covered by media outlets like Github.com. This indicates the concept has reached a level of mainstream or scientific viability beyond just developer forums.
What are some commercial alternatives to OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion?
Our semantic intelligence engine identifies potential commercial alternatives in the SaaS space, such as Investor Updates, which offers overlapping value propositions.
How does the creator describe OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion?
The original author or development team describes the product as follows: "Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge (https://openknowledge.ai/), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and other agents. Avai..."
Community Voice & Feedback
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.
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
I'm getting tired of the "second brain" concept, it is mostly a hallucination of the human brain
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 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.
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...
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.
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...
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!
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