Evernote vs Siyuan
SiYuan is a direct open-source note-taking and personal knowledge management alternative with multimedia editing, organization, search, web clipping, templates, and self-hosted deployment.
Decision guide
The practical reasons to choose either option, based on documented capabilities.
Choose Siyuan if
- Self-hosting and control of your data are a priority and Siyuan covers your required workflows. Its source code uses the AGPL-3.0 license.
Stay with Evernote if
- You rely on capabilities that are different, missing, or not yet documented for Siyuan.
Feature fit
What Siyuan covers
- Multimedia and structured note editing
- Knowledge organization with links, attributes, and templates
- Web clipping
- PDF annotation
- AI-assisted writing and question-answering
- Cross-platform desktop and mobile applications
- Export and self-hosted deployment
What’s different or missing
- Document scanning is not explicitly documented as a capture workflow, although Tesseract OCR is listed.
- Cross-device synchronization and offline access are not explicitly documented in the supplied README.
- Real-time collaboration, calendar-linked notes, and tasks within notes are not documented.
- Audio capture, transcription, and AI-powered natural-language search are not documented.
Project snapshot
- GitHub stars
- 45,825
- Contributors
- 118
- Language
- TypeScript
- Last commit
- Aug 12, 2026
- Latest release
- Aug 15, 2026
Categories: Content Management Systems, AI Assistants, Business Intelligence, Data Integration, Document Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Note Taking, File Sync & Storage, Calendars & Scheduling, Task Management, Search Engines, Project Management, Digital Whiteboards
Sources and editorial review8 linked sources
Public documentation supports this comparison. Automation assists collection and classification; editorial standards and corrections remain the responsibility of Kris.
An open-source, privacy-first, self-hosted knowledge workspace where humans and AI agents work together
repository description · github.comSiYuan is a privacy-first personal knowledge management system, supporting fine-grained block-level reference and Markdown WYSIWYG.
readme · github.comWeb clipping; PDF Annotation link
readme · github.comBlock-level reference and two-way links
readme · github.comAI writing and Q/A chat via OpenAI API
readme · github.comAndroid/iOS/HarmonyOS App
readme · github.comDocker deployment
readme · github.comExport ... Standard Markdown with assets; PDF, Word and HTML
readme · github.com
