Ask HN: Notion or TiddlyWiki for free a * personal * wiki? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Notion or TiddlyWiki for free a * personal * wiki?

12 pointsNerDProgrammer12 comments

A bit of backgroud, I have been searching for a well suited personal wiki for some time. I am a programmer and I am well versed with linux and open source. Over the course of searching for the perfect software for my purposes, I came across Notion and TiddlyWiki. Notion(www.notion.so/) and TiddlyWiki(https://tiddlywiki.com/) both look super good for a personal knowledge base. Looking at the feature sets, both of them look highly customisable. For my purposes, I have been fascinated by Zettelkasten and hence, I was trying for a software which can be linked to it, to Roam or Obsidian or something else. I plan on keeping a personal wiki and then taking out core ideas from them into my zattlekasten.

Notion being great out of the both wihtout the need to do many things to make it useful. Great sync feature and unlimited storage for a free Personal plan.

TiddlyWiki on the other hand also has great features and amazing customisability. It's open source, so it's more flexbile if one knows how to code. But setting up TiddlyWiki has a learning curve.

So, what's the take of the HN community over Notion or TiddlyWiki, which one do you prefer and why so ? Here I am trying to especially look for a software for keeping a personal wiki.

If you have some other alternative to the following two, please feel free to share.

Zim Wiki[1] is amazing as a personal wiki. Loads of good official plugins and unofficial. Everything stored as text and organised in folders. Supports code highlighting, pasting images, tasks, journal, links (internal and external), back links, version control, etc. Just an all round brilliant piece of software.

1: https://zim-wiki.org/

Definately like zim, it's amazing and I can use it with vim also. Only con that stopped me for using it is that it doesn't have cross platform support, as I would also like to keep my wiki accessible on my android device. Thank you so much for the suggestion ! :)

In the same boat myself. Been using Notion for a decent bit now. I like it for a great many things, but wiki-style knowledge management just isn't one of them.

TW, on the other hand, excels at this.

You're right on all accounts. Notion is a slicker experience right out of the box. TW takes some fiddling to set it up in a way that you really enjoy using. And, it still has pain points. The editing experience is not my favorite, switching in and out of edit mode.

But, it absolutely shines at Zettlekasten and networked thought. In addition, several recent TW projects have really upped the value for this. Check out the Krystal theme to essentially recreate Andy's Notes. Then, add the Streams plugin to get easier outlining functionality for quick creation. I like this much better than what i was attempting in Notion. Backlinks and transfusion are crucial to networked, non-linear thinking, in my experience.

Yeah, as a programmer TW makes much more sense to me as I am not locked in by what I get, I can add additional functionality as and when I require.

There's also some things about notion that are starting to bother me, like the startup times of the application are insane, even if i want to just save a quick link, I cannot add tags to it. The out of customisability and freedom are great and definately appreciate what they have done to make it so much simpler to use for just about anyone, but sometimes the lock in just annoys a bit too.

Thank you so much for the Krytal theme!!!

Since you're a programmer and value customisability & open-source, have you thought about trying emacs org-mode?

I was also in a similar position trying to decide between TiddlyWiki, Notion, Evernote, OneNote, Confluence, etc, for a personal knowledge base, but eventually settled on org-mode. Lots of people use it for managing TODOs, planning, and organising things, but I use it as a personal knowledge base.

org-mode out of the box supports hierarchical note taking with headings and links to other files or headings. You can also use org-roam (https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam) to get something like a Roam or Zettelkasten workflow (with backlinks etc) without having to use separate software (since you said "I plan on keeping a personal wiki and then taking out core ideas from them into my zattlekasten" maybe you will find this useful). If your notes include references/links to academic papers, then you'll love org-ref (bibtex integration).

If you're interested, I'd recommend having a play about with vanilla emacs and the Doom Emacs configuration (https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs).

It's definitely more work to set up than Notion, but much more customisable and you're in full control of your data (and can store everything under version control!). I've not used TiddlyWiki enough to form a useful opinion though.

Thank you very much for suggestion but as much as I respect emacs and have always seen org-mode as something really really amazing out of the box, I still haven't decided to switch or start using emacs yet. There's a plugin in vim which replicates similar functionality but it still is not as good as emacs. I don't mean to say anyone editor is better, but for practical reasons I am not trying org-mode now.

I really appericiate your suggestions and will keep it in mind when I might give emacs a shot.

If you want to self host, use a Tiddlywiki (the Node server). I advise starting by grabbing someone else's plugins. My setup is here: https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-to-t...

If you like the convenience of not self hosting, Notion is good!

That said, you probably want your wiki and zettelkasten to be the same thing.

Thank you so much for sharing your configuration!

since you mentioned Zettelkasten ,apart from Zettlr, if you are on mac, you can try this https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

Try this as well https://www.zotero.org/

take a look at fsnotes, it looks like it hits a sweet spot amongst many other apps, but it may be apple only, but uses plain text or markdown so I imagine easily flexible

I’m using Zettlr. I’m liking it.

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