What are good free or self-hosted alternatives to OneNote for sysadmin notes?
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MapleOrbit42
I currently keep my technical notes and learning material in a work-managed OneNote account, but I want a separate place for personal notes and things I'm studying. I'd like something with features similar to OneNote, including the ability to paste screenshots and keep them with the related notes. Free or self-hosted options are preferred, since I don't want another monthly subscription. What tools are you using and how do you handle syncing or backups?
Answers
Take a look at Joplin if you want something closer to a traditional notebook application. It has desktop and mobile clients, notebooks, attachments, image pasting, and encryption. You can sync through a supported storage provider or run your own sync server, so it doesn’t require a subscription. It’s a good fit if you want a more structured OneNote-like experience rather than building your own workflow around plain Markdown files.
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Obsidian is probably the most commonly recommended option for this. It stores everything as regular Markdown files, supports pasted screenshots and attachments, and has a huge plugin ecosystem. You can keep the vault on a normal cloud drive, use Git, or set up Syncthing instead of paying for the official sync service. The files remain easy to open with other editors later, which is a big advantage over proprietary databases.
QuietHarbor19: I use it for daily logs, meeting notes, commands, runbooks, and documentation. It takes a little setup to decide where attachments should go, but after that screenshots work very smoothly.
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If you’re comfortable with developer tools, plain Markdown files in a Git repository are hard to beat. You get version history, searchable text, easy backups, and no lock-in. Obsidian, VS Code, or another Markdown editor can provide a nicer interface, while Git handles synchronization and rollback. Just be careful not to commit passwords, private keys, or confidential company information.
GoldenRook63: This is my setup too. A small amount of YAML frontmatter makes it easier to categorize and search notes, while screenshots can live in an attachments folder beside the Markdown files.
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For a browser-based, self-hosted setup, TriliumNext is worth checking out. It provides a hierarchical notebook structure, rich text, code snippets, images, links, and a web interface, so you can access it from different machines without syncing a local vault everywhere. BookStack, Wiki.js, and DokuWiki are also good choices if your notes are becoming more like organized documentation or a knowledge base.
SilverMango84: I run TriliumNext in a container and like it because the web interface avoids installing and syncing a client on every computer. I keep sensitive credentials and secrets somewhere separate rather than putting them in the exposed instance.
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AmberQuill31: Joplin is what I settled on because the self-hosted sync option is straightforward. My only annoyance is that some of the markup behavior can feel intrusive when I just want plain text.