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

51 points by engomez ago | 17 comments
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 Cursor. Available as MacOS app or CLI. Fully free/local and OSS (https://github.com/inkeep/open-knowledge).

We built this because we wanted a “Google docs” 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 “what you see is what you get” 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 writing

4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first users

OSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/trees

On 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.

vitorbaptistaa |next [-]

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 |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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.

iamacyborg |root |parent [-]

Neat, I’ve created a couple OKF based knowledge bases, this looks like a nice way to work with them.

https://github.com/jacquescorbytuech/crm-open-knowledge-wiki

https://github.com/jacquescorbytuech/running-knowledge-base

pcthrowaway |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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 |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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 |next |previous [-]

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

engomez |root |parent [-]

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.

engomez |root |parent [-]

tl;dr: Slite supports import/export Markdown files, so not a native "interop".

Links: https://slite.slite.page/p/5XOO7_tII0D87T/Importing-Files, https://slite.slite.page/p/PxKfPvLrLHj07O/Exporting-Your-Doc...

Recommend trying it for some personal notes/specs/etc. -- can be used independently.

Natfan |next |previous [-]

macos only? shame.

engomez |root |parent |next [-]

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

beanjuiceII |root |parent |previous [-]

yea pass..

devCassius |next |previous [-]

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

engomez |root |parent [-]

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.

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