--- title: "SumizAI vs Trilium Notes" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-trilium-notes.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a Trilium Notes alternative? SumizAI and Trilium Notes side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "trilium-notes", "alternative to Trilium Notes"] --- # SumizAI vs Trilium Notes Looking for a Trilium Notes alternative? SumizAI and Trilium Notes side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## What Trilium Notes is Trilium Notes (developed today as TriliumNext after the project was handed off by its original author to the community) is an open-source notebook built around a hierarchical note tree — any note can have any number of child notes, and the same note can appear in multiple places in the tree at once through cloning. This differs from a flat file list or simple wiki-style linking: Trilium treats hierarchical structure as the primary way to organize knowledge, supplemented by tags and attributes for more flexible categorization. Key features: The note tree with cloning lets the same note live in multiple branches of the hierarchy simultaneously, without duplicating content — a change in one place shows up everywhere. The attribute system (labels and relations) allows adding structured metadata to notes, which can later drive queries and dynamic views. The editor handles formatted text as well as plain Markdown, syntax-highlighted code, and hand-drawn sketches. Encryption on selected notes protects sensitive content with a password independent of the rest of the vault. Version history saves snapshots of changes, letting you roll back to an earlier version of a note after an accidental edit or deletion. Who it's for: Trilium appeals to people organizing a very large, deeply nested knowledge base — engineers documenting complex systems, researchers keeping multi-year project notes, self-hosting enthusiasts who want full control over their notebook's infrastructure. Users used to classic file managers and folder hierarchies who want that same logic applied to notes will find a tool closer to that mental model than flat, link-based systems. Use cases: In practice, Trilium works well for documenting a large software project, where each module gets its own branch in the note tree with sub-notes for API documentation, known issues, and architectural decisions. Someone keeping a research notebook clones the same note defining a key concept into several different topic branches, so it's available from every context without copying content. A team self-hosting their own infrastructure runs Trilium on their own server, keeping full control over data without depending on an outside cloud. Pricing and business model: Trilium is completely free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. There are no paid plans, subscriptions, or feature restrictions — all the code is publicly available, and users can self-host the app on their own server or run the desktop version locally. That model, typical of community-run AGPL projects, means no pressure to monetize at the expense of features, but also no official commercial support — help comes mainly from the community on GitHub. Limitations and what to watch for: The deeply nested tree structure, Trilium's main strength, takes time to get used to — a beginner used to simpler notebooks may feel overwhelmed by the number of organizational options. Self-hosting requires basic server knowledge, which can be a barrier for less technical users. Anyone migrating from a simpler tool should be warned that importing existing notes into Trilium's tree structure can be time-consuming if the source notebook had no hierarchy at all — it has to be built essentially from scratch, deciding which notes are parents and which are children. The project went through a maintainer transition (moving from the original Trilium to TriliumNext), which leads some users to watch its ongoing development a bit more cautiously. AI notes in a hierarchical tree: Trilium has no built-in AI model integration, but its flexible tree structure is well suited to manually organizing ai notes from conversations with an assistant — a whole branch can be dedicated to ai notes, with sub-branches by topic or project. Pasting a conversation fragment in as a new note and cloning it to the right places in the tree is possible, but entirely manual — there's no automatic mechanism that captures a conversation with an AI assistant and turns it into a ai notes entry without user intervention. Project evolution and community continuity: The transition from the original Trilium to TriliumNext under a new maintainer team is an example of how open source projects under the AGPL license can survive a change of lead developer without losing continuity — the code, the community, and users' existing vaults remain untouched; only who leads further development changes. For users building a knowledge base over many years, that's an important signal that the file format and the project itself stand a better chance of outlasting a typical commercial startup. Integration through API and scripts: Trilium exposes its own API along with a scripting mechanism that runs inside notes, letting technical users build custom automations — from generating reports to syncing with external data sources. That programmability is rare among notebooks and makes Trilium an interesting platform for people who want to go beyond standard interface features. What's worth checking before choosing: Before building a large note hierarchy in Trilium, it's worth testing the cloning feature on a small sample to understand how it affects content organization, and checking whether self-hosting on your own server is a realistic option for you, since an officially hosted cloud isn't the app's primary mode of operation. Bottom line: Trilium Notes is a powerful, hierarchical notebook for people who value tree structure and full control over their data through self-hosting. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land in such a structure automatically should consider a tool built specifically around that workflow. Comparison with SumizAI: Trilium Notes and SumizAI differ fundamentally in organizational model and content source. Trilium builds a deep hierarchy of notes manually created and cloned by the user, with full control through self-hosting. SumizAI generates ai notes directly from a conversation with an AI model, saving them as plain Markdown files in a vault the user owns, with no need to manually build a tree structure. Anyone who wants an elaborate, manually curated knowledge base with full control over hosting will pick Trilium; anyone who wants ai notes to arise automatically from an AI conversation without manual cloning and organizing will find SumizAI a simpler tool for that one purpose. **Key facts** - Price: Free - License: Open Source - Category: Note-taking, Todo List Manager ## What SumizAI is A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk. A vault is a directory holding `base.md`, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a `notes/` folder with one `.md` file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist. The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used. ## Where they differ - AlternativeTo's description of Trilium Notes does not mention an AI model. That is the whole starting point in SumizAI: you have a conversation with a model on your own API key, and the answers worth keeping become notes without you filing them. - Trilium Notes is open source (AGPL-3.0), and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for Trilium Notes. The guarantee SumizAI offers instead is structural rather than legal: the notes are Markdown files in a folder you chose, so they open in any editor whether or not the application is running. - AlternativeTo's description of Trilium Notes does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard `.md` files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them. - Trilium Notes can be self-hosted. SumizAI has nothing to host on the desktop — the vault is a folder on your machine — and if you want the model on your own hardware too, a local Ollama is one of the seven providers it speaks to. - AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Trilium Notes. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-trilium-notes.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-trilium-notes.html)