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OpenKnowledge

open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

Details

External ID
48675435
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
OpenKnowledge
Website domain
github.com
Launched
June 25, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
381
Upvotes percentile
0.9863387978142076
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

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 other agents. Available as MacOS app or Web UI+CLI. Fully free/local and OSS.We built this because we wanted a Notion-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 WYSWIG 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 writing4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first usersOSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/treesOn 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.

Enrichment

Theme
AI agent frameworks and developer tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Vertical SaaS
Audience
B2C
AI stance
AI-native
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
open source ai-powered note-taking and knowledge management
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes Building a WYSIWYG markdown editor with Electron/Tauri, TipTap/ProseMirror, and direct agent API calls (Anthropic/OpenAI) is a standard vibe-coding project.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Obsidian, Emacs

Concerns raised: Missing native markdown color highlighting support, Inconsistent UX across operating systems (scrolling, selection, hotkeys), Real-time collaboration via CRDT not yet available, requires Git sync, In-app chat experience needs improvement, Mac-centric design approach

Feature requests: Better in-app chat experience, Native markdown text color highlighting, Centralized CRDT server for real-time collaboration, Linux and Windows native apps beyond CLI/WebUI

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 126 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #3 of 127 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 218 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

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