Questions, answered without the marketing voice

Nodum is a free, open-source, web-based knowledge base. You write markdown notes, connect them with [[wikilinks]], get backlinks automatically, and explore the whole vault as a GPU-rendered knowledge graph. It is MIT licensed, runs in any modern browser, and can be self-hosted with one Docker Compose command.

Yes. Nodum is free and open source under the MIT licence, with no paid tier holding features back and no per-seat pricing. You can use the hosted instance or run your own, in which case the only cost is the server you run it on.

Yes — the whole stack. The FastAPI backend and the Next.js frontend are both MIT licensed and published in one public repository, with no open-core split and no separate proprietary server. You can read it, fork it, audit it and run it.

Nodum is Latin for 'knot' or 'node'. The name is the argument: notes are the knots, and the value is the rope between them — the links, not the individual pages.

No. Nodum runs in any modern browser, so a locked-down work laptop, a Chromebook, a borrowed machine and a phone all reach the same vault with nothing installed. It can also be installed as a PWA if you want it in its own window.

People who write a lot and want their notes connected: researchers, engineers, students, writers and anyone building a long-lived personal knowledge base. It suits you particularly if you want the software to be open source and the notes to be plain files you can take elsewhere.

Yes. Zip your Obsidian vault folder and import it from Settings → Vault → Import. Nodum resolves wikilinks across the whole batch rather than file by file, unwraps a redundant root folder, detects .obsidian config directories, imports .md, .markdown and .txt as notes, and brings PDFs in as attachments plus a note of their extracted text.

Yes, at any time. Export produces a folder-true zip of .md files — the same shape an Obsidian vault is, and the same thing Nodum's importer accepts. There is also a versioned REST API and an MCP server if you want programmatic access.

No. Obsidian plugins are written against Obsidian's own Node-level API, while Nodum's plugin API is capability-scoped and runs inside an opaque-origin sandboxed iframe — a deliberately different and narrower contract. If a specific plugin is central to how you work, Obsidian remains the right tool.

Export to markdown first. Notion exports as Markdown & CSV with subpages; strip the page ids it appends to filenames before importing. Evernote exports as .enex, which a converter such as Yarle or evernote2md turns into markdown. Then zip the folder and import it into a Nodum vault.

Yes — global and local, rendered on WebGL2 through a GPU force simulation, so it stays smooth into the tens of thousands of notes. Node size follows link count, unresolved links appear as ghost nodes you can click to create, and folder colours carry through from the explorer into the graph.

Obsidian-compatible markdown: wikilinks with paths, aliases, heading targets and embeds; the full callout set; YAML frontmatter; GFM tables and footnotes; task lists; KaTeX maths inline and block; Mermaid diagrams; and syntax-highlighted code fences. The editor is CodeMirror 6 with live preview, source and reading modes.

Yes. Nodum has real-time collaborative editing per note using Yjs CRDTs over websockets, with presence, and it works across multiple API workers rather than only in a single-process deployment.

Yes, at two levels. Any note can get an unlisted public share link, revocable at any time. Any vault can be published as a public site at /s/your-slug, with working links between the published notes. Both are included rather than sold as a separate product.

Yes. Every save is snapshotted server-side, and you can browse and restore previous versions of a note from its version history. This is cheap to offer precisely because Nodum is server-based.

Yes, and they run on your own API key. The assistant searches, reads, creates and extends notes in your vault, streams its replies with live tool status, and works with Claude, OpenAI, Gemini or Qwen. Keys are encrypted at rest and can be set per vault.

Yes. Nodum is a Model Context Protocol server at /api/v1/mcp with 36 tools, using the same services and ownership checks as the app. Point Claude Code, Claude Desktop or Cursor at it with a per-user token and the AI can create vaults, write and link notes, colour folders, search, import and export.

No. Nodum does not train models on your notes. The assistant sends only what a request needs to the model provider whose key you supplied, and if you self-host and point it at a local model endpoint, nothing leaves your network at all.

Yes. Alongside the links you write by hand, Nodum surfaces semantically related notes using pgvector cosine similarity over note embeddings, which finds connections you never made explicitly.

Yes, with one command. ./compose.sh prod up -d --build brings up the API, PostgreSQL, Redis, MinIO and a Caddy edge proxy that provisions and renews TLS certificates automatically. Caddy is the only container that binds a host port, and schema migrations run in a one-shot container everything else waits on.

A machine with Docker or Podman, a domain pointed at it, and about an evening for the first deployment. A small VPS is sufficient for personal use. Deployment and backup runbooks are in the repository, and a smoke script drives signup, note creation and an attachment round-trip through the real proxy chain.

Nodum is multi-tenant with ownership checks on every path, argon2id password hashing, refresh-token rotation with reuse defence, and rate-limited auth endpoints. If you want the strongest answer, self-host it: the notes then sit on hardware you control, under no third party's terms of service.