6,162 stars · MIT, read from /blob/main/LICENSE.md on 2026-09-27 after /blob/main/LICENSE returned 404; copyright 2022 Zef Hemel, no added conditions · 2.11.1 (2026-09-22), read from /releases/latest · Track this in Scout
A self-hosted personal knowledge base that keeps every page as a plain Markdown file in a folder you own, with links, search and live queries on top.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
SilverBullet is a self-hosted personal knowledge base reached through the browser. Every page is a plain Markdown file on disk, and on top of that it adds linking between pages, full-text search, templates, and a query layer that indexes pages so one page can display a live list drawn from the others.
What it is good for. Anyone who wants Notion-shaped features without a subscription or a lock-in. The strongest argument is what happens when you stop using it: the notes are still a folder of readable text files, so there is nothing to export. Scripting is done in a language called Lua, written directly inside the notes themselves, so commands and small automations live beside the content instead of in a plugin folder. It works offline in the browser too.
Worth knowing: this project changed its foundation. Until recently it was a Deno application. The repository root now carries Cargo.toml and Cargo.lock and no deno.json or package.json at all, and the README describes a Rust back end with a TypeScript client. Anything written about its Deno requirements is now out of date. Running it from the container image is unaffected.
- The data is plain Markdown in a plain folder. Readable in any editor, portable to any other tool, and there is nothing to export.
- Very small appetite. The install documentation says "a few hundred megabytes of RAM is sufficient" and that it runs on a Raspberry Pi.
- MIT with no carve-out, no paid edition and no limit on use.
- There is no password by default. The documentation says outright that "A single-space server with no credentials set is open to anyone who can reach it." Setting one in single-space mode means putting a username and password in plain text into an environment variable, and the documentation marks single-space mode as legacy. Do not expose it to the internet before you have read that page.
- The default container image includes a headless copy of Chromium, which makes it considerably larger than the "few hundred megabytes" figure suggests. A
-slimimage without Chromium exists, and no size is published for either. - There has been a lot of churn. The back end was rewritten from Deno to Rust and the scripting model was replaced, so older setups and third-party plugins face breaking migrations. There are 324 open issues.
- outline/outline
40,721 stars, a polished team wiki with proper permissions; a much larger thing to run, and the notes live in a database rather than as files.
Track this in Scout - siyuan-note/siyuan
45,942 stars, a block-based notebook with a desktop app and optional paid sync; more features, more structure imposed on you.
Track this in Scout - TriliumNext/Trilium
38,021 stars, a deep hierarchical notebook, now run by the community after the original author handed the repository over; it redirects from zadam/trilium.
Track this in Scout
docker run -d --restart unless-stopped \ --name silverbullet \ -p 3000:3000 \ -e SB_USER=yourname:yourpassword \ -v ./data:/data \ ghcr.io/silverbulletmd/silverbullet:latest
