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Comparison · Collab
Readwise vs Trilium Notes
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Readwise and Trilium Notes — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Readwise vs Trilium Notes: at a glance
What is Readwise?
Two big swings in July and August, and since then Readwise has been paying the bill.
Readwise shipped a full mobile rewrite in late July and library-wide Ghostreader a fortnight later, and the weekly changelogs since have been almost entirely repair. The August 28 week is typical: thirteen fixes against five real improvements, spread across EPUB handling, chart and video embeds, Ghostreader chat on both mobile platforms, and Boox e-ink devices. The one consistent addition each week is parsing coverage for more publishers.
What is Trilium Notes?
Trilium spent a year adding what notes can hold; now it is fixing what happens to them.
Trilium Notes is a self-hosted hierarchical note application with an unusually broad content model — text, code, canvases, mind maps, and since 0.103.0 spreadsheets with formulas and OCR-extracted text from images, PDFs and Office files. Releases are large, quarterly, and explicit about breakage. The current release turns that attention inward: the database itself becomes something you can measure, clean, repair, and restore.
Readwise vs Trilium Notes: editorial side-by-side
Readwise
6.3COLLAB
Two big swings in July and August, and since then Readwise has been paying the bill.
◆ Current state
Readwise shipped a full mobile rewrite in late July and library-wide Ghostreader a fortnight later, and the weekly changelogs since have been almost entirely repair. The August 28 week is typical: thirteen fixes against five real improvements, spread across EPUB handling, chart and video embeds, Ghostreader chat on both mobile platforms, and Boox e-ink devices. The one consistent addition each week is parsing coverage for more publishers.
◆ Where it's heading
The fix list is a map of where the rewrite is still settling — pagination and layout stability on Android tablets, chat sheets and message sending on mobile, exports arriving with page CSS attached. Underneath that, small capabilities keep arriving quietly: Apple Books folder-EPUBs now upload, interactive charts render as linked images instead of an import notice, non-Latin titles survive the trip to Kindle. The company is broadening what it can ingest and export while stabilising what it rebuilt.
◆ Prediction
Expect the weekly cadence to hold with fixes still outnumbering additions, and the remaining Boox and Android tablet issues to keep appearing until the mobile rewrite fully settles.
Trilium Notes
6.3COLLAB
Trilium spent a year adding what notes can hold; now it is fixing what happens to them.
◆ Current state
Trilium Notes is a self-hosted hierarchical note application with an unusually broad content model — text, code, canvases, mind maps, and since 0.103.0 spreadsheets with formulas and OCR-extracted text from images, PDFs and Office files. Releases are large, quarterly, and explicit about breakage. The current release turns that attention inward: the database itself becomes something you can measure, clean, repair, and restore.
◆ Where it's heading
Two arcs run in parallel. One expands what a note can be, peaking with the spreadsheet note type and OCR that feeds extracted text into search. The other is about trust in the thing holding your knowledge base — a coordinated security release in April, then 0.105.0 shipping backup restore, a cleanup tool that honours versioning limits, compaction, integrity repair, and a space-usage treemap. The AI layer is being made self-hostable in the same spirit, moving from a fixed vendor model list to dynamic retrieval plus Ollama, LM Studio and any OpenAI-compatible provider. Breaking changes are frequent and documented up front rather than smuggled in.
◆ Prediction
The two features the maintainer explicitly links to funding — an official mobile application and multi-user support — are the stated backlog; nearer term, expect the spreadsheet note type to leave beta and the newly networked MCP interface to gain more surface.
Alternatives to Readwise and Trilium Notes
Other Collab products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Readwise or Trilium Notes.
Whimsical
Ask Whimsical makes the whiteboard AI-native — diagrams and wireframes generated by conversation.
GitHub
GPT-6 Astra lands in GitHub Copilot — OpenAI's long-horizon autonomous coding model is now production-available.
Wiki.js
Wiki.js hits 3.0 beta while the 2.x branch enters security-only maintenance mode.
Paperless-ngx
Paperless-ngx v3.1 ships AI document metadata automation as a hands-off workflow action
AFFiNE
AFFiNE adds iOS share support and multi-account invitation switching in its active canary track
See all Readwise alternatives → · See all Trilium Notes alternatives →
Recent activity from Readwise and Trilium Notes
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 11d agoReadwiseApple Books EPUBs, chart embeds, and non-Latin Kindle titles
- 18d agoReadwiseAuto-scroll preference persists and Kindle disconnect works properly
- 19d agoTrilium NotesBackups become restorable and the database becomes manageable ⚡
- 25d agoReadwiseFaster manual highlight entry and steadier highlight scanning
- 1mo agoReadwiseGlobal Ghostreader reads and acts across your whole library ⚡
- 1mo agoReadwiseMastery cards, Discards, and multilingual scanning restored on mobile
- 1mo agoTrilium NotesLLM providers become dynamic and self-hostable; OneNote import hardened
- 1mo agoReadwiseReadwise 2.0 rebuilds the mobile apps from scratch ⚡
- 1mo agoTrilium NotesRelease-preparation tag for v0.104.0
- 3mo agoTrilium NotesSpreadsheet notes and OCR-backed search arrive ⚡
- 5mo agoTrilium NotesCoordinated security release across content handling and the desktop app
- 6mo agoTrilium NotesHotfix for mind map rendering and PDF viewer regressions
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Readwise and Trilium Notes?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Readwise and Trilium Notes are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 6.3 vs 6.3, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Readwise better than Trilium Notes?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Readwise and Trilium Notes are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 6.3 vs 6.3, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Collab products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Readwise?
Top Readwise alternatives in Collab are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Readwise alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/readwise for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Trilium Notes?
Top Trilium Notes alternatives in Collab are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Trilium Notes alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/trilium for the full list with editorial commentary on each.