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Comparison · Collab
Tana vs Trilium Notes
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Tana and Trilium Notes — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Tana vs Trilium Notes: at a glance
What is Tana?
Tana is rebuilding itself around meetings — capture, present, and AI wrap-up, all native
Tana, once a supertag-driven knowledge base, now spends nearly all its release energy on a meeting layer: a pre-meeting hub card, one-click capture of external Zoom/Teams/Meet calls through system audio, live document presentation, and AI agents that summarize and extract outcomes. The Today page has become the product's home surface, organizing the day around calls and their generated artifacts. Recent work is dense and iterative — join nudges, permission recovery, presentation palettes, voice agents — all pointed at the same target.
What is Trilium Notes?
A local-first note app hardens its imports and keeps AI optional
Trilium, now maintained as the TriliumNext community fork, is a local-first hierarchical note application on a steady monthly point-release cadence. Recent work centers on import fidelity, note-type expansion (spreadsheets and OCR in 0.103), security patches, and a pragmatic LLM stance: it removed bundled LLM integration in 0.102.0, then reintroduced a lighter, provider-backed model selector.
Tana vs Trilium Notes: editorial side-by-side
Tana
6.3COLLAB
Tana is rebuilding itself around meetings — capture, present, and AI wrap-up, all native
◆ Current state
Tana, once a supertag-driven knowledge base, now spends nearly all its release energy on a meeting layer: a pre-meeting hub card, one-click capture of external Zoom/Teams/Meet calls through system audio, live document presentation, and AI agents that summarize and extract outcomes. The Today page has become the product's home surface, organizing the day around calls and their generated artifacts. Recent work is dense and iterative — join nudges, permission recovery, presentation palettes, voice agents — all pointed at the same target.
◆ Where it's heading
The direction is unambiguous: Tana wants to own the full arc of a meeting — before (hub, invites, calendar sync), during (capture, present, live AI digest), and after (summaries, outcomes, review queue) — and fold the results back into its typed knowledge graph. External-meeting capture moving to on-by-default and live doc presentation without screen sharing put it in direct competition with Granola and Fellow, not just as a notes tool. The knowledge-base roots are increasingly the substrate that meeting outputs land in, not the headline.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next releases to deepen the AI wrap-up loop — richer automatic outcome extraction, agent actions triggered from meeting content, and tighter linking of meeting artifacts into typed entities — since that is the recurring thread across these entries.
Trilium Notes
5.0COLLAB
A local-first note app hardens its imports and keeps AI optional
◆ Current state
Trilium, now maintained as the TriliumNext community fork, is a local-first hierarchical note application on a steady monthly point-release cadence. Recent work centers on import fidelity, note-type expansion (spreadsheets and OCR in 0.103), security patches, and a pragmatic LLM stance: it removed bundled LLM integration in 0.102.0, then reintroduced a lighter, provider-backed model selector.
◆ Where it's heading
The fork is stabilizing and broadening ingest and interop — robust OneNote migration with device-code web authentication and multi-hour token refresh — while keeping AI optional and provider-driven rather than baked in. The direction is a dependable self-hosted knowledge base that reclaims data locked in other tools.
◆ Prediction
Expect continued import and format-fidelity work plus incremental, provider-dynamic LLM options rather than a bundled AI push; official mobile and multi-user remain community-demand items gated on funding.
Alternatives to Tana 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 Tana or Trilium Notes.
Teable
The open-source Airtable ships daily, hardening self-host admin controls and AI governance
Paperless-ngx
Paperless-ngx ships its 3.0 rewrite, then patches the landing hard
HelloID
HelloID grinds on access-governance precision through steady release trains.
Avoma
Avoma buries real agent-native moves under a wall of SEO comparison posts
GitHub
GitHub is retrofitting its whole surface around autonomous Copilot agents.
See all Tana alternatives → · See all Trilium Notes alternatives →
Recent activity from Tana and Trilium Notes
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1d agoTrilium Notesv0.104.1
- 2d agoTanaAsk the AI to pin things for you
- 6d agoTanaStart, schedule, or capture external meetings right from Today
- 8d agoTrilium Notesv0.104.0
- 11d agoTanaNever miss an upcoming Tana meeting
- 13d agoTanaPresent and capture, in one click
- 16d agoTanaA pre-meeting hub ⚡
- 18d agoTanaA voice for your meeting agents
- 2mo agoTrilium Notesv0.103.0
- 3mo agoTrilium Notesv0.102.2
- 4mo agoTrilium Notesv0.102.1
- 4mo agoTrilium Notesv0.102.0
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Tana and Trilium Notes?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Tana is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 5.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Tana better than Trilium Notes?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Tana is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 5.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Collab products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Tana?
Top Tana alternatives in Collab are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Tana alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/tana 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.