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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

FeatureTanaTrilium Notes
SectorCollabCollab
Velocity score6.30.0
Sparks · 30d10
Top themesmeetings, ai-agents, transcription, calendar-syncnote-taking, fork, code-signing, mfa
Last editorial update6d ago3h ago
WebsiteVisit →Visit →

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.

Read the full Tana trajectory →

What is Trilium Notes?

The TriliumNext fork spent its early betas making the app trustworthy to install

Three beta releases from early 2025. The work is dominated by distribution and access concerns: signed Windows binaries obtained through a donated EV certificate, signed macOS builds, multi-factor authentication that required a database version bump, basic right-to-left content support, and repaired migration paths from the original Trilium. Nothing has been published to this feed since March 2025.

Read the full Trilium Notes trajectory →

Tana vs Trilium Notes: editorial side-by-side

T
Tana
COLLAB
6.3

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.

T0.0

The TriliumNext fork spent its early betas making the app trustworthy to install

◆ Current state

Three beta releases from early 2025. The work is dominated by distribution and access concerns: signed Windows binaries obtained through a donated EV certificate, signed macOS builds, multi-factor authentication that required a database version bump, basic right-to-left content support, and repaired migration paths from the original Trilium. Nothing has been published to this feed since March 2025.

◆ Where it's heading

These are the problems a fork inherits rather than chooses. Before adding features, the project had to make installs pass platform trust checks, let users migrate off the predecessor without an intermediate upgrade, and add authentication a self-hosted note store is expected to have. It is groundwork, done in the open, with contributors credited by name.

◆ Prediction

There is not enough recent activity to predict the next release. The feed has been silent for over a year, so whether the beta line continued elsewhere is the open question.

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.

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.

  1. 6d agoTanaAsk the AI to pin things for you
  2. 10d agoTanaStart, schedule, or capture external meetings right from Today
  3. 15d agoTanaNever miss an upcoming Tana meeting
  4. 17d agoTanaPresent and capture, in one click
  5. 20d agoTanaA pre-meeting hub
  6. 22d agoTanaA voice for your meeting agents
  7. 1y agoTrilium NotesMulti-factor authentication and signed Windows binaries
  8. 1y agoTrilium NotesSigned macOS builds and right-to-left content support
  9. 1y agoTrilium NotesFixes missing Windows ZIP artifacts

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 0.0), 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 0.0), 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-next for the full list with editorial commentary on each.