NoteDiscovery: Build Your Own AI-Powered Knowledge Base

NoteDiscovery is a lightweight, self-hosted note-taking application that gives you complete control over your knowledge base — with a modern twist: built-in AI note discovery. Instead of renting a subscription and handing your notes to a cloud provider, you run everything on your own server, store plain Markdown files in folders, and let AI help you find, organize, and connect what you write.

Why self-host your notes?

Commercial note apps store your data on their servers, under their terms, and charge monthly. NoteDiscovery flips that: your server, your data. It works fully offline and on air-gapped networks because every browser library is served locally — no CDN required. There are no subscriptions, and no lock-in: your notes are plain Markdown files you can open with any editor.

Full-text search that finds what you need instantly.

AI is built in

NoteDiscovery ships with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so AI assistants like Claude and Cursor can search, create, edit, tag, and explore your notes directly. Ask "find all my notes about Docker deployment" or "add this thought to my daily journal" — the assistant does it for you. For a fully local AI stack, one command spins up NoteDiscovery + Ollama + Open WebUI with semantic search powered by your own LLM.

The graph view visualizes connections between your notes.

Who is it for?

Privacy-conscious users who want control over their data, developers who prefer Markdown and local files, knowledge workers building a second brain, and teams looking for a self-hosted alternative to commercial apps. With 2.8K GitHub stars, an MIT license, and an active maintainer, it's a solid foundation you can trust.

Ready to take back control of your knowledge base? The tool page has everything you need: system requirements, Docker Compose config, and install guides.