Obsidian has been my go-to for a while now when it comes to note-taking, and for good reason. It's well laid out, it's easy to use, and it's completely free for both personal and commercial use. Even paid features like Obsidian Sync, which you can use to synchronize notes to other devices, can easily be replaced by managing the synchronization between your devices yourself. With that said, I've recently been using a lesser-known self-hosted note-taking app called Blinko, and it's slowly replacing Notion for me.

Blinko runs in a Docker container, and you can deploy it in seconds using the pre-made compose file that the developer distributes. It's a very simple note-taker on the surface, but it has a lot of depth and additional features that make it more than just a notes app. It has a full tagging system, notes history, a complete markdown editor, and support for local AI to assist in creating and retrieving notes. Plus, you can upload your music to Blinko for controlling within your browser so that you don't have to switch applications while working.

Blinko is the cleanest note-taking app I've used

And it has a lot of thoughtful features

Blinko takes some major strides to differentiate itself from other note-taking apps, the biggest of which is how it discerns between a "Note" and a "Blinko". A Blinko is something that you jot down quickly, and the default view is the "Blinko" view when you navigate to the app. The idea is that you open the app, take down something quickly, and then come back to it later.

"Notes" are for long-term storage and are more important. You can designate each Blinko as a note, and you can also save anything you write in the editor at the top of the dashboard in either section so that you don't need to write a note, save it, and then convert it.

One of my favorite features is the "random walk" option, and it's really what separates a Blinko from a regular note. Any of those thoughts you jot down during the day are then shown in this card form. It will randomly pull Blinkos that you've written and give you the option to convert them to a note, edit them, archive them, or delete them. It basically forces you to organize your notes, and you can tag them appropriately when editing them before either swiping them away (to keep them as a Blinko) or converting them to a note.

It's not forceful with this mechanism either; the option is at the top right of the screen, out of the way, so if you'd rather just use it like Google Keep and not bother with organizing your notes, you can absolutely do that instead.

Blinko is filled to the brim with options to explore, too, so you can customize it however you want. There's a mobile app that you can install when you first visit the page, and this will be installed via a Progressive Web App. You can configure how Blinko will look and react on different platforms, and there are also plugins, Spotify integrations, and backups built right into Blinko.

I was already sold on Blinko by this point, but where things get really interesting is its support for AI. You can use an API like ChatGPT or Gemini, but I used LM Studio instead to process everything locally. In Blinko, you just need to set it to OpenAI mode and then change the API endpoint to be the local address of your device. This is because LM Studio exposes ChatGPT-like APIs that maintain compatibility, so it all works the same.

AI and Blinko

You don't have to use any of it, and if you do use it, it can all work locally

Blinko has a few powerful AI features, with one of the most interesting being RAG. RAG, standing for retrieval-augmented generation, powers tools like Nvidia's Chat with RTX and improves accuracy by using an external dataset during inference and lacing the responses with relevant information from the documents that are in its dataset. In this case, the dataset is your notes. Configuring this requires the deployment of an embedding model within a tool like LM Studio, and you can then ask the AI questions based on your knowledge base to find notes.

When RAG is configured, you can chat with your notes in a similar way to other services like NotebookLM. You can upload documents of many different file types, and the responses you get will have a direct link to where the information was pulled from so that you can verify it yourself. If you want to deploy an embedding model in LM Studio, you can simply search "embedding" in its model search, and there are plenty of small models there that you can use. While I'm using Gemma-3-27B for text generation, the embedding model that I'm using, text-embedding-granite-embedding-278m-multilingual, is only 218MB and packs just 278M parameters.

Blinko's other AI features are super cool as well, especially for someone who locally hosts their own models. It can automatically tag your notes for you, generate content for your notes, and even just provide a nice front end for writing regular prompts. Plus, it can generate summaries of your notes when you write them, so they can be interspersed throughout your notes or tacked on at the bottom. All of the AI features are opt-in as well, so you never have to think about them if you don't want to use them, and all of them can be disabled if you don't want to use them anymore.

I can't stress enough how much Blinko focuses on privacy. Everything is deployed locally, and all of the AI features can be implemented on a local setup if you don't want to use an external service like Google's Gemini or OpenAI's ChatGPT. Even without these AI features, it's still an incredibly powerful note-taker that I've started using more and more frequently in recent weeks. It looks good, it's responsive, and it took approximately two minutes to deploy on my TrueNAS Scale instance. I then access it via Tailscale when I'm out and about, using a reverse proxy so that I can access it from my own domain.

If you're looking for a new self-hosted note-taking app, I wholeheartedly recommend Blinko. It's been working really well for me, and at the moment, I'm using a combination of Obsidian and Blinko, which is aided by the fact that both support markdown formatting. It's completely free, open-source, and worth your time getting to grips with!