The note-taking app frontier is chock-full of unique tools, each offering its own unique facilities. For coding enthusiasts, you’ve got SilverBullet, while Google Keep is great for minimalism-loving users who prefer Google’s application suite. On the to-do list builder front, you’ve got Todoist and its self-hosted alternative, Vikunja. Then there’s Obsidian, an all-rounder tool that’s favored by the entire note-taking community.

However, TriliumNext Notes is easily one of the best utilities for jotting down your ideas, especially if you favor self-hosted services over their cloud-based counterparts. Better yet, you can deploy it on a Raspberry Pi to turn the SBC into a full-on productivity server. If that sounds intriguing, here are four reasons why a Raspberry Pi and TriliumNext Notes make for a terrific combo.

4 A completely private note-taking server

That’s packed to the brim with useful features

Privacy is a major concern when you’re storing your notes, ideas, and thoughts on an app connected to external cloud(s). That’s where self-hosted tools like TriliumNext Notes come in handy, as all your files are stored on local hardware, free from the prying eyes of large corporations.

Despite its FOSS roots, TriliumNext Notes is an extremely well-developed app and houses a plethora of facilities to help you manage your notes. In addition to its support for Mermaid diagrams, code blocks, and Markdown text, TriliumNext Notes lets you link all your documents via Relation Maps. And that’s before you include the different view types, Excalidraw integration, and robust tagging provisions at your disposal.

3 Portable enough to fit in your pocket

And you can bring it along on your travels

Switching away from TriliumNext Notes for a second, a Raspberry Pi lies at the center of the note-taking server – and I mean that in the figurative and literal sense. While the SBC isn’t good enough to replace a conventional home server, it’s more than capable of hosting a lightweight service like TriliumNext Notes without any performance issues.

Compared to server rigs and even mini-PCs, Raspberry Pi SBCs have a tiny footprint, so you don’t need to create extra space just to accommodate them in your home lab. While I prefer using Tailscale to access my local devices when I’m away from my computing cave, the credit card-sized boards are so portable that you can bring one (or even multiple, if you’re rocking a cluster setup) on your trips.

2 Fairly low power consumption

No more worrying about sky-high energy bills

If you plan to run a note-taking server 24/7, a typical x86 system can guzzle several kilowatts of electricity, especially in the case of server-grade hardware. Meanwhile, Raspberry Pi boards consume a lot less energy thanks to their Arm processors, and you could save hundreds of dollars on energy bills by hosting your TriliumNext Notes server on the lean, mean, green SBC family.

Thanks to the low wattage of the Raspberry Pi server, you can go for a cheap UPS (even a power bank) to keep your TriliumNext Notes server up and running during blackouts and outages.

1 Solid compatibility with other self-hosted tools

Provided you’re using a decent RPi board

TriliumNext Notes is fairly useful on its own, but you can enhance its functionality to the next level by hosting it in tandem with other self-hosted utilities. If you want to back up your notes, you can host Nextcloud on the Raspberry Pi and use developer rcaneill’s ics conversion script to sync your TriliumNext Notes documents with Nextcloud.

Throw a self-hosted n8n container into the mix, and you can create automated workflows to back up, monitor, and manage every aspect of your TriliumNext notes server without lifting a finger.

TrilliumNext Notes and Raspberry Pi are a match made in heaven

As someone who has tried several note-taking apps, I always find myself returning to TriliumNext Notes. It’s pretty simple to set up on the Raspberry Pi and has a beginner-friendly UI, with enough features under the hood to satisfy all my note-taking needs.