Thank you! I haven’t used Notesnook personally, but from their description it focuses mainly on note-taking. Colanode, by contrast, also includes collaboration features such as chat, file sharing, and databases. One other difference is that Notesnook offers end-to-end encryption, whereas Colanode does not (at least for now).
We have been thinking for some automation/workflows to be executed on specific events. Do you have any example/use case that you might be interested in?
My 2c: A particular thing about notion that bugs me is that hn page content get imported as simple. tables and in notion there is no automated way to delete all empty cells of all tables on page, that make it unreadable, or just to convert tables automatically into text
Hi, thanks for bringing this up! We don’t have export or migration features in place yet, but we are planning to add them. Which export formats would be most useful to you? And when you mention migration, are you thinking about moving data from similar tools into Colanode or vice-versa? If so, which specific tools would you like to be able to migrate to/from?
The first export type implemented should be as minimal and human readable as possible (text files for most content, maybe w/ minimal markup). If that's not possible for all data, then standard formats like html or pdf.
After that, go after your biggest competitor. If people know they have a path back to a familiar shore they're less scared to swim in new waters.
Hi, thanks for the question! I haven’t used Huly extensively to provide a detailed comparison, but from a quick look (and a test I did some time ago) it seems to take a more opinionated approach: features such as issues, projects, and overall layout are pre-defined. Colanode, by contrast, works like Notion, giving you flexible building blocks so you can model your own workflows and knowledge structures. Huly may be quicker to get started with, while Colanode offers greater adaptability over time (this comes down to personal preference). Another key distinction is tech architecture: Colanode is built around a local-first design, providing full offline support with background syncing. I haven’t found equivalent offline capabilities documented for Huly, even though they may have them.
Hi, thanks for the question! Yes, we do plan to implement mobile apps, but we don't have a concrete timeline yet. It depends on the limitations and challenges we might face when we implement the same local-first approach as we did in desktop (full offline support, background syncing etc).
That's a great question! We didn't come to it yet, because we are focused only in desktop app for now. This is definitely one of the challenges we need to solve once we start working on the mobile apps. The self-hosting use case makes it tricky (and probably fun challenge to solve).
Having used several real time self hostable apps with chat (Nextcloud, Odoo, Rocket chat) this is the hard problem to solve.
Rocketchat uses it as a way to funnel you into paying. You'll get a low number monthly for free. They say 10k month but with a team of 5 people lightly using it we used that in 4 days. Or you can do it yourself, but you'll need to register your own version of the app in both the Apple Store and Play Store. For Apple apparently this is close to impossible so I didn't try.
Nextcloud runs their own server for free, but you have to accept that you'll be sending data via their server. But I've spent the last week hacking away at setting up a Nextcloud in my spare time. Got it mostly set up in a day, then the rest of the time has been trying to get notifications working on mobile. Still not working.
Odoo, I don't think I ever got notifications working.
I have researched other apps: Mattermost does something similar to Rocketchat, using notifications as a sales funnel. Element is similar to Nextcloud, they host their own free server, although I think you can self host that too.
From this experience, I would never try a new app until they have this feature solved, clearly documented, and with proof that it works and isn't a sales funnel.
> I have researched other apps: Mattermost does something similar to Rocketchat, using notifications as a sales funnel
Can you elaborate on this? I manage a Mattermost instance and there are some features missing from the OSS self-hostable community edition, but notifications seem to mostly work, even on mobile where notification delivery does rely on their gateway
When hosting and using their free notifications service, you're basically using their test server with no uptime guarantees. I agree that there's only so much you can expect from a free service, but unreliable notifications make a chat app 100% useless for any serious work.
If you pay, it's $10/user/month for the basic service. Where I live that's about 3x Ms Teams, 2x Slack. And you still have to self host.
Self hosting the service has the same issue as Rocketchat: you need an Apple dev account, a firebase account and an endless amount of free time. It's going to be far harder and more time consuming than just hosting the app.
We haven't had any issues with the free notification service. They did release the code to host your own but I think you'd also have to rebuild and release their mobile app to use it, and that sounds like a massive hassle.
I'm using it for a nonprofit, so $10/month per user is out of the question. Self-hosting and open source are critical to us also.
Hi! For now, Colanode is available only as a desktop app (Electron). The primary reason is that we wanted to implement some local-first features, which are currently more complex to achieve in the browser.
Mainly using SQLite and having access to native file system for reading and writing files. We wanted to provide a full offline functionality. While it's possible to achieve that in browser as well it seemed quite complicated for now (we might consider it in the future).
It’s actually fairly straightforward using the OPFS API; I used it to build an upload queue a while ago, so the user can drag arbitrary files on the browser, they get copied into the OPFS as regular files, and then I can upload them at my own leisure, even after browser restarts.
The SQLite WASM build even has support for it AFAIR.
