Docs is a self-hosted, open-source collaborative note-taking app that aims to replace Notion

When it comes to self-hosted platforms, few come close to competing with the likes of Notion. Now, a project backed by Germany and France (as part of an EU initiative) might finally offer a true competitor in the form of Docs. It’s a self-hosted, privacy-focused notebook that looks good, has some nice features, and is being actively developed. If you’re looking for a Notion replacement, Docs might be it.

Of course, to many, Notion is more than just a documents and notes application. It’s a full relational database with countless integrations to build on its functionality. If you’re the kind of Notion user that relies on those more advanced functions, then Docs isn’t for you — at least not right now. If, however, you just want a basic database of notes that you can collaborate on, then it might be worth giving Docs a try.

Every feature implemented in Docs works well

And there’s a roadmap with more to come

If you’ve used the likes of Notion before, then you’ll be able to quickly and easily get to grips with Docs. You can use slash commands to insert blocks, and you can share your notes with other users registered on your instance. In my case, I used the default admin account and created a second account in order to write a note and share it with the other. From there, you can see what the other user does as they modify the note. It’s completely collaborative, and there was no processing delay when I ran it locally.

Of course, you will have to factor in latency and processing delay when dealing with servers and significantly more users, but for smaller teams, Docs seems like an excellent application that could genuinely replace alternatives. It’s a well-fleshed-out application with many features already in place and usable. It’s not designed to be your one-stop shop for note-taking just yet, but the roadmap, which is public on the official GitHub, gives you a pretty good idea of features to expect. These include:

• Add Mermaid JS support
• Publish note as website
• Full search feature
• Mobile application
• Versioning and diff view
• Embeds

And so much more. Keep in mind that some of these features haven’t been implemented yet and are in the roadmap with a date that has already passed, so it’s unclear what the status is on those features.

Right now, there is a version history for notes, and you can download your notes in both Markdown and HTML. You can export them in PDF or in DocX too, with the ability to create a PDF template that the note can export into. This can mean having a template with specified headers in the document so your notes, when exported to PDF, can have a standardised layout. These templates can’t be modified from the UI just yet, but you can edit them from the Django back-end if you know what you’re doing.

While Docs is technically a “barebones” application, it’s barebones in the sense that it has all of the basic functionality you’d expect from something that aims to replace Notion or Outline in the future. What’s currently implemented works nearly perfectly, as opposed to there being a lot of features that are all individually half-baked. You could definitely use this application right now as your main note-taking application if you wanted, especially given how much control you have over it thanks to the Django back-end.

If you want to give Docs a try, it’s pretty simple, but it’s a somewhat large application that isn’t just easily hosted in Docker through a basic UI like you may have come to expect with other tools.

Docs is pretty big, but it’s easy to set up

Just follow the instructions

Currently, the major downside of Docs is that it’s pretty big and somewhat cumbersome to self-host. The Docker Compose file for it is over 200 lines long, and there are quite a few dependencies. From a brief glance at those dependencies, nothing seems out of the ordinary, but it’s quite a big application to self-host in general. Thankfully, the instructions are very easy to follow on the official GitHub, and I had it up and running in just a few minutes.

In my time testing Docs, I was unable to find out how to enable the AI features that can help with creating, translating, and editing notes. I imagine that this feature will require you to either self-host an LLM or use an external API, but the feature does exist. I was also able to see other users talking about it existing in the GitHub Issues, so I suspect that it just requires a lot more set up to get up and running at the moment.

Once it finished building, I was able to log in using the credentials provided on the GitHub. I could also register a new user account and, from the back-end, grant that user account additional privileges. I could create notes, share them with other registered users, and see what they did with those notes. It’s a really cool piece of software, and while there’s certainly work to be done, it’s a polished project that looks and feels great to use.

If you want to try out Docs, you can head over to the official GitHub and follow the instructions given to try it out!