Notion or TiddlyWiki for free a * personal * wiki?

Question

A bit of backgroud, I have been searching for a well suited personal wiki for some time. I am a programmer and I am well versed with linux and open source. Over the course of searching for the perfect software for my purposes, I came across Notion and TiddlyWiki. Notion(www.notion.so/) and TiddlyWiki(https://tiddlywiki.com/) both look super good for a personal knowledge base. Looking at the feature sets, both of them look highly customisable. For my purposes, I have been fascinated by Zettelkasten and hence, I was trying for a software which can be linked to it, to Roam or Obsidian or something else. I plan on keeping a personal wiki and then taking out core ideas from them into my zattlekasten.Notion being great out of the both wihtout the need to do many things to make it useful. Great sync feature and unlimited storage for a free Personal plan.TiddlyWiki on the other hand also has great features and amazing customisability. It's open source, so it's more flexbile if one knows how to code. But setting up TiddlyWiki has a learning curve.So, what's the take of the HN community over Notion or TiddlyWiki, which one do you prefer and why so ? Here I am trying to especially look for a software for keeping a personal wiki.If you have some other alternative to the following two, please feel free to share.

Maha-pudma · Accepted Answer

Zim Wiki[1] is amazing as a personal wiki. Loads of good official plugins and unofficial. Everything stored as text and organised in folders. Supports code highlighting, pasting images, tasks, journal, links (internal and external), back links, version control, etc. Just an all round brilliant piece of software.1: https://zim-wiki.org/

buckfilfu · Answer

In the same boat myself. Been using Notion for a decent bit now. I like it for a great many things, but wiki-style knowledge management just isn't one of them.
TW, on the other hand, excels at this.
You're right on all accounts. Notion is a slicker experience right out of the box. TW takes some fiddling to set it up in a way that you really enjoy using. And, it still has pain points. The editing experience is not my favorite, switching in and out of edit mode.
But, it absolutely shines at Zettlekasten and networked thought. In addition, several recent TW projects have really upped the value for this. Check out the Krystal theme to essentially recreate Andy's Notes. Then, add the Streams plugin to get easier outlining functionality for quick creation. I like this much better than what i was attempting in Notion. Backlinks and transfusion are crucial to networked, non-linear thinking, in my experience.

f89839999999999 · Answer

Since you're a programmer and value customisability & open-source, have you thought about trying emacs org-mode?
I was also in a similar position trying to decide between TiddlyWiki, Notion, Evernote, OneNote, Confluence, etc, for a personal knowledge base, but eventually settled on org-mode. Lots of people use it for managing TODOs, planning, and organising things, but I use it as a personal knowledge base.
org-mode out of the box supports hierarchical note taking with headings and links to other files or headings. You can also use org-roam (https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam) to get something like a Roam or Zettelkasten workflow (with backlinks etc) without having to use separate software (since you said "I plan on keeping a personal wiki and then taking out core ideas from them into my zattlekasten" maybe you will find this useful). If your notes include references/links to academic papers, then you'll love org-ref (bibtex integration).
If you're interested, I'd recommend having a play about with vanilla emacs and the Doom Emacs configuration (https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs).
It's definitely more work to set up than Notion, but much more customisable and you're in full control of your data (and can store everything under version control!). I've not used TiddlyWiki enough to form a useful opinion though.

kixiQu · Answer

If you want to self host, use a Tiddlywiki (the Node server). I advise starting by grabbing someone else's plugins. My setup is here: https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-to-t...
If you like the convenience of not self hosting, Notion is good!
That said, you probably want your wiki and zettelkasten to be the same thing.

rammy1234 · Answer

since you mentioned Zettelkasten ,apart from Zettlr, if you are on mac, you can try this https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

fattybob · Answer

take a look at fsnotes, it looks like it hits a sweet spot amongst many other apps, but it may be apple only, but uses plain text or markdown so I imagine easily flexible

figomore · Answer

I&rsquo;m using Zettlr. I&rsquo;m liking it.