on the surface, it's a boring hierarchical note taking app, and you can use it just as one, keeping things simple. But then, you can jump into the rabbit hole and figure out how attributes, templates and properties inheritance can give your notes a structure, be organized as collections, and become a very dependable PKMS.
I personally settled on Trilium after a long search for a PKMS to fit my needs, including Obsidian, LogSeq and many others. My top criteria were:
- I need typed notes: if I'm set to maintain long references of People, Places, Movies, … I want the system to keep track of types, attributes, and relations, just like a RDBMS would. In practice, many systems fail at that and give you a ton of maintenance work just to keep your knowledge base consistent, well-structured and usable
- I need something that syncs with my server at home, and lets me work offline when needed. Trilium client app does that without fuss nor requires subscription/premium/membership.
- I need r/w access to my notes on devices which I don't own (e.g. a work computer), so a fully-featured and secure web version with MFA must exist as an alternative to a client application, and again, Trilium delivers there.
I've been daily-driving Trilium for almost 3 years now, and I haven't stumbled upon an alternative with envy. OTOH, Trilium got (much) refined and gained lots of clever features.
I probably sound like the fan that I am, but you can have a look by yourself at https://app.triliumnotes.org/