Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative

39 points by hakanshehu 8 hours ago

Hey HN,

I'm Hakan, the founder of Colanode (https://github.com/colanode/colanode), an open-source, local-first collaboration app combining the best of Slack-style chats and Notion-style note-taking, fully self-hostable for complete data control. Here's a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp1hoSCEArg

As a heavy Notion user, I often found it tough to get my teams fully onboard since people naturally gravitate toward chat for quick interactions. Maintaining context between chat apps like Slack and documentation apps like Notion became increasingly frustrating. Switching contexts, losing track of information, and managing data across multiple tools created unnecessary friction.

This frustration led me to build Colanode, a single platform integrating structured notes and knowledge management with real-time chat. After building the first version, early feedback highlighted a critical issue: teams/organizations want full control over sensitive data, especially conversations. That's why I decided to open-source Colanode under an Apache 2.0 license, making it fully self-hostable so you can retain complete ownership and privacy over your data.

Colanode is built with simplicity and extensibility in mind, using only open-source tools and avoiding any vendor or cloud lock-in. It features a local-first architecture offering complete offline support. From a technical perspective, Colanode consists of a Node.js server API and an Electron desktop client, with mobile apps coming soon. Everything in Colanode is represented as a node (e.g., message, file, folder, chat, channel, database, record), each with specific attributes and permissions. All reads and writes performed by the desktop client happen locally within a SQLite database, and changes sync seamlessly via a synchronization engine built on top of SQLite, Postgres, and Yjs—a CRDT library for conflict resolution. The server then propagates these changes to other collaborators. You can self-host the server in any environment using Docker, Postgres, Redis, and any S3-compatible storage, and connect using the official desktop client, which supports simultaneous connections to multiple servers and accounts. This local-first approach also prepares us for future integrations with fully local LLMs, further enhancing privacy and performance.

I'd love your feedback and suggestions on Colanode. What features would you like to see? What would you change?

Thanks, looking forward to your thoughts!