Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to My Digital Zettelkasten That Connects Data Engineering and Much More
I'm sharing my public Second Brain - a digital Zettelkasten that connects my knowledge across Data Engineering, Personal Knowledge Management, Programming, Productivity, and philosophical topics like Digital Minimalism. Built with Obsidian and published using Quartz/GoHugo, this knowledge vault contains interconnected notes that I've crafted, curated, and connected over years. I've developed a streamlined publishing workflow where I simply add #publish to any note I want to make public, then run make deploy through a custom Rust script that's 30x faster than my original Python…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1OS
My Public Second Brain (https://brain.sspaeti.com) is built with the help of a wonderful tool called Quartz (https://brain.sspaeti.com/quartz-publish-obsidian-vault/). Obsidian (https://brain.sspaeti.com/obsidian/) has become my favorite for note-takers, given its flexible and linked structure that closely mirrors our natural way of thinking. With Quartz, I was able to seamlessly publish my Obsidian notes to a public vault, providing the groundwork for my Public Second Brain. The journey of making this possible involved some scripting as…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 2
Second Brain▲281Hi HN, I'm Dom, a solo founder. I built Second Brain to solve a common issue I had with AI chats: the knowledge disappears. There’s no structure, no memory, and no way to reuse or build on them. So I built a tool that combines AI chat with a visual, interconnected knowledge system. Key features: - Save AI responses into editable docs (Notion-style Pages). - AI Visual board with multiple content & chat nodes (like Miro meets ChatGPT). - Add and chat with YouTubes, TikToks, Audio, PDFs, GitHub repos, Looms, websites, etc. - Organize using Projects and Smart Tags — then chat with full contexts.…
2025 · second-brain-lac-ten.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 3IB
Field notes on shipping fast, privacy-first, evergreen web products.
2021 · joeldare.com · its alternatives →
- 4
The best second brain system for knowledge workers
2022 · philipp-stelzel.com · its alternatives →
- 5
A few months ago I noticed that I was quickly approaching my 10GB sync limit for my daily driver vault. I considered deprecating some of the heavier files and images, but I was worried how it would affect the integrity of my vault. Instead, I took the opportunity to think to myself -- what would the perfect vault look like? I began to write down some of the key philosophies and strategies I use in my driver vault which led to indispensable plugins, which led to more indispensable philosophies and on and on it went. I've chronicled these results into a fully working vault template that…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Give your team one AI memory. Keep your own private.
Jul 2026 · thesecondbrain.dev · its alternatives →
- 7
In the last few years I've been doing a lot of technical writing, both for my own programming blog and others, and I've noticed there is a lack of good tools for this kind of writing. Whether that was a programming blog post or documentation, I always had to move back an forth between different editors, and sometimes even other apps for content management and the actual content publication. A lot of copy-pasting, and wasted time. Based on this experience I decided to try and build a tool that could provide a good experience for this kind of content from writing to publishing. This (I call it…
2023 · vrite.io · its alternatives →
- 8
Hey HN! Over the weekend (leaning heavily on Opus 4.5) I wrote Jargon - an AI-managed zettelkasten that reads articles, papers, and YouTube videos, extracts the key ideas, and automatically links related concepts together. Demo video: https://youtu.be/W7ejMqZ6EUQ Repo: https://github.com/schoblaska/jargon You can paste an article, PDF link, or YouTube video to parse, or ask questions directly and it'll find its own content. Sources get summarized, broken into insight cards, and embedded for semantic search. Similar ideas automatically cluster together. Each…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9AB
Hey HN! We're building an open-source CMS designed to help creators with every part of the content production pipeline. We're showing our tiny first step: A tool designed to take in a Twitter username and produce an "identity card" based on it. We expect to use an approach similar to [Constitutional AI] with an explicit focus on repeatability, testability, and verification of an "identity card." We think this approach could be used to create finetuning examples for training changes, or serve as inference time insight for LLMs, or most likely a combination of the two. The tooling we're…
2025 · contentfoundry.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Second Brain▲11Second Brain is a free for creating and sharing content
2024 · 2ndbrain.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 11IB
Hi HN, I have been working on a new tool that was inspired by Vannevar Bush's memex and Luhmann's Zettelkasten. Having been a long time user of different tools, I got to the point where I decided to build my own. For the longest time I have been looking for something that puts association first, works as fast as the mind, and allows you to stay in flow state. Making building a second mind, playful and rewarding. If anyone is interested, I have added the link below. At this point I am slowly letting on the first users, and hoping to gather as much feedback as possible. The explore link on the…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 12
Second Brain▲20Your digital knowledge management system
2025 · secondbrainapp.netlify.app · its alternatives →
- 13
Over the past three months, I’ve been working with my dad on this app as a way to learn Cursor, shadcn/ui, and Next.js. I’m currently studying UX design at the University of Michigan, and I’ve been really impressed by how much vibe-coding tools have advanced over the last six months. This work journal includes private AI-generated insights with scheduled summaries that can be shared with your team or manager. You can also choose to make a summary public—like I’ve done here for my work on this web app: https://www.workjourney.ai/summary/mkblt2zt-hn2kdbus If anyone has…
Jan 2026 · workjourney.ai · its alternatives →
- 14
Organize Your Developer Life: All-in-One Notion Template
2024 · jagadeeshk.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Hi HN, wanted to translate this into a more human-readable post - please see below and would love any and all feedback! What is it: A second brain you self-host and engine to compound itself and spark new ideas, from your own ideas. Why: ROI on your own knowledge, actually realize the value from your ideas. Down the line I'd love for this to evolve into a wider / shareable concept -- Haven't fully figured this out yet which is part of the reason I am posting. View the /constellation folder for the specs on that concept. (Self hosting engine is all in the repo as well) Looking…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026 · its alternatives →
- 17
I have a short term memory and i have no passion to writing but i want to learn to write something, so i need my note as my second brain, but i need not only note app, i want to freely to write something from my mind, and set some to-do list, so i decide to create one web application that fit to my requirement. And here is my final product that you can try and maybe give me some feedback. This is a free application. Access https://paperly.id for detail
2025 · paperly.id · its alternatives →
- 18
The first ever AI peer reviewed research article just got approved. It’s kinda crazy how advanced AI have come to replace researchers. I've just been using Deep Research on ChatGPT and Perplexity a lot to write and research complex technical reports for my boss. He loves the reports and it has decreased my workload a ton but I still have some frustrations with it. None of them provide an API that gets me the same quality of output you would with the applications. I wanted something with more control on the LLMs, swappable with the reasoning new models that came out. Not just prompt →…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20
I got the idea of [mindmap.so](http://mindmap.so/) out of my own frustration of managing my personal notes in Notion and Miro in parallel. I have built it 3 months back on top of excalidraw, posted it in Reddit a couple of times, and never looked back (was using it only for personal use). Little did I know that the small and nimble tool that I created has crossed 2000+ users (was so surprised when I saw the dashboard last week). It was all organic and word of mouth . Having 2000+ users trusting a product is no easy feat. That’s when I thought may be I should put some more…
2024 · mindmap.so · its alternatives →
- 21
Bring joy and visual interactivity to Obsidian Canvas.
Jun 2026 · momansour.com · its alternatives →
- 22
all your knowledge, projects, notes in one organized place.
2023 · easlo.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
- 23
I'm an "ideas person" who messes around with AI on a low budget. I got tired of watching my tokens vanish and context windows filling up while agents fumbled around trying to find the right thing. Agents don't flail like they used to with shell tools, but there are still weak/blind spots and back-and-forth episodes — especially when using tools in combination/sequence. So I built "tilth" today. Or rather, AI built it — every line is Opus 4.6. I spent a lot of my precious tokens getting it to "not shit" (at least several of the different vendors' AI overlords assure me it's not…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24MW
From inception Thursday night to near-feature-complete on Sunday morning, I consider it one of my better weekend hacking projects. http://leftright.me/ I built it with node and Redis which was particularly fun. Redis truly is the AK-47 of databases. This project has deeply engrained my longtime hate of Internet Explorer. Everything should be kosher in Chrome and FF but I had to make some compromises for IE. I sent the link to a few friends and the userbase grew from there. It's not much but it's definitely something for having it live for a day. I'm really looking forward to any constructive…
2011 · leftright.me · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Open-Source Public Second Brain Built with Obsidian and Quartz alternatives
- Second Brain alternatives
- I built my own second brain software tool alternatives
- Luhmann's Zettelkasten for Notion alternatives
- A highly opinionated, fully functional Obsidian vault alternatives
- Second Brain for Mac and Windows alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →