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

(github.com)

88 points by hakanshehu 14 hours ago

24 comments

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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!

mdaniel 8 hours ago

Congratulations on your launch, the animation makes it seem like a neat product!

I don't think I've ever seen a "coming soon" pricing page before <https://colanode.com/pricing/>

For my curiosity, your readme mentions Valkey but the docker compose uses Redis - is that on purpose? https://github.com/colanode/colanode/blob/v0.1.3/docker-comp...

You will also almost certainly want to either use the Apache 2 version of Minio[1] or label that dependency as AGPLv3 to ensure folks are aware. I would also recommend always pinning image versions, because you don't control what that project does or doesn't do in releases

1: https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/RELEASE.2021-04-22T15-44...

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  • hakanshehu 7 hours ago

    Thank you! We're still working on the hosted offering, hence the "coming soon" pricing page.

    Regarding Valkey, I included it as an example of a Redis compatible alternative, but you're right, it's probably better to use it in our Docker Compose file as well. Thanks also for pointing out the licensing considerations around Minio, will definitely look into that.

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itomato 2 hours ago

These products are neat, but what about the data?

Notion is a tragedy when it comes to export or migration.

I didn’t see any bragging about the exportability of content from this one, but that’s the main thing I look for now.

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  • hakanshehu an hour ago

    Hi, thanks for bringing this up! We don’t have export or migration features in place yet, but we are planning to add them. Which export formats would be most useful to you? And when you mention migration, are you thinking about moving data from similar tools into Colanode or vice-versa? If so, which specific tools would you like to be able to migrate to/from?

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nashashmi 2 hours ago

Is there a name for this new-age method of notes/webpage/data productivity genre? They all seem to have "write with /" to insert "block" content.

I am trying wrap my head around what they are. The seem to be "docs" on the web. Then they also have this "inline page" feature which is a fancy include. Then have a table insert with a relation feature. Then they have a dynamic view layout engine on a table.

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regnerba 3 hours ago

Do you have plans for mobile app? It looks really useful but the two places I would use it would both require I mobile app before I could switch to it.

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  • hakanshehu 3 hours ago

    Hi, thanks for the question! Yes, we do plan to implement mobile apps, but we don't have a concrete timeline yet. It depends on the limitations and challenges we might face when we implement the same local-first approach as we did in desktop (full offline support, background syncing etc).

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ThinkBeat 4 hours ago

Anything that starts as Open source but is clearly meant to be a for profit product makes me sceptical.

The page has a link "Pricing" that takes to a page that says its coming up.

Well I will wait and see what and how the pricing structure will be revealed.

It is a product that easily lends itself to being a "little vit free and open source" and then all the for profit add ons are $$$$$ and not open sourced .

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  • Rooster61 4 hours ago

    Wouldn't surprise me if it's just cloud hosting and maintenance for a fee. Might not be an indicator of dark patterns.

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esperent 6 hours ago

This looks great, it's a crowded field but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

The most important question before I'd try this is, do real time cross platform notifications work? If yes, how did you solve this for people self hosting?

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  • hakanshehu 5 hours ago

    That's a great question! We didn't come to it yet, because we are focused only in desktop app for now. This is definitely one of the challenges we need to solve once we start working on the mobile apps. The self-hosting use case makes it tricky (and probably fun challenge to solve).

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eterps 5 hours ago

> Colanode consists of a Node.js server API and an Electron desktop client

Is the Electron app a necessity or is using a browser possible as well?

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  • hakanshehu 5 hours ago

    Hi! For now, Colanode is available only as a desktop app (Electron). The primary reason is that we wanted to implement some local-first features, which are currently more complex to achieve in the browser.

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    • apitman 4 hours ago

      Curious which features? I'm starting a local-first project and would love to make a PWA, but I just don't think the platform is ready yet.

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      • hakanshehu 3 hours ago

        Mainly using SQLite and having access to native file system for reading and writing files. We wanted to provide a full offline functionality. While it's possible to achieve that in browser as well it seemed quite complicated for now (we might consider it in the future).

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plextoria 7 hours ago

I'm excited to try this out! (seems to have some bandwidth issues, currently downloading at 24KB/s)

Is SSO implemented or planned in the near future? I feel that colanode would be a great fit for our start-up

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  • hakanshehu 7 hours ago

    Thank you! Will look into the download speed issue. As for SSO, we don't have immediate plans, but we'll certainly consider it for the future.

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frizlab 7 hours ago

Hello! How does this compare to Huly?

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  • hakanshehu 3 hours ago

    Hi, thanks for the question! I haven’t used Huly extensively to provide a detailed comparison, but from a quick look (and a test I did some time ago) it seems to take a more opinionated approach: features such as issues, projects, and overall layout are pre-defined. Colanode, by contrast, works like Notion, giving you flexible building blocks so you can model your own workflows and knowledge structures. Huly may be quicker to get started with, while Colanode offers greater adaptability over time (this comes down to personal preference). Another key distinction is tech architecture: Colanode is built around a local-first design, providing full offline support with background syncing. I haven’t found equivalent offline capabilities documented for Huly, even though they may have them.

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drcongo 8 hours ago

This looks very interesting purely because I can just about see from the very fast gif on the README that it has tasks in there, how much of a first class citizen they are of the app could be really important. It blows my mind that both Slack and Notion have such half-arsed task implementations - every time I need to introduce better, asynchronous task assignments at work I get pushback over "people won't use yet another app" - and sure enough, getting people to assign me something rather than @ notifying me while I'm nose deep in code of something that needs doing in a few days time has been impossible. A single app that lets a team manage work without constant interruptions would be the dream.

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  • lelanthran 3 hours ago

    > A single app that lets a team manage work without constant interruptions would be the dream.

    I can see how it can work, using a native application client to interface to something like develops or jira and then bolt on instant messaging (or the reverse).

    The question is, can I get a company to open their wallets for this? From experience, I think not, but i am open to being convinced.

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