NoteVault
🇬🇧 English · 🇪🇸 Español
🎯 Our goal: to surpass Obsidian and Notion — your notes, your study plan and your whole life in one open, local-first app, with constant updates.
Study, notes and personal management in one desktop app. Your data is plain files you own.
NoteVault brings together Markdown notes, tasks, calendar, habits, goals, projects, finances, exercise, nutrition and a Mentor that builds and follows your study plan. Everything lives in a folder on your disk — no account, no server, no telemetry. AI is optional and your choice: an API, a local model or a prompt you paste yourself.
We are students with no funding or financial backing. NoteVault is free and will stay free, but we need money to keep going: any help counts. PayPal · Nequi/Bre-B 0093524288 · more ways to support
Why NoteVault — and why we aim to surpass Obsidian and Notion
Obsidian and Notion are great products and they set the bar. We are building the app that goes further:
| NoteVault | Obsidian | Notion |
|---|
| Your data as plain local files | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ cloud |
| Open source | ✅ GPL-3.0 | ❌ | ❌ |
| Works with an existing Obsidian vault | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Study Mentor: plan that fits your dates, spaced reviews, daily pace per subject | ✅ built in | plugins | templates |
| Tasks, habits, goals, finances, exercise and nutrition in the same app | ✅ built in | plugins | templates |
| Editable, versioned AI “skills” that generate notes, maps and practice | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| AI with your own API or a local model | ✅ | plugins | ❌ |
| No account required | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
Where they are ahead today — plugin ecosystems, mobile apps, real-time collaboration and polish. That is the gap we are closing, release after release.
🚀 Constant updates
We ship continuously. Every improvement lands in the open: see the Releases and the CHANGELOG. Next on the roadmap: Android, macOS, web, automatic updates and a signed installer.
Features
- Markdown editor with live preview, links, formulas and canvases (
.canvas).
- Tasks, projects, calendar, habits and goals.
- Finances, exercise (302 exercises with step-by-step instructions) and nutrition.
- Mentor: a study plan that always fits your dates, with spaced reviews, Pomodoro and the pace you need per subject.
- Skills: the instructions that generate notes, maps and practice — editable, with version history and automatic detection of outdated pieces.
- Open, documented vault format (
docs/VAULT_FORMAT.md); compatible with Obsidian.
Install
Everything is included — nothing else to install. Download from Releases:
- Windows:
NoteVault-Setup-<version>.exe (installer) or NoteVault-Portable-<version>.exe (no install).
- Linux:
.deb (Ubuntu/Debian) or .AppImage.
- macOS: from source for now (see below).
From source (Windows, Linux, macOS): requires Node.js 20+ and npm 10+.
git clone https://github.com/Lessteps/NoteVault.git
cd NoteVault/frontend
npm install
npm run electron:dev
Development
cd frontend
npm run typecheck # TypeScript types
npx vitest run # unit tests
npm run test:e2e # end-to-end tests with Electron (needs npx vite build)
npm run electron:build # builds the installer into frontend/release/
Documentation
Full docs at https://lessteps.com/docs/ (Spanish: https://lessteps.com/docs/es/). Built with MkDocs Material from docs_site/:
pip install -r requirements-docs.txt
mkdocs serve
Contributing
Read CONTRIBUTING.md and the code of conduct. To report a vulnerability, use SECURITY.md. Ideas, bugs and pull requests are welcome.
License
The code is published under GPL-3.0-or-later (see LICENSE); the documentation under CC BY-SA 4.0. The “NoteVault” name and logo are not licensed with the code (TRADEMARK.md). Third-party credits are in CREDITS.md.
Support the project
We are students with no funding or financial backing. NoteVault is free and open source, and any help, however small, lets us keep building it.
Not able to donate? Star the repo ⭐, report bugs, improve the docs, or tell a friend.
Contact
About the name
“NoteVault” is a provisional name for the product. The company behind it is Lessteps. If the name changes, it will be announced in this repository.
