What is Athens
Athens is an open-source and local-first alternative to Roam Research. Athens is the most community-driven, private, and extensible knowledge graph.
🚀 Download the free desktop app 🚀
(Do not auto-update with the Mac M1. Right now M1 build auto-updates to Intel. This is a problem with Electron Builder and we are looking into it.)
Sponsor us for additional features/services at https://opencollective.com/athens!
Demo Athens in your browser (no changes are saved): https://athensresearch.github.io/athens
Open-Source
- The freedom to self-host
- The freedom to use any previous version of Athens for the rest of time
- Insurance against vendor lock-in
- Transparency and direct feedback loops in the development process
Local-First
- 0% data loss
- 0% downtime
- 100% availability
- 100% local and fast unlike server-first apps (cough Notion and Roam)
Knowledge Graph
The problem with notetaking apps like Evernote or Apple Notes is that once you write a note, after a week you never look at it again. Without any organization, you're stuck praying that search will work for your future self. On the other hand, creating and following a system requires way too much discipline.
Athens lets you take notes with minimal systems, structure, and organization, freeing you to stay creative and in flow state. Athens does this with [[bidirectional links]], ((block references)), and a graph database.
Building Locally or Contributing
If you want to contribute to Athens as a developer or designer, please begin by reading Contributing. This also contains instructions on how to build Athens on your own computer.
Some tips once you've gotten Athens:
- How to use Athens
- How to file a bug report
- How to file a feature request
- If you have trouble with a new version of Athens, download a previous build on our releases page.
Join Discord
Our Discord community is a space for collaboration and learning (especially about Clojure!).
Every Sunday we have a Community Call at 11am Pacific.
Pricing
Athens is free to self-host, with additional features and services for our paid sponsors. We are also working on an enterprise offering for companies to self-host. Please see our Open Collective for more details.
Links
To learn more about this project, please see:
- Athens Joins Y Combinator
- MVP Update, Funding, and Why I Started Athens
- Vision — individual and collective memexes — computing and the Web as originally promised
- Governance — BD + Core Team + Guardians + Athenians
- Code of Conduct — our values and guidelines, AKA how to be an awesome Athenian
Thank You
Athens is here today because of our Sponsors and Contributors. Thank you.
Sponsors
Contributors
Developers
Designers: https://www.figma.com/file/iCXP6z7H5IAQ6xyFr5AbZ7/Product-Design-Sandbox?node-id=0%3A1
Plus everyone who's commented on GitHub, Discord, Twitter... the community!