Alexandrie

A self-hosted wiki and knowledge base, MIT, by Smaug6739. Its own GitHub description is the purest instance of the open-source-alternative frame this corpus holds:

📚 The open-source, offline-first Notion, Obsidian & Confluence alternative. Advanced Markdown, multi-tenant teams, OIDC/SSO, and local S3 backups. Deploy in one command.

Three proprietary products named in one sentence, before the software says what it is.

The repository

From the GitHub API on 2026-08-30: 2,633 stars / 179 forks, 26 open issues, primary language Vue, MIT, created 2022-08-21, last push 2026-08-29 — active the day before it was read. Topics claim docker, golang, nuxt, offline-first, oidc, pwa, selfhosted, kanban, knowledge-base. Homepage alexandrie-hub.fr. Built "by Smaug6739 and contributors."

What it is, per the README

• Advanced Markdown engine in an extended CodeMirror 6 editor: LaTeX, custom containers, interactive checkboxes, frames, snippets, and diagrams (flowcharts, structural) rendered inline. Plus speech-to-text dictation and a snippet manager.
• Multi-tenant hierarchy: Teams → Workspaces → Categories → nested Documents, with a 5-level access model (None / Read / Write / Admin / Owner) per node or workspace, temporary invitation codes, custom scopes, and public share links.
• OIDC / SSO built in, described as "production ready."
• Offline-first PWA installable on desktop or mobile "with full offline capabilities and seamless synchronization."
• Command Center (Ctrl+K), full-text indexing with snippet highlights, and a Kanban board in every workspace.
• S3 object storage (RustFS, Garage, MinIO or AWS), in-app PDF rendering and previews for 30+ media formats, and ZIP import/export of selected nodes or the whole platform state.
• One-command deployment: docker compose up -d, then an owner account at localhost:8200.

What it actually costs to run

The README says "one command" and stops there, so the stack was read from docker-compose.yml directly (2026-08-30). Four services:

That places it precisely on this spoke's operational-cost spectrum: above hometube (one container a household can run for years), below ever-gauzy (a monorepo with Postgres, Redis, OpenSearch and MinIO), and just under openpanel (seven containers, three stateful). Two stateful services means two backup jobs, and the operator owns both.

Documents live in MySQL, not as files. Nothing in the repository stores a note as a .md file on disk; the markdown is a column. That matters for one of the three products it names — Obsidian's whole proposition is a folder of markdown files you can open with anything — and Alexandrie's answer to portability is a ZIP export instead. The README does not mention the database at all, which is the more notable omission on a project whose pitch is "maintain total ownership over your binaries, media streams, and backups."

Why this page matters beyond one more app

open-source-alternative argues the substitution frame sets a roadmap by imitation: a project measured against a commercial product is pressured to match that product's feature list. Alexandrie lets you read the imitation off the bullet points, because it names three targets and inherits from each:

• from Notion — nested documents, Kanban boards, the Ctrl+K command palette;
• from Confluence — teams, workspaces, five permission levels, OIDC/SSO, invitation codes;
• from Obsidian — markdown-first authoring and offline use.

The result is a feature list assembled from three different products' business decisions rather than from one coherent idea of what a knowledge base is. Whether that is a flaw or simply what users want is not something this source can settle — but it is the clearest evidence the corpus has for the mechanism that page describes, and a stronger case than openpanel, which named one target.

What it does not say

• No database or architecture in the README. Found by reading the compose file.
• No requirements. No RAM, disk or CPU floor for a stack with MySQL and an object store in it.
• No security or audit history, on software that ships SSO and a five-level permission model.
• No benchmark or comparison against any of the three products it names — the comparison is the claim, and it is made in the description and nowhere else.
• No maintainer detail. "Smaug6739 and contributors"; the handle has no biography evidenced, so no entity page is created here (the AndreVto precedent).
• Offline-first is a PWA claim, unverified: a browser-installed app with local caching and "seamless synchronization" against a MySQL server it does not own the schema documentation for.

Standing caveat for this spoke: every autonomy and ownership claim here is the project's own and none is independently verified.

Related

open-source-alternative · self-hosting · foss-application · openpanel · ever-gauzy · hometube · openalternative · synthesis