Looking for a family brain system
I look for a good note taking and brain library for my whole family. That helps my family and me in daily life
Nothing seems to work perfect yet...
I found: Paperless -> bad GUI and in practice not visual enough for me. Obsidian -> sync git to complicated for family and much git sync problems. Appflowy -> good GUI and in practice very good. But expensive and not a good stable release only 2 members free to use and selfhosted is very hard and not enough clarity of functions available Joplin -> bad GUI and not so visual in markdown and in practice not easy enough for me.
Requirements
- Whole family must be able to use it.
- Must have ai integration to search through files or prompt for answer.
- Syncing must work easy and saved in a local and external db.
- Pictures and videos must be able to load from the document
- Gui fast, easy simple
- Cross platform: Mac osx, android , iOS, windows and Linux.
Wish: Collaboration in same file live sync like google docs
I seen appflowy has this and obsidian too with a payed addon works very good but also had limits.
Obsidian is to much local storage and files and the app works worse then native appflowy and is not a database like approach its a bunch of files in. Directory what does not have to be bad but in my use cases it is.
Notebook LLM seems something I need but it's to much in the cloud and can't selfhost it right?
Posted Oct 11, 2025, 7:37 PM UTC