Trilium vs Obsidian on Windows: Cloned Notes, Nested Organization and Migration Test

Here's what Trilium does differently, which parts of that comparison the documentation backs up, and how Windows users can decide whether it's worth trying.

A OneNote-shaped app with Obsidian ideas​

The XDA writer describes Trilium's layout as a lot like OneNote. It uses three panes and a folder-style hierarchy, and it adds the linked-note features that made Obsidian popular. There's more underneath than the tidy interface suggests. He points to mind maps, Mermaid diagrams and a canvas feature similar to Obsidian Canvas.

The project's own feature list agrees. Notes can be arranged into arbitrarily deep tree, and a rich WYSIWYG note editor including e.g. tables, images and math with markdown autoformat is part of the core package. The same list includes support for editing notes with source code, including syntax highlighting as well as full-text search and note hoisting.

Getting started on Windows is simple. The project says you can download the binary release for your platform from the latest release page, unzip the package and run the trilium executable. If you'd rather self-host, a server installation gives you a web interface which is almost identical to the desktop app.

Section summary: Trilium looks familiar to OneNote users, but its note types, diagrams and self-hosting options make it closer to a personal knowledge base than a digital notebook.

Notes that are also folders​

This is Trilium's biggest structural difference. In Obsidian, a folder is a folder and a note is a Markdown file sitting inside it. Trilium drops that distinction. Its user guide says there is no dedicated folder note type: any note can have children, so a parent note can hold real content of its own instead of being an empty container.

The XDA writer's example is world-building for a science-fiction novel:

• A top-level note describes a fictional solar system.
• Each planet gets a child note.
• Each planet's note has its own children for geography, government, environment and so on.

In his view, this makes big projects easier to organize because you aren't juggling a pile of separate folders. He also says a mind map can be turned into a series of nested notes quite easily.

One caveat. He writes that Obsidian simply can't do nested notes, and that goes too far. Obsidian has folders and internal links, and people build parent-child structures with links, properties and community plugins all the time. The real difference is the default data model. In Trilium the parent-child relationship is part of the structure. In Obsidian, a file lives in one folder and its links describe relationships separately. You can get to a similar place in either app, but Obsidian makes you build it yourself.

Section summary: Trilium's note-as-folder design suits deep, layered projects. Obsidian can imitate it, but you have to assemble the structure yourself.

One note, many homes: cloning​

Trilium's second big idea fixes a problem every folder-based note-taker has run into: where does this note go?

The project's older documentation describes that problem directly. It says a strict hierarchy carries a hidden assumption that each "subtopic" is "owned" by one parent. Its example is Bash, both a programming language and a tool (shell) very much tied into Linux. The answer, in the documentation's words, is to allow notes to have multiple parents.

Trilium calls these placements "clones," which is a slightly misleading name. They aren't copies. Every placement points to the same note, so an edit made in one spot shows up everywhere else. In the XDA example, a trading guild that operates on several planets can appear under each planet. Rename the guild's leader once and every branch shows the change.

The writer admits he organizes his Obsidian vault by folders rather than tags. Some notes fit more than one folder, and he forgets where he filed them. For people who work that way, cloning is the main reason to look at Trilium.

It isn't perfectly smooth yet. A feature request opened on the project's tracker in mid-September 2026 describes gathering scattered notes under a single "Cars" dashboard note. It says the current workflow currently has massive friction, and it proposes a quicker way to clone notes into the note you already have open.

Section summary: Clones let one note appear in several places without duplicates getting out of sync. It's a strong feature, though adding clones still takes more clicks than it should.

A rich-text editor that won't scare off newcomers​

The XDA writer remembers having to learn Markdown before Obsidian felt fast, and says the missing formatting toolbar made the start harder. Trilium's default Text note is a WYSIWYG editor that anyone who has used Microsoft Word will recognize, with buttons for images and tables.

According to Trilium's documentation, text notes support:

• Headings, font sizes, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript
• Bulleted, numbered and to-do lists
• Tables with merged cells and captions
• Inline code and code blocks
• Footnotes, math equations and Mermaid diagrams
• Block quotes and admonitions, which are Trilium's version of callouts

You can have a fixed toolbar or floating controls that appear only when you need them. Markdown fans aren't left out: Markdown-style formatting shortcuts work, Markdown can be imported, and a text note can be converted into a Markdown note. The editor runs on CKEditor. One small catch is that a text note may open read-only if it is very large or has been explicitly marked read-only.

Comparing it to Word is fair as a description of how it feels. It is not an actual Word document or a Word-compatible format.

Section summary: Trilium's editor is easier to start with for people coming from Word or OneNote, and it still offers Markdown-style shortcuts for keyboard users.

Where Obsidian still wins​

The XDA writer's main point matters. Trilium's best features fix problems he had already solved in Obsidian with plugins. For fiction projects, he names the StoryLine community plugin as his answer to the organization issues. After years in Obsidian, he doesn't think Trilium's advantages justify moving everything over. He also says that if he had found Trilium first, Obsidian might not have become his main tool.

That's a personal verdict, not a benchmark, and it fits how most people choose these apps. Obsidian's Markdown files, large plugin library and Canvas feature are a real strength. Trilium isn't catching up on basics here. Both apps offer visual canvases and diagrams. The difference is in how they're built and how they connect to the rest of your notes.

Thinking about switching? Test before you jump​

If cloning and nested notes sound like what you've been missing, don't rebuild your vault by hand. Trilium's documentation describes an Obsidian importer that takes a ZIP file of your vault, and support for importing from other apps was expanded starting in v0.104.0. The docs also list OneNote and Evernote among supported imports, which helps Windows users coming from Microsoft's notebook.

A sensible way to test it:

1. Make a copy of a representative part of your Obsidian vault, not the whole thing.
2. Zip it and import it into a fresh Trilium install.
3. Check internal links, attachments, images and formatting.
4. Look for anything that depends on a plugin, because features that rely on community plugins may not come across.
5. Try cloning on a few notes you've always struggled to file.

Import support doesn't mean every workflow comes across intact. Your plugin setup won't come with you.

Current-version notes for self-hosters​

The XDA piece doesn't say which Trilium build it used. Anyone setting up now should know that recent releases have changed a few things. The project warns that a recent release contains changes that can break an existing setup, and that MCP now requires authentication and can optionally be accessed over the network. In addition, general HTML support in text notes is now disabled by default. This makes copy-paste from websites behave well, without grabbing unwanted tags such as input boxes. The writer also noticed a typo-tolerance setting and an option for enabling AI/LLM chat, so the project is clearly still adding features quickly.

The bottom line​

Trilium's appeal comes down to two things: notes that can be folders, and notes that can live in more than one place without duplicates drifting apart. If you're writing a novel, running a research project, or tired of arguing with your own folder tree, it's worth an afternoon of testing. If your Obsidian setup already works, the XDA writer's conclusion applies: Trilium is good, but it may not offer anything you need badly enough to move.