head to head · open source
Joplin vs Khoj
Joplin has 56,994 GitHub stars, 6,390 forks, 652 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Khoj has 37,946 stars, 2,529 forks, 148 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Joplin leads on adoption by 50% (56,994 vs 37,946 stars). Joplin is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; Khoj is written in Python under AGPL-3.0. Joplin has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, Khoj 7%. Joplin was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (obsidian), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Joplin | Khoj | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 57K | ★ 38K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.4K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Joplin if
- You weight community size — 57K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Khoj if
- You want the Khoj feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Khoj fits your workflow better
About Joplin
Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to do application, which can handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks. The notes are searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified either from the applications directly or from your own text editor. The notes are in Markdown format. Notes exported from Evernote can be imported into Joplin, including the formatted content (which is converted to Markdown), resources (images, attachments, etc.) and complete metadata (geolocation, updated time, created time, etc.). Plain Markdown files can also be imported. Joplin is "offline first", which means you…
read the full Joplin overview →
About Khoj
Your AI second brain 📑 Docs • 🌐 Web • 🔥 App • 💬 Discord • ✍🏽 Blog 🎁 New Meet 🌶️ Pipali our open source AI coworker that runs on your computer. Read about Khoj's excellent performance on modern retrieval and reasoning benchmarks. Overview Khoj is a personal AI app to extend your capabilities. It smoothly scales up from an on device personal AI to a cloud scale enterprise AI. Chat with any local or online LLM (e.g llama3, qwen, gemma, mistral, gpt, claude, gemini, deepseek). Get answers from the internet and your docs (including image, pdf, markdown, org mode, word, notion files). Access it from your…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Joplin or Khoj more popular?
Joplin has 56,994 GitHub stars and Khoj has 37,946. Joplin has the larger community by that measure.
Are Joplin and Khoj free?
Both are open source. Joplin has no licence declared in this registry, and Khoj is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Joplin and Khoj?
Joplin is written in TypeScript and Khoj in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Joplin or Khoj?
Choose Joplin if you want the larger community (56,994 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Khoj if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.