head to head · open source
silverbullet vs brain.md
silverbullet has 6,492 GitHub stars, 531 forks, 345 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. brain.md has 594 stars, 59 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. silverbullet leads on adoption by 993% (6,492 vs 594 stars). silverbullet is written in TypeScript under MIT; brain.md is written in JavaScript under Apache-2.0. silverbullet has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, brain.md 10%. silverbullet was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (knowledge-management, markdown), 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
| silverbullet | brain.md | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 6.5K | ★ 594 |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-08 | 2026-11-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 531 | ⑂ 59 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick silverbullet if
- You weight community size — 6.5K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick brain.md if
- You want the brain.md feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and brain.md fits your workflow better
About silverbullet
SilverBullet SilverBullet is a Programmable, Private, Browser based, Open Source, Self Hosted, Personal Knowledge Database — a fancy term for a "notes app on steroids". Yowza! That surely is a lot of adjectives to describe a browser based Markdown editor programmable with Lua. Let’s get more specific. SilverBullet combines a clean live preview editor with wiki style linking, a built in database and query language, and a fully integrated Space Lua scripting environment, turning your notes into a programmable system that grows with you. In SilverBullet you keep your content as a collection of Markdown Pages…
read the full silverbullet overview →
About brain.md
brain.md A persistent, file based memory layer for your coding agents. An open, agent agnostic standard for capturing a project's durable knowledge as plain Markdown — read and written through one small CLI. It lives in your repo and travels across agents, machines, and models. Why · Quick start · See it work · CLI · How it works This repository is the toolkit , not a brain itself. Install it once, then in any project run brain init : it scaffolds a BRAIN.md protocol file, a brain/ directory, and default wires agent config files into your repo. From then on, any coding agent — Claude Code, Codex, anything that…
read the full brain.md overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is silverbullet or brain.md more popular?
silverbullet has 6,492 GitHub stars and brain.md has 594. silverbullet has the larger community by that measure.
Are silverbullet and brain.md free?
Both are open source. silverbullet is licensed under MIT and brain.md under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between silverbullet and brain.md?
silverbullet is written in TypeScript and brain.md in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, silverbullet or brain.md?
Choose silverbullet if you want the larger community (6,492 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose brain.md if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.