[HN Gopher] Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack...
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Show HN: Colanode, open-source and local-first Slack and Notion
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Hey HN, I'm Hakan, the founder of Colanode
(https://github.com/colanode/colanode), an open-source, local-first
collaboration app combining the best of Slack-style chats and
Notion-style note-taking, fully self-hostable for complete data
control. Here's a quick demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp1hoSCEArg As a heavy Notion
user, I often found it tough to get my teams fully onboard since
people naturally gravitate toward chat for quick interactions.
Maintaining context between chat apps like Slack and documentation
apps like Notion became increasingly frustrating. Switching
contexts, losing track of information, and managing data across
multiple tools created unnecessary friction. This frustration led
me to build Colanode, a single platform integrating structured
notes and knowledge management with real-time chat. After building
the first version, early feedback highlighted a critical issue:
teams/organizations want full control over sensitive data,
especially conversations. That's why I decided to open-source
Colanode under an Apache 2.0 license, making it fully self-hostable
so you can retain complete ownership and privacy over your data.
Colanode is built with simplicity and extensibility in mind, using
only open-source tools and avoiding any vendor or cloud lock-in. It
features a local-first architecture offering complete offline
support. From a technical perspective, Colanode consists of a
Node.js server API and an Electron desktop client, with mobile apps
coming soon. Everything in Colanode is represented as a node (e.g.,
message, file, folder, chat, channel, database, record), each with
specific attributes and permissions. All reads and writes performed
by the desktop client happen locally within a SQLite database, and
changes sync seamlessly via a synchronization engine built on top
of SQLite, Postgres, and Yjs--a CRDT library for conflict
resolution. The server then propagates these changes to other
collaborators. You can self-host the server in any environment
using Docker, Postgres, Redis, and any S3-compatible storage, and
connect using the official desktop client, which supports
simultaneous connections to multiple servers and accounts. This
local-first approach also prepares us for future integrations with
fully local LLMs, further enhancing privacy and performance. I'd
love your feedback and suggestions on Colanode. What features would
you like to see? What would you change? Thanks, looking forward to
your thoughts!
Author : hakanshehu
Score : 90 points
Date : 2025-04-24 07:43 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| drcongo wrote:
| This looks very interesting purely because I can just about see
| from the very fast gif on the README that it has tasks in there,
| how much of a first class citizen they are of the app could be
| really important. It blows my mind that both Slack and Notion
| have such half-arsed task implementations - every time I need to
| introduce better, asynchronous task assignments at work I get
| pushback over "people won't use yet another app" - and sure
| enough, getting people to assign me something rather than @
| notifying me while I'm nose deep in code of something that needs
| doing in a few days time has been impossible. A single app that
| lets a team manage work without constant interruptions would be
| the dream.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > A single app that lets a team manage work without constant
| interruptions would be the dream.
|
| I can see how it can work, using a native application client to
| interface to something like develops or jira and then bolt on
| instant messaging (or the reverse).
|
| The question is, can I get a company to open their wallets for
| this? From experience, I think not, but i am open to being
| convinced.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Congratulations on your launch, the animation makes it seem like
| a neat product!
|
| I don't think I've ever seen a "coming soon" pricing page before
| <https://colanode.com/pricing/>
|
| For my curiosity, your readme mentions Valkey but the docker
| compose uses Redis - is that on purpose?
| https://github.com/colanode/colanode/blob/v0.1.3/docker-comp...
|
| You will also almost certainly want to either use the Apache 2
| version of Minio[1] or label that dependency as AGPLv3 to ensure
| folks are aware. I would also recommend always pinning image
| versions, because you don't control what that project does or
| doesn't do in releases
|
| 1:
| https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/RELEASE.2021-04-22T15-44...
| hakanshehu wrote:
| Thank you! We're still working on the hosted offering, hence
| the "coming soon" pricing page.
|
| Regarding Valkey, I included it as an example of a Redis
| compatible alternative, but you're right, it's probably better
| to use it in our Docker Compose file as well. Thanks also for
| pointing out the licensing considerations around Minio, will
| definitely look into that.
| plextoria wrote:
| I'm excited to try this out! (seems to have some bandwidth
| issues, currently downloading at 24KB/s)
|
| Is SSO implemented or planned in the near future? I feel that
| colanode would be a great fit for our start-up
| hakanshehu wrote:
| Thank you! Will look into the download speed issue. As for SSO,
| we don't have immediate plans, but we'll certainly consider it
| for the future.
| plextoria wrote:
| sadly, app doesn't run on Intel Macs
| frizlab wrote:
| Hello! How does this compare to Huly?
| hakanshehu wrote:
| Hi, thanks for the question! I haven't used Huly extensively to
| provide a detailed comparison, but from a quick look (and a
| test I did some time ago) it seems to take a more opinionated
| approach: features such as issues, projects, and overall layout
| are pre-defined. Colanode, by contrast, works like Notion,
| giving you flexible building blocks so you can model your own
| workflows and knowledge structures. Huly may be quicker to get
| started with, while Colanode offers greater adaptability over
| time (this comes down to personal preference). Another key
| distinction is tech architecture: Colanode is built around a
| local-first design, providing full offline support with
| background syncing. I haven't found equivalent offline
| capabilities documented for Huly, even though they may have
| them.
| esperent wrote:
| This looks great, it's a crowded field but there's still a lot of
| room for improvement.
|
| The most important question before I'd try this is, do real time
| cross platform notifications work? If yes, how did you solve this
| for people self hosting?
| hakanshehu wrote:
| That's a great question! We didn't come to it yet, because we
| are focused only in desktop app for now. This is definitely one
| of the challenges we need to solve once we start working on the
| mobile apps. The self-hosting use case makes it tricky (and
| probably fun challenge to solve).
| eterps wrote:
| > Colanode consists of a Node.js server API and an Electron
| desktop client
|
| Is the Electron app a necessity or is using a browser possible as
| well?
| hakanshehu wrote:
| Hi! For now, Colanode is available only as a desktop app
| (Electron). The primary reason is that we wanted to implement
| some local-first features, which are currently more complex to
| achieve in the browser.
| apitman wrote:
| Curious which features? I'm starting a local-first project
| and would love to make a PWA, but I just don't think the
| platform is ready yet.
| hakanshehu wrote:
| Mainly using SQLite and having access to native file system
| for reading and writing files. We wanted to provide a full
| offline functionality. While it's possible to achieve that
| in browser as well it seemed quite complicated for now (we
| might consider it in the future).
| 9dev wrote:
| It's actually fairly straightforward using the OPFS API;
| I used it to build an upload queue a while ago, so the
| user can drag arbitrary files on the browser, they get
| copied into the OPFS as regular files, and then I can
| upload them at my own leisure, even after browser
| restarts. The SQLite WASM build even has support for it
| AFAIR.
|
| Can recommend, it's a fun challenge :)
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Anything that starts as Open source but is clearly meant to be a
| for profit product makes me sceptical.
|
| The page has a link "Pricing" that takes to a page that says its
| coming up.
|
| Well I will wait and see what and how the pricing structure will
| be revealed.
|
| It is a product that easily lends itself to being a "little vit
| free and open source" and then all the for profit add ons are
| $$$$$ and not open sourced .
| Rooster61 wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me if it's just cloud hosting and maintenance
| for a fee. Might not be an indicator of dark patterns.
| regnerba wrote:
| Do you have plans for mobile app? It looks really useful but the
| two places I would use it would both require I mobile app before
| I could switch to it.
| hakanshehu wrote:
| Hi, thanks for the question! Yes, we do plan to implement
| mobile apps, but we don't have a concrete timeline yet. It
| depends on the limitations and challenges we might face when we
| implement the same local-first approach as we did in desktop
| (full offline support, background syncing etc).
| nashashmi wrote:
| Is there a name for this new-age method of notes/webpage/data
| productivity genre? They all seem to have "write with /" to
| insert "block" content.
|
| I am trying wrap my head around what they are. The seem to be
| "docs" on the web. Then they also have this "inline page" feature
| which is a fancy include. Then have a table insert with a
| relation feature. Then they have a dynamic view layout engine on
| a table.
| omneity wrote:
| Block-based editors maybe?
| nashashmi wrote:
| Could be. That seems to bring up many search results.
| Philpax wrote:
| The term I'm familiar with is "outliners", as is used by
| Logseq: https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/start%20here
|
| Unfortunately, this is quite difficult to search for, but it
| might give you some leads.
| itomato wrote:
| These products are neat, but what about the data?
|
| Notion is a tragedy when it comes to export or migration.
|
| I didn't see any bragging about the exportability of content from
| this one, but that's the main thing I look for now.
| hakanshehu wrote:
| Hi, thanks for bringing this up! We don't have export or
| migration features in place yet, but we are planning to add
| them. Which export formats would be most useful to you? And
| when you mention migration, are you thinking about moving data
| from similar tools into Colanode or vice-versa? If so, which
| specific tools would you like to be able to migrate to/from?
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Would it be possible to allow us to set our own custom fonts and
| color scheme (without having to fork it)?
| hakanshehu wrote:
| That's an interesting idea. Didn't plan it, but we could
| implement some kind of custom theme functionality.
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