Plainva

Plainva is a free, open-source, local-first Markdown notes app and knowledge base. Your notes are plain Markdown files on your own disk — nothing is locked in a proprietary database, there is no account to create, and there is no telemetry. Plainva opens existing Obsidian vaults as they are and never migrates or reformats them, so you can move over without converting anything.

At its core is a full Markdown editor with live preview, a slash-command menu, [[wiki-links]] and backlinks, tags, callouts, tables, math (KaTeX), Mermaid diagrams, code highlighting, an outline, find & replace, tabs and a split view. On top of plain notes, Plainva adds Obsidian-compatible .base databases with eight view types — table, list, gallery, Kanban board, calendar, timeline, graph and a Google-Keep-style pinboard — each with typed properties, relations and per-view filters. A graph view — a per-note context graph plus a full vault map with cleanup tools — rounds out how you move through your notes.

Sync is bring-your-own: connect WebDAV/Nextcloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox or any S3-compatible storage with your own credentials, and your notes sync end-to-end through your own cloud. Plainva runs no servers of its own and never sees your data. A central "Cloud accounts" area connects files, calendar and mail per provider in one place, with a large catalog of mail providers — Apple/iCloud, mailbox.org, Fastmail, Yahoo, Zoho and dozens of international IMAP presets. An experimental calendar (CalDAV, Google, Microsoft) and email client (IMAP, Microsoft Graph) live alongside your notes, fully opt-in and account by account.

Also included: a tasks view with checkbox promotion, automatic backups with full version history, 13 themes, 10 languages, and signed and notarized macOS builds. Plainva runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, with mobile apps in beta on Android and via TestFlight on iOS. It is licensed under AGPL-3.0.