What is Athens

Athens is an open-source and local-first alternative to Roam Research. Athens is the most community-driven, private, and extensible knowledge graph.

Download the free desktop app

Mac: https://tinyurl.com/athens-mac
Mac M1: https://tinyurl.com/athens-mac-m1
Windows: https://tinyurl.com/athens-windows
Linux: https://tinyurl.com/athens-linux

Sponsor us for additional features/services at https://opencollective.com/athens!

Demo Athens in your browser (no changes are saved): https://athensresearch.github.io/athens

Open-Source

The freedom to self-host
The freedom to use any previous version of Athens for the rest of time
Insurance against vendor lock-in
Transparency and direct feedback loops in the development process

Local-First

0% data loss
0% downtime
100% availability
100% local and fast unlike server-first apps (cough Notion and Roam)

Knowledge Graph

The problem with notetaking apps like Evernote or Apple Notes is that once you write a note, after a week you never look at it again. Without any organization, you're stuck praying that search will work for your future self. On the other hand, creating and following a system requires way too much discipline.

Athens lets you take notes with minimal systems, structure, and organization, freeing you to stay creative and in flow state. Athens does this with [[bidirectional links]], ((block references)), and a graph database.

Building Locally or Contributing

If you want to contribute to Athens as a developer or designer, please begin by reading Contributing. This also contains instructions on how to build Athens on your own computer.

Some tips once you've gotten Athens:

How to use Athens
How to file a bug report
How to file a feature request
How to download any version of Athens:
- Replace 55 with the version number you want.
- Mac: https://athens-apps.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/Athens-1.0.0-beta.55.dmg
- M1: https://athens-apps.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/Athens-1.0.0-beta.55-arm64.dmg
- Windows: https://athens-apps.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/Athens+Setup+1.0.0-beta.55.exe
- Linux: https://athens-apps.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/Athens-1.0.0-beta.55.AppImage
- beta.39 and below has a lowercase a in athens, e.g. https://athens-apps.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/athens-1.0.0-beta.39.AppImage

Join Discord

Our Discord community is a space for collaboration and learning (especially about Clojure!).

Every Sunday we have a Community Call at 11am Pacific.

Pricing

Athens is free to self-host, with additional features and services for our paid sponsors. We are also working on an enterprise offering for companies to self-host. Please see our Open Collective for more details.