Beaver Notes vs SiYuan

SiYuan significantly outpaces Beaver Notes in community adoption with 47,211 stars compared to 1,369 stars on GitHub. This 34.5x difference suggests SiYuan has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, SiYuan has 3,115 forks, indicating strong developer engagement.

Beaver Notes is growing faster, adding 22 stars in the last 30 days (+1.6%) against adding 438 stars for SiYuan (+0.9%). Beaver Notes is the smaller project of the two, so it is closing the gap rather than extending a lead.

Both projects show recent activity, with Beaver Notes last updated 1 day ago and SiYuan 10 hours ago.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with JavaScript, CSS, Typescript, SCSS. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: Beaver Notes uses JSX, Vue while SiYuan leverages Bash, Python, Golang.

SiYuan has been in development longer, starting 6 years ago, compared to Beaver Notes which began 3 years ago. This 2.9-year head start suggests SiYuan may have more mature features and established processes.

Beaver Notes uses the MIT license, which is more permissive than SiYuan's AGPL-3.0 license, potentially offering greater flexibility for commercial use and integration.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Note-Taking, Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). However, they also have distinct specializations: Beaver Notes also focuses on Secure & Encrypted Notes.

SiYuan provides self-hosting options for complete data control and customization, while Beaver Notes may be primarily cloud-based or require different deployment approaches.