Beaver Notes vs SiYuan

SiYuan significantly outpaces Beaver Notes in community adoption with 45,943 stars compared to 1,330 stars on GitHub. This 34.5x difference suggests SiYuan has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, SiYuan has 2,960 forks, indicating strong developer engagement.

Beaver Notes and SiYuan are moving at much the same rate, adding 17 stars and adding 552 stars respectively over the last 30 days (+1.3% vs +1.2%). Neither is pulling away from the other on momentum alone.

Both projects show recent activity, with Beaver Notes last updated 10 hours ago and SiYuan 9 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.