Colanode is an all-in-one platform for easy collaboration, built to prioritize your data privacy and control. Designed with a local-first approach, it helps teams communicate, organize, and manage projects—whether online or offline. With Colanode, you get the flexibility of modern collaboration tools, plus the peace of mind that comes from owning your data.

• Real-Time Chat: Stay connected with instant messaging for teams and individuals.
• Rich Text Pages: Create documents, wikis, and notes using an intuitive editor, similar to Notion.
• Customizable Databases: Organize information with structured data, custom fields and dynamic views (table, kanban, calendar).
• File Management: Store, share, and manage files effortlessly within secure workspaces.

Built for both individuals and teams, Colanode adapts to your needs, whether you're running a small project, managing a team, or collaborating across an entire organization. With its self-hosted model, you retain full control over your data while enjoying a polished, feature-rich experience.

Colanode includes a desktop app and a self-hosted server. You can connect to multiple servers with a single app, each containing one or more workspaces for different teams or projects. After logging in, you pick a workspace to start collaborating—sending messages, editing pages, or updating database records.

All changes you make are saved to a local SQLite database first and then synced to the server. A background process handles this synchronization so you can keep working even if your computer or the server goes offline. Data reads also happen locally, ensuring immediate access to any content you have permissions to view.

Colanode relies on Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) - powered by Yjs - to allow real-time collaboration on entries like pages or database records. This means multiple people can edit at the same time, and the system gracefully merges everyone’s updates. Deletions are also tracked as specialized transactions. Messages and file operations don’t support concurrent edits and use simpler database tables.

To begin using Colanode, download the official desktop app from the website. Once installed, you can connect to any Colanode server—including our free beta cloud servers:

• Colanode Cloud (EU) – hosted in Europe.
• Colanode Cloud (US) – hosted in the United States.

Both cloud servers are currently in beta and free to use; pricing will be announced soon.

If you prefer to host your own Colanode server, simply use the Docker Compose file in the root of this repository. In the near future, we’ll provide more detailed instructions for other environments, including Kubernetes. For now, here’s what you need to run Colanode yourself:

• Postgres with the pgvector extension.
• Redis (any Redis-compatible service will work, e.g., Valkey).
• S3-compatible storage (supporting basic file operations and presigned URLs).
• Colanode server API, provided as a Docker image.

All required environment variables for the Colanode server can be found in the docker-compose file.

Colanode is released under the Apache 2.0 License.