What you want to know first, answered honestly.

Nothing. nexlore is free software under the AGPL-3.0. There's no paid tier, and you don't need an account anywhere, just a machine that runs Docker.

The only thing that can cost money is using AI in the editor. Each person sets that up themselves, with their own service and their own key. A model running at your home with Ollama costs nothing but electricity.

For anyone who wants to keep their notes as files and still work on them in the browser and on their phone. nexlore is built for one person first, but with spaces and roles it works just as well for a family, a club or a small team.

English and German. Every further language is a JSON file the operator uploads, and they can download a template for it in the settings. Whatever is missing from such a file, nexlore shows in English.

Yes, in the form of spaces. Every folder at the top of nexlore's vault is a space of its own, with its own members, its own folder for daily notes and, if you like, its own theme. To link from one space into another, you write [[Space/Note]].

You can install nexlore on your phone straight from the browser. It then sits on your home screen like an app, and you can write in it just as you would on your computer. There's no app in a store. To install it, the browser needs HTTPS, and how that works is explained under Self-host.

No, nexlore needs a connection to your server. That doesn't have to be the internet, though, because at home the server in the basement is enough. If you want to write on the road without a connection, you can also bring the vault to your computer with Syncthing and work on it there in a Markdown editor.

No. One person types, and the others see a notice and can read in the meantime. In return there's no fighting over single characters and no server passing keystrokes back and forth. If someone changes the file from outside at the same time, a conflict copy is made, and nothing gets lost.

PDFs are, and a hit takes you straight to the file. nexlore doesn't search Office files, and it doesn't recognize text in pictures either.

Yes, for your own account. You can choose from seven themes, use an editor with colour pickers that warns you when the contrast is too low, pick from six free fonts and set the font size and the width of the editor. You can pass themes on as a file or share them in a gallery on the server. Custom CSS snippets work too, if the operator allows them. nexlore then reads them with a CSS parser and lets nothing through that could load something.

In a test with 100,000 notes on a small virtual machine, a note opened in about 16 ms, search answered in 7 to 160 ms, and the graph stayed smooth because the server works out the layout and delivers it in tiles. Only the very first pass over such a vault takes a good two minutes, and after that nexlore just keeps up with the changes.

No. nexlore is an app of its own. It only writes in a way that lets Obsidian open the folder at any time, if you want that.

No. nexlore is an independent project and has nothing to do with Obsidian or its makers. It simply understands the same way of writing.

nexlore shows their code as code and never changes it, but it doesn't run it either. The plugin “Queries” handles simple lists by tag or folder, and for tables, cards and boards there are the built-in views.

No. .canvas files are left untouched, but nexlore doesn't show them as a board.

Any time. Your notes are ordinary Markdown files in a folder the whole time. You just open that folder in Obsidian again. Only the versions and the trash live in nexlore's database and don't come along.

Not on disk. They are ordinary files, so that sync tools and any editor can read them. If you need that, you encrypt the server's disk. On their way to the browser, HTTPS behind your reverse proxy protects them.

Only what you switch on. That means invitations by mail through your mail server, text to your AI service when you use it in the editor, and public pages when you share something. The interface loads nothing from other servers, not even fonts.

Not in the app. As soon as a space has members, the operator only sees it if they are one of them. On the server's disk, though, the files aren't encrypted. So you trust whoever runs the server the way you would trust the owner of a hard drive.

Then nexlore rebuilds it from the files. All you would lose are the versions and the trash. For those there are the built-in backups, which pack the database, notes and attachments into one ZIP.

nexlore removes place and device from a photo when you upload it, and this is on by default. Pictures in HEIC format from an iPhone get a WebP copy that every browser can show. If the same file is already there, nexlore simply links the existing one.

On anything that runs Docker, because the image is built for amd64 and arm64. That can be a mini PC, a NAS, a Raspberry Pi or a virtual machine. Apart from the container you need nothing, no database and no search server.

The vault may. If the share doesn't report changes, you switch on NEXLORE_WATCH_POLLING. The data folder with the database, on the other hand, belongs on a local disk, because SQLite doesn't cope reliably with SMB and NFS.

For AI programs there's MCP, with more on that under AI and MCP. nexlore describes the interface's own API under /api/docs once you switch on NEXLORE_API_DOCS.

The operator decides how large a single file may be, which is 1024 MB by default. They also decide how much room each account has for its attachments, and by default there's no limit.

Add NEXLORE_LOG_LEVEL=detailed to the environment, restart and look into the log under data/logs. Note contents, passwords and keys never appear there, so you can safely pass the log on when you ask for help.