Is Trilium a good fit for ad hoc notes, and some more structured ones?

[wsw70]

I have been looking for a note taking program for years (I even wrote mine) and I am currntly bouncing between Blinko and Memos.
trilium is great, though, but I am not sure that it fits my needs (befor juming in deeper).

My profile:

• 60% of my notes are shares from blogs, Youtube, forums, ... → I need to tag these manually afterwards to differentiate the categories. I am considering connecting th enotes to an AI (or to n8n) to tag automatically.
  These are the external notes
• 35% are ad hoc notes, ideas I need to quickly note somewhere and they are independent pieces of knowledge (so they do not pile up in a daily note). Some of them are very volatile, some are more to stay. Some become full-fledged notes. I need to quickly input them (at some point I wrote a tool that pops a text field and writes the note to the service via an API
  These are ideas
• 5% are true notes which I use for references

Is Trilium adapted to such as note taking context?

[dosubot[bot]]

Trilium is a solid fit for workflows that mix ad hoc, external, and structured notes, but with some unique design choices. All notes live in a hierarchy—there’s no true “standalone” note like in Blinko, but you can use an Inbox or Day note as a catch-all for rapid, context-free capture, and organize later. Quick input is well-supported: you can create notes via the REST API, use the official Android Sender app, or trigger a global shortcut (configurable) to jot down ideas instantly from anywhere on your system (source, source).

Tagging is flexible: you can add, update, and search tags (called “labels”) manually, or automate tagging via the REST API or backend scripting API. This means you can connect Trilium to AI or n8n for automatic categorization—there’s no built-in auto-tagging, but the APIs provide everything needed for external automation (source, source). Trilium also has built-in LLM (AI) chat features, so you can leverage note content as context for AI workflows, including tagging or enrichment (source).

For volatile or “idea” notes, the typical workflow is to capture them quickly in the Inbox or Day note, then promote or organize them as needed. Notes can be created without a title, and external links (blog posts, YouTube, etc.) are easy to embed and tag (source, source).

The main friction compared to Blinko is that Trilium always puts notes somewhere in the tree, but you don’t have to organize them right away. If you want a workflow where you “dump” notes and sort later, Trilium works well. If you need notes that are never part of any structure, that’s not how Trilium is designed—but for most quick note-taking and sharing scenarios, it should fit your needs.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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