Local-first · Open source · Real-time CRDT sync
A second brain,
shared.
Everyone built a second brain for themselves. Nobody built one for a team. Baalda is plain .md files on your disk, edited together in real time, permissioned per file, and read and written by your AI like a teammate.
The one idea
AI is only as good as the context you give it. Baalda is where your team's context lives.
Files on disk
Every note is a real .md file in a folder you own. No database, no lock-in. Your context outlives every tool built on top of it.
Live for the whole team
Open the same note together. A CRDT merges every keystroke, so two people, or ten, never clobber each other's work.
AI as a peer
Your assistant reads and writes the same files over MCP. Its edits merge with yours as operations, never whole-file overwrites.
Why we built it
Every tool made us pick two.
We ran our own team brain for a year on personal tools stretched past their limits: strategy docs vanishing mid-edit, permissions that stopped at folders, AI wired in through hacks. The tools weren't broken. They were built for one person.
Local, but solo
Obsidian-style tools are brilliant for one brain. But they're architecturally not built for a team sharing context: sync plugins fork, conflict, and lose edits under real concurrent use.
Multiplayer, but theirs
Notion-style workspaces nail collaboration, and hold your knowledge server-side as opaque objects, out of reach of your local files, your editors, and your command-line agents.
Shared, but broken
Git turns teammates into merge-conflict resolvers. Cloud drives sync a note in two minutes, two hours, or two days. Neither was ever meant for live, shared writing.
The market sells you a silo or a merge conflict, not a live, permissioned, AI-writable team brain. So we built one.
What you get
All three, out of the box.
Files on your disk. A team editing them live. An AI writing alongside you. Plus everything a second brain needs day to day.
Local-first
Editor, full-text search, backlinks and a graph view that work fully offline. Your notes never have to touch a server to be useful.
Real-time collaboration
Live presence and keystroke-level sync on the same note. Concurrent edits merge cleanly: no conflict dialogs, no lost strategy docs.
AI-native
Connect an AI over MCP and it works in your markdown as a real collaborator. Its writes flow through the same sync as human edits. No side-channel hacks.
Per-file permissions
Share a folder with the team, then lock a single file inside it. Viewer or editor, per person, per file, so nobody silently rewrites the note your AI runs on.
Multi-device sync
The same vault on every machine, converging in milliseconds, not "maybe in two hours, maybe in two days." Offline edits merge when you're back.
Linked knowledge
[[Wikilinks]], backlinks that survive renames, semantic search, and a graph view of how your team's thinking connects.
Built to scale
From your notes to your whole company.
Most tools slow to a crawl as your notes pile up or your team grows. Baalda doesn't. Everything stays quietly up to date in the background, so the moment you click, it's already there.
Need more? Baalda scales out to tens of thousands of people working at once.
Open core
Free forever on your own machine.
The desktop app is free and open source. You pay only when your brain goes multiplayer: the managed backend for sync, collaboration and hosted AI. Self-hosters run it themselves, free.
Learn more
Read up before you commit.
How a team second brain works, how Baalda compares to the tools you already know, and why local-first plus real-time collaboration is the combination nobody else ships.
What is a team second brain (and why nobody built one until now)
A team second brain is a shared knowledge system your whole team edits together. What it is, why personal note apps fail teams, and how Baalda does it.
ComparisonsThe best second brain apps in 2026 (for teams and solo)
An honest comparison of the best second brain apps in 2026: Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, Reflect, Tana, and Baalda. Which to pick for a team versus solo.
AI & MCPGive your AI a second brain: connect Claude to your notes over MCP
MCP lets an AI assistant read and write your actual markdown files instead of a separate chat. How it works, why it beats copy-paste, and how to set it up with Baalda.
Give your team one brain.
Free, open source, and yours to keep. Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.