Documents and notes decision
Aurelius
A capable engineer can build a useful research repository (notes, tags, search, basic transcription and reports) in a week and maintain it cheaply, but matching Aurelius' enterprise features, wide integrations, transcription scale/language coverage, and hosted SLA makes full replacement impractical for a single developer.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Store research notes & media, tag and search across projects, generate/key insights and simple reports, transcribe uploaded audio/video via a 3rd-party API
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise features: SSO (SAML), IP whitelisting, advanced permissions and priority support
- Built-in high-volume transcription at competitive scale and language coverage (180+ languages claimed)
- Magic Upload that auto-parses many document types into notes
- Zapier/third-party integrations pre-built and maintained across 3000+ apps
- Guaranteed 'Unlimited' storage, backups and SLA handled by vendor
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a self-hosted user-research repository using Next.js (React) frontend, Node.js/Express API, Postgres for data, MinIO or S3 for file storage, and Elasticsearch (or Postgres full-text) for search. In scope: project and note CRUD, file upload + store in object storage, transcription integration using a configurable 3rd-party API (save transcripts as notes), tagging with type-ahead, universal search across projects/tags/notes, create/save Key Insights and export simple HTML/PDF reports, basic charts for tag aggregates, user auth (email/password). Out of scope: SAML SSO, enterprise permission models, paid Zapier connector, and multi-tenant billing. Include error handling for uploads/transcription failures, rate limits, background job queue for transcription, database migrations, and unit/integration tests for API endpoints and core UI flows.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAurelius - The more powerful research repository and insights platform
- official pricingAurelius Pricing
- official docsHow Does Aurelius Improve UX Research for Product Teams?
- open sourcezmister2016/MrDoc
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
