Install on Microsoft Windows™

Download the latest Windows archive from QOwnNotes Releases on GitHub (look for a file called QOwnNotes.zip) and unzip it to anywhere you like. There is no installation needed!

Warning

If you want to use the automatic updater please make sure you unzip it to a place where your user account has write access to. By default, your user account most likely doesn't have write access to places like C:\Program Files (x86) or C:\Program Files.

You can then directly run QOwnNotes.exe from your QOwnNotes folder, no installation is required.

Portable mode

Use QOwnNotesPortable.bat to run QOwnNotes in portable mode where everything (including your notes) will only be stored in your QOwnNotes folder.

Tips

You don't need the portable mode if you just don't have Administration permissions to your computer. QOwnNotes doesn't need to be installed!

Windows 8.1 and older

The Windows release is built with Qt6 and needs at least Windows 10.

The legacy Qt 5.7 build for Windows XP to Windows 8.1 is no longer updated. The final version is QOwnNotes 26.10.0, which you can download as QOwnNotes-Qt5.7-legacy.zip (SHA-256 checksum) from the 26.10.0 release on GitHub.

Unzip it to a folder of your liking and run QOwnNotes.exe from that folder, no installation is required.

Info

The automatic update mechanism does not work with the legacy build!

Chocolatey

There is a community-maintained package of QOwnNotes at Chocolatey.

You can install it with:

choco install qownnotes

Scoop

There is a community-maintained package of QOwnNotes at Scoop. If you add the Extras bucket, you can use it to install QOwnNotes in portable mode.

scoop bucket add extras
scoop update
scoop install qownnotes

WinGet

There is a community-maintained package of QOwnNotes for WinGet.

You can install it with:

winget install qownnotes

MSYS2

There is a community-maintained package of QOwnNotes for MSYS2.

You can install it with:

pacman -S mingw-w64-qownnotes