Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative (opens in new tab)

There is also https://bangle.io - a web based local note taking app.

It’s still early in development, but it distinguishes itself from the crowd by allowing you to open your locally saved markdown notes while providing a notion like WYSIWYG interface.

I might try focalboard, I am using Joplin now, but looking for something… more? Like that you can run it local offline. Appflowy is macOS only right now unfortunately,

I don't know about the others, but Outline is nowhere close to a notion clone. Notion has way more features, and Outline is more focused on being a wiki/knowledge base.

Outline looks fantastic. I prefer open source to build a Knowledge Base for my business. I would def not use a proprietary system.

IN my understanding the licence allows me to use it and do what I could do with a normal open source licence except that I cannot build another SaaS using the code?

https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE

Am I correct to understand that this licence says that the license changes to a fully open one after 2025? What's the catch?

Edit: A quick search took me here: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/. I imagine this license was created by MariaDB to stay "open" while at the same time prevent another corps to offer their software as a SaaS.

Could anyone confirm this?

The power is in the edit and view being the same view.

It's also wonderfully minimal, much faster loading, and follows basic markdown as opposed to forcing you to use BBCode or Jira specific syntax.

Previously wiki like Confluence software used to force you to go to 'edit' mode to switch between the two. This also fails when multiple people are editing the same document.

You can have a phone call with someone, and see each others cursors, edit simultaneously in real time. You say this fell down, but in Confluence this would be impossible.

It's also super easy to share pages with external vendors using the GUID based URL. They can even comment inline if they register.

The main difference between Notion and gdocs is that Notion is a wiki; you can easily navigate up and down the page hierarchy without leaving the current tab. Gdocs keeps docs separate, so you’re constantly bouncing back and forth between folder and docs, or more likely just keeping one massive, poorly organized doc with everything you might ever need in it

Rather than seeing Notion as a Google Docs alternative, it might be better to see it as an alternative to Atlassian Confluence or other wiki softwares. I can certainly say that Notion was a much better fit for us than something like Confluence was for use as a team wiki.

OneNote or Confluence is the better comparison, for just writing text in but Notion has a more powerful data model. You can link a set of pages together through their attributes and view them through a table, kanban, calendar etc. It's basically a simple relational DB, which allows you to build information tools on top of it.

At our (now defunct) startup we used it to do all our initial CRM and ticket management. We had all our customers in one table, and a different table of ongoing tickets linked to the first. We had similar setups for other things. As things started to scale we moved out to dedicated tools but having that capability meant that the initial version was much more accessible and useful.

I'll jump to whatever project has an API with features like custom link unfurling and off-site embedding.

Notion doesn't let you embed its pages in other sites, and doesn't provide a programmatic way to display proprietary content. This means it's black boxed and limited insofar as integration with enterprise tooling is concerned.

as I remember they use the “last win “ strategy, instead of crdt

I had the same idea about Notion before, and after using it the best way I have to describe is that it is a database manager, and what can it do is up to you. You can use it for simple note taking (and it does have nice features for that), but also add databases in certain formats, with properties, links between them, run "queries", add reminders... In a sense, it's like coding a (very) basic application without coding. Pretty helpful, for example I use it for managing recipes and shopping lists automatically (among other things).

Yes. It can be any of those, all of those, or none of those, and it's all organized in a hierarchical manner like a folder tree with emojis being the new way of identifying and codifying documents.

Would it be possible to do this using an email client and draft emails ?

(I work at Notion)

> A possibly disturbing/pleasing thought -- is Notion Chat on the horizon

I don’t think Notion is interested in this outside of making our comments work better.

You can already chat async on a page pretty well with Notion in comments.

Gitlab was on Github. Doesn't mean much.

What makes this especially weird is that the Trello link is right underneath the Demo Pages heading. It's the only clickable thing there. Besides that, the section only has two screenshots, one of which seems to be showing of how you can use Appflowy as a Trello-like board. Confused.

Notion team is true to their product all the way. Even using it as their blog.

You have to start somewhere if your own system isn’t ready yet but I agree, I’d change it over to my own application before launch…

Not sure why you would think it'll reach geopolitical level, a good product is a good product.

But, based on the description in their Chinese page, the service is not self-hostable (???). If this is true then there is no real reason to use such service since there are many better alternatives (Notion for example).

Does not seem to be Open Source or offer a self host option like AppFlowy.

It's not like Notion's privacy policy/TOS are great to begin with, so it's a low bar.

This doesn't look much like Notion. I think it's a lot closer to something like Google Suite (even the name indicates that).

From when I last tried it, Outline lacks any of the database/datatable functionality of Notion, but Appflowy seems to already have much of this functionality built in (or at least something like it is visible in one of the screenshots shown). Furthermore, logins in both the self-hosted and cloud versions of Outline require logging in with third party providers, no local accounts, so it can never be fully self-hosted.

Outline's rich-markdown-editor (https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor) package is pretty nice. I have used it to make some custom MD editor/CMS experiment.

Athens Research uses a workflowy like UI. It comes with a bunch of other features, but you can ignore those pretty easily.

Obsidian with the Outliner plugin is also nice - although Obsidian isn't open source, it is free and all your data is stored locally as markdown files.

1. https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

2. https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

There is Logseq (https://logseq.com/) although it is more oriented to recreate Roam.

Because that's also a Notion alternative. Not open source though sadly.

(Disclaimer: I work on Notion)

It looks like desktop software built with Flutter. Their editor is based on https://github.com/singerdmx/flutter-quill which also has a web version, so maybe they’ll be able to target web in the future. For now I don’t think they support multi-user sharing or collaboration yet, and I didn’t see web features listed on their roadmap either.

There's also Anytype.io, though it's still in closed invitation-only alpha and the promise they will open source it in the future.

Workflowy was founded 2-3 years before notion and is more of a bullet point (tree structure) based knowledge management tool.

Looks like they are still in the early stages of development. I wouldn't be surprised if in future the developers/someone else decided to host a paid version of this software so that it becomes more accessible.

Right now there is not much reason for end-users to pay for this, and running servers is expensive if you don't have a business model...

Would you like to elaborate a bit about how those graphs are useful ? I think the graphs in roam are too dense to be useful .