Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative

  • So, there's Focalboard (https://www.focalboard.com/), Outline (https://github.com/outline/outline) and Appflowy.

    Has anyone compare these three Notion alternatives, yet? Would love to know, which one comes closest to the features of the original.

  • I don't know when this Notion thing took off but after recently being forced to use it at $DAY_JOB I don't get the hype. It feels like GDocs but with the directory embedded in the sidebar. Given how many people are rushing to clone it I must clearly be missing something.

    Also their implementation of OT or CRDTs is horseshit, it failed miserably when there was ~6-7 of us updating a bulleted list at the same time.

  • I guess I greatly underestimated what Notion was -- I thought it was mostly a note-taking tool ("Evernote 2.0"), but Appflowy (and a visit to the Notion site again) makes it seem like a project management tool + wiki?

    Notion is essentialy JIRA + Confluence + OneNote wrapped up in one (not implying anything about the quality of the products just their competencies)?

    [EDIT] - A possibly disturbing/pleasing thought -- is Notion Chat on the horizon?

  • The fact that their Roadmap is hosted on Trello rather than Appflowy itself says as much about where the project is at as the roadmap itself.

  • Using rust and flutter for a project like this seems to me, that the authors just searched for a project to learn/use a new skillset?

    Although, an interesting stack, this is definitely not boring technology, so the innovation tokens will be used probably with flutter web.

  • I am enjoying the fact very much that there are more and more visible efforts to make modern, free and (post-)open alternatives to commercial software.

    What I am still not understanding is how designers and programmers can make a living when "everybody" uses cheap and decentralized (Yunohost, etc.) cloud instances.

  • Sorry for the tangent, but is anyone aware of any open source alternative to workflowy (quite a bit different to notion, a lot simpler, usually described as an infinite outliner)?

    I really got on with that whilst I was briefly using it, but it being proprietary was a bit of a concern

  • Why is the project's roadmap is located in Trello and not in the website itself?

  • Another (largely unheard-of) alternative to Notion is https://www.larksuite.com/ , by ByteDance. It's quite good.

    (I hope I didn't just start a political / ideological debate because I mentioned ByteDance.)

  • Ah this is great! I've been looking for something like Notion but self-hosted.

  • Outline is another (more mature) option: https://github.com/outline/outline

  • Why does this sound so much like Workflowy[1]?

    [1] https://workflowy.com/

  • If you're looking for a full-fledged alternative to Notion, I'd look at Anytype. It's closed beta for now.

  • Is Notion the tool with the most copycats? Slite, workflowy, loop, appflowy, outline, focalboard, ...?

  • It looks like this is self-hosted only as opposed to a more direct alternative to Notion.

  • Does it allow easy internal linking and does it have a graph like in Obsidian or Roam?

  • If this has offline mode and fast search, I am in.

  • Is there a docker image that I can use to run this off my RPi

  • Why is their roadmap hosted on Trello?

  • Soon we will need an open source alternative to the open source.