AFFiNE

What AFFiNE actually is

AFFiNE is the “there can be more than Notion and Miro” project, which is a very direct shot across the bow: it wants to be both a knowledge base and a visual collaboration space, not another slightly shinier notes app with a pricing page. The GitHub description calls it a “next-gen knowledge base” for “planning, sorting and creating,” with privacy-first, open-source, customizable positioning. In SaaS terms, it sits between Notion and Miro: useful for teams or individuals who want structured docs, planning, and whiteboard-ish thinking in one place without committing their entire brain to a proprietary workspace.

Live GitHub stats

AFFiNE is not a sleepy weekend repo: toeverything/AFFiNE has 70516 stars and 5062 forks on GitHub. That level of attention is a signal that people are actively looking for a Notion/Miro alternative that does not feel like it escaped from 2014.

The repository’s primary language is TypeScript, which makes sense for a modern collaboration/productivity app with a serious web UI. GitHub reports the license as NOASSERTION, which is worth noticing rather than hand-waving away, because “open-source” branding and clear licensing are not the same thing.

Maintenance also looks active from the outside: the last push date is 2026-07-15. There are 671 open issues, which is not automatically bad for a large project, but it does mean you should expect some rough edges, unresolved bugs, and the usual “power users found every corner case” energy.

What it's good at

AFFiNE’s strongest pitch is that it refuses to split your work across separate mental models. Notion is great until you want more spatial thinking. Miro is great until your board becomes a museum of sticky notes nobody can find again. AFFiNE aims at the awkward middle: planning, sorting, and creating in one workspace, with a knowledge-base foundation underneath it.

That matters because a lot of teams do not actually need “a docs tool” and “a whiteboard tool” as separate subscriptions. They need a place to dump ideas, organize them, turn some of them into plans, and keep the result from dissolving into Slack archaeology. AFFiNE’s tagline is blunt, but the product category is real: Notion-style structure plus Miro-style creation is exactly where a lot of modern work happens.

The other big appeal is control. AFFiNE’s own description leans on “privacy first,” “open-source,” and “customizable,” which are not magic words, but they do point at the audience: people who like Notion’s flexibility but hate the feeling that their company wiki, project plans, and second brain are all rented furniture. If you want an official cloud product, AFFiNE has that. If you want to self-host, that option exists too. That dual path is usually the sweet spot: use the hosted version if you value time, self-host if control is the point.

AFFiNE is also one of the few projects in this space with enough traction to be taken seriously as more than a clone. A lot of “open-source Notion alternatives” are really markdown editors wearing a trench coat. AFFiNE is aiming higher: docs, planning, sorting, and visual creation as part of the same product surface. That ambition is the whole reason it is interesting, and also the reason you should test it before betting a department on it.

What to watch for

The big yellow flag is licensing clarity: GitHub reports the license as NOASSERTION, so do not assume the legal posture based on the marketing copy. If you are deploying AFFiNE for a business, especially in a regulated or enterprise setting, check the repository and project licensing directly before you make it infrastructure. Deployment difficulty is a 3 out of 5, which puts it in “reasonable for someone comfortable with self-hosting” territory, not “your least technical coworker can run this between coffee and standup.” The last push date is 2026-07-15, so the project appears actively maintained, but 671 open issues means you should still expect churn, bugs, and feature gaps depending on your workflow.

How to deploy

AFFiNE gives you two paths: self-host it, or use the official cloud. The official SaaS starts at $6.75/month, which undercuts Notion’s listed starting price of $10/month, though price is not the only reason people leave Notion unless they enjoy migration pain as a hobby. For self-hosting, expect a modern TypeScript web-app stack; Docker or Compose-style deployment is common for this category, but do not copy random YAML from a blog post and call it production. Use the SwapToSaaS deploy guide at /deploy/affine/ for the practical path.

Related tools

If you are mainly trying to replace Notion, start with the broader Notion alternatives page at /alternatives/notion/. AFFiNE is one take on the problem, but the right answer depends on whether you care more about docs, databases, local-first storage, publishing, or team collaboration.

If the pain is more Miro-shaped, use /alternatives/miro/ instead. Whiteboarding and knowledge management overlap, but they are not the same job, and pretending otherwise is how teams end up with an infinite canvas full of abandoned rectangles.