AFFiNE vs Anytype

The one question that decides this

AFFiNE and Anytype are both trying to be credible Notion replacements, but they are not aiming at the same center of gravity. AFFiNE’s own pitch is “There can be more than Notion and Miro,” and its GitHub description talks about bringing “planning, sorting and creating all together,” which puts it closer to an all-purpose workspace with whiteboard-ish ambitions. Anytype’s pitch is “Local-first, encrypted personal knowledge OS,” which is a very different religion: less “team canvas for everything,” more “my private knowledge graph should not live inside someone else’s SaaS spreadsheet cosplay.”

What each one is actually trying to be

AFFiNE: Notion plus Miro, without pretending those are separate jobs

AFFiNE is optimizing for the person who likes Notion’s flexible workspace model but keeps running into the wall where documents, tasks, diagrams, and visual thinking become separate tools. Its GitHub tagline says it plainly: “There can be more than Notion and Miro.” That is the bet. Not just a docs app, not just a database app, not just a whiteboard — a combined knowledge base where planning, sorting, and creating can happen in one place.

That positioning matters because it makes AFFiNE feel more expansive than a straight Notion clone. The project description calls it “a next-gen knowledge base” and emphasizes “Privacy first, open-source, customizable and ready to use.” There is some startup-grade phrasing in there, sure, but the target is legible: people who want a workspace that can handle structured notes and more visual, canvas-style thinking without forcing them into the Notion/Miro two-app tax. If your Notion setup already looks like a small internal operating system and your Miro boards are where the actual thinking happens, AFFiNE is very obviously courting you.

Anytype: A local-first knowledge OS for people who do not trust the cloud by default

Anytype is not trying to win by being the biggest shared workspace on the block. Its tagline is “Local-first, encrypted personal knowledge OS,” which is a stronger philosophical statement than most productivity tools are willing to make. The GitHub description is more modest — “Official Anytype client for MacOS, Linux, and Windows” — but the product positioning is not subtle. This is for people who want a Notion-like system where privacy, ownership, and local-first design are not just settings buried under a Pro plan upsell.

That makes Anytype more interesting if your main complaint about Notion is not “I need more whiteboarding,” but “why is my second brain rented from a company that can change pricing, features, or terms whenever the spreadsheet says so?” Anytype replaces Notion, but it does so with a different worldview. The inclusion of p2p in its hosting options reinforces that. This is not merely “we have a cloud version and a Docker image, good luck.” It is trying to make peer-to-peer, local-first knowledge management feel like a normal consumer product rather than a weekend project for people who compile their own window manager.

Head-to-head: the metrics

On GitHub, AFFiNE is the larger project by a wide margin. The repository toeverything/AFFiNE shows 70,797 stars, 5,093 forks, 691 open issues, license NOASSERTION, and a last push date of 2026-07-25. It is written in TypeScript. Those are big numbers for an open-source productivity app, and the fork count in particular suggests plenty of people are at least curious enough to poke the machinery rather than just clap from the stands.

Anytype’s main client repository, anyproto/anytype-ts, shows 8,488 stars, 554 forks, 192 open issues, license NOASSERTION, and a last push date of 2026-07-22. It is also TypeScript. That is materially smaller than AFFiNE in GitHub popularity, but it is not some abandoned “Notion alternative” repo with a README, a screenshot, and vibes. The last push date is fresh, the issue count is real, and the project has enough traction to be taken seriously.

The metrics tell us a few useful things and a bunch of things people love to overread. Stars and forks tell us AFFiNE has far more GitHub-visible attention. Last push dates tell us both projects are active, at least at the repository level. Open issues tell us both have ongoing bug reports, feature requests, and maintenance load; they do not tell us whether the maintainers are responsive, whether the issues are severe, or whether the app will make you want to throw your laptop into a canal.

The license field is also worth not hand-waving. Both projects are listed here with license NOASSERTION, which means you should not assume a clean, familiar open-source license from this data alone. If license compliance matters to your company, your lawyer, or your “I refuse to use weird source-available bait” policy, go check the repository before rolling it into anything serious. Open-source alternatives are great, but license ambiguity is how you end up in a meeting with Legal where everyone suddenly uses the word “exposure” a lot.

Self-hosting

AFFiNE supports self-host and official-cloud, with a deploy difficulty of 3 out of 5. That puts it in the sane middle: not “click one button and ascend,” but not a cursed homelab rite either. The official SaaS price listed here is $6.75/month, which is a useful escape hatch if you want the product without becoming the part-time infrastructure department. For teams or individuals who want control but still want a conventional cloud option, AFFiNE’s hosting model is pretty straightforward.

Anytype supports self-host, official-cloud, and p2p, with a deploy difficulty of 4 out of 5. That tracks with the product’s philosophy: local-first and peer-to-peer systems are powerful, but they tend not to be as boring as a standard web app deployment. The official SaaS price listed here is $0/month, though “free” should not be confused with “simple to reason about forever.” Anytype is the more interesting option if p2p and local-first are part of why you are leaving Notion in the first place, but it also asks you to care more about the underlying model.

Community signals

AFFiNE has 2 Hacker News mentions in the last 90 days. The top HN item included in the data is titled “Affine transformations,” with 82 points and 19 comments, posted by signa11 on 2018-01-10. That is not actually a meaningful AFFiNE product discussion; it is about affine transformations. So yes, the data is present, but no, we should not pretend this is the Hacker News hivemind endorsing a Notion replacement. This is exactly how lazy “community sentiment” sections become SEO sludge.

The Reddit top post attached to AFFiNE is also not useful product signal. It is titled “Morality of giving every single person a permanent symbol of their 'destiny' the moment they do something they're 'meant to do' the rest of their life?”, from r/MoralityScaling, with 16,070 upvotes and 414 comments. That may be many things, but it is not evidence that productivity nerds have evaluated AFFiNE. Treat it as a reminder that keyword matching is not community research.

Anytype has 1 Hacker News mention in the last 90 days. The included top HN story is directly relevant: “Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative,” with 414 points and 273 comments, posted by TTTZ on 2023-07-20. That is a much stronger public signal than a stray unrelated match, because it frames Anytype exactly the way the product frames itself: local-first, peer-to-peer, and aimed at Notion users. No need to invent a consensus from the comment thread; the existence and size of the discussion are enough.

The Reddit top post attached to Anytype is titled “40th birthday pulls,” from r/MagicCardPulls, with 373 upvotes and 16 comments. Again: not useful product signal. Unless your knowledge management evaluation process involves booster packs, skip it.

What we'd do

Pick AFFiNE if your real desire is a broader Notion-plus-Miro workspace: structured knowledge, planning, creation, and visual thinking in one product, with self-hosting available and a conventional cloud option if you get tired. Pick Anytype if the reason you are leaving Notion is philosophical as much as practical: local-first, encrypted, p2p-capable personal knowledge management where ownership is the point, not a feature bullet. AFFiNE wins on GitHub-visible momentum and broader workspace ambition; Anytype wins if you want your notes to feel less like rented furniture.