AFFiNE vs Trilium Notes

The one question that decides this

AFFiNE and Trilium Notes are both trying to pull you out of Notion, but they are not aiming at the same Notion-shaped hole. AFFiNE is pitching a broader workspace — “There can be more than Notion and Miro” — so the axis is creation plus planning plus visual collaboration. Trilium Notes is much more direct: a hierarchical note-taking app “with focus on building large personal knowledge bases.” If you want a Notion/Miro-ish canvas for thinking and making, look at AFFiNE; if you want a structured personal knowledge base that does not pretend to be your company operating system, Trilium is the cleaner bet.

What each one is actually trying to be

AFFiNE: Notion plus Miro, minus the SaaS hostage situation

AFFiNE’s GitHub description is refreshingly explicit: “There can be more than Notion and Miro.” That tells you almost everything about the ambition level. This is not a tiny notes app with a Markdown editor and a dream. It is trying to combine planning, sorting, and creating into one open-source workspace, with privacy-first and customizable positioning layered on top.

That ambition is the good news and the risk. AFFiNE is optimizing for people who like Notion’s flexible document model but also want something closer to a visual creation surface, hence the Miro comparison. The project replaces both notion and miro in its own positioning, which is a big claim. Big claims are useful because they tell you what to test first: don’t just ask “can it store notes?” Ask whether it can become the place where your team plans, organizes, and creates without collapsing into productivity cosplay.

Trilium Notes: A personal knowledge base that knows what it is

Trilium Notes is not trying to win a design award from a VC-funded collaboration startup. Its tagline is plain: “Hierarchical note-taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases.” That is the product philosophy in one sentence. It wants to be a serious note system, especially for people who think in trees, nested structures, and long-lived archives.

The GitHub description is similarly restrained: “Build your personal knowledge base with TriliumNext Notes.” There is no “AI-native second brain for the future of work” sludge here, which is already a point in its favor. Trilium replaces notion and obsidian in the provided positioning, so its battlefield is personal knowledge management more than broad team workspace. If your Notion usage is mostly databases, dashboards, and shared docs, Trilium may feel narrower; if your Notion usage is notes, research, and structured reference material, narrower may be exactly the point.

Head-to-head: the metrics

AFFiNE is the much larger GitHub project by the visible numbers: toeverything/AFFiNE has 70,822 stars, 5,090 forks, 688 open issues, license NOASSERTION, and a last push date of 2026-07-26. It is written in TypeScript. Those are very strong popularity signals, and the last-push date suggests the repository is currently moving. The license field being NOASSERTION is worth noticing, because it means we should not confidently summarize the license from this dataset.

Trilium Notes is smaller but cleaner-looking on the issue count: TriliumNext/Notes has 2,933 stars, 153 forks, 1 open issue, license AGPL-3.0, and a last push date of 2025-06-24. It is also written in TypeScript. The smaller star and fork counts do not automatically make it worse; they just mean it has less broad GitHub gravity than AFFiNE. The AGPL-3.0 license is explicit here, which matters if your legal or compliance brain wakes up at night screaming about ambiguity.

What the metrics tell us: AFFiNE has far more attention, more forks, and a fresher recorded push date. That usually correlates with broader interest, more contributors poking around, and a project that people are actively watching. Trilium’s numbers suggest a smaller project with a much tighter open-issue count, although issue counts are easy to misread because projects can use discussions, external trackers, or aggressive triage.

What the metrics do not tell us: they do not tell us which app fits your brain. Stars are not UX. Forks are not reliability. Open issues are not a product roadmap, and a low issue count can mean “well-maintained” or “nobody files issues here,” depending on the project culture. The useful read is this: AFFiNE is the bigger, louder, more ambitious option; Trilium Notes is the smaller, more narrowly defined personal knowledge base option.

Self-hosting

AFFiNE supports both self-host and official-cloud, which gives it a nice escape hatch depending on how much infrastructure pain you want with your notes. The provided deploy difficulty is 3 out of 5, so call it moderate rather than weekend-brain-dead simple. The official SaaS price in the provided data is $6.75/month, which means you can punt on hosting if you want the product without immediately becoming the product’s unpaid sysadmin. That hybrid model fits AFFiNE’s broader pitch: it wants to be usable by people who want open source, but not necessarily by people who want to babysit containers for sport.

Trilium Notes supports self-host only in the provided hosting options. Its deploy difficulty is also 3 out of 5, so the hosting burden is in the same moderate band as AFFiNE, at least from the supplied score. There is no official SaaS price in the data, so there is no hosted subscription number to compare here. That makes Trilium feel more like classic open-source software: you run it because you want the control, not because a polished cloud tier is trying to upsell you on “workspace serenity.”

Community signals

AFFiNE has 2 Hacker News mentions in the last 90 days according to the supplied data. The listed HN top story is “Affine transformations,” with 82 points and 19 comments, posted by signa11 on 2018-01-10, but that appears to be about the mathematical concept rather than the AFFiNE product. The supplied Reddit top post is also not useful as a product signal: “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. In other words: the word “affine” attracts search noise, and pretending otherwise would be content marketing malpractice.

Trilium Notes has a more relevant historical HN signal in the supplied data. The top HN item is “Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application,” with 328 points and 124 comments, posted by The_Colonel on 2019-01-06. That is old, but at least it is actually about the project. The 90-day HN mention count is 0, so don’t mistake historic hacker interest for current front-page momentum.

On Reddit, the supplied Trilium signal is directly relevant too: “Trilium v0.140.0, our biggest release ever” in r/Trilium, with 62 upvotes and 26 comments. That is not a giant mainstream community wave, but it is at least an actual product-community post. Compared with AFFiNE’s noisy social matches, Trilium’s public community data here is smaller but cleaner. Sometimes boring relevance beats giant irrelevant numbers, which is also a decent summary of half the internet.

What we'd do

Pick AFFiNE if you want an open-source Notion alternative that is also reaching toward Miro-style creation and planning, and you like the option of either self-hosting or paying for the official cloud. Pick Trilium Notes if your real job is building a personal knowledge base and you do not need your notes app to cosplay as a whole collaboration suite. AFFiNE wins on ambition, GitHub scale, and product breadth; Trilium wins on focus, license clarity, and not trying to become every app at once.