AppFlowy vs AFFiNE

The one question that decides this

Both projects appear on every "open-source Notion" list. Both have massive star counts. Both are actively developed. You will find people online swearing by each. The reason the internet can't agree is that they're not competing for the same use case, even though they overlap enough to feel like it.

Ask yourself this: when you used Notion, did you spend more time in databases and pages, or more time bouncing between Notion and a whiteboard tool like Miro or Excalidraw?

Databases-and-pages → AppFlowy. Whiteboard-adjacent → AFFiNE. That's the honest sort.

What each one is actually trying to be

AppFlowy: "Notion, but yours"

AppFlowy's shape is deliberately close to Notion. Blocks. Pages. Databases with grid/board/calendar/gallery views. Nested workspaces. Native desktop apps built in Flutter, plus a real mobile app. If you took a Notion user, blindfolded them, and dropped them in AppFlowy, they'd figure out the layout in about ten minutes.

The interpretation is: "the killer feature of Notion is the database-as-page fusion; let's rebuild that in an open-source tool people can self-host."

AFFiNE: "Notion + Miro + Excalidraw, in one canvas"

AFFiNE's shape is broader and, honestly, more ambitious. It has the block editor for docs. It also has an infinite whiteboard canvas as a first-class surface, and lets you drop docs onto the whiteboard as embedded objects. You can build a mind map that's also a set of pages that's also a database.

The interpretation is: "the killer feature isn't the database, it's the ability to fluidly move between structured docs and unstructured spatial thinking; let's build that."

The catch is that "let's build that" is a bigger swing than "rebuild Notion." AFFiNE moves faster, changes more, and has a higher rate of "I opened it today and something looks different" than AppFlowy does.

Databases: this is where AppFlowy wins clean

If you used Notion's databases seriously — properties, filters, sorts, formulas, rollups, linked databases — AppFlowy has more of that end-to-end. Not all of it, but more.

AFFiNE has database blocks. They're growing. They're not yet at parity with Notion's database engine, and they're behind AppFlowy's for straightforward use cases.

This is the axis on which most Notion refugees decide, because databases are usually the thing they couldn't get anywhere else.

Whiteboarding: this is where AFFiNE wins clean

AppFlowy does not have an infinite whiteboard. You can embed Excalidraw. That's not the same thing.

AFFiNE has an actual infinite canvas with shapes, connectors, sticky notes, hand-drawing, and — critically — the ability to drop rich blocks onto the canvas. If a chunk of what you did in Notion was "sketch out this system" and you'd been jumping to Miro or FigJam, AFFiNE collapses that into one tool.

Self-hosting

AppFlowy — Docker Compose file, external Postgres. Cloud sync layer is the piece that historically caused pain; it's better now than a year ago. There's also an official cloud from $10/mo if you'd rather not host.

AFFiNE — Docker Compose file, external Postgres and Redis. More moving parts than AppFlowy. Official cloud exists at various tiers.

Both are "one afternoon" self-hosts, not "one weekend" self-hosts. Neither is trivial to keep upgraded gracefully — plan for a maintenance window every few releases.

Licenses

• AppFlowy — AGPL-3.0. Safe for internal business use. Building a hosted commercial product on top requires open-sourcing modifications.
• AFFiNE — mixed: core parts under MIT, the "AFFiNE License" applies to some subsystems. Read LICENSE before commercial redistribution.

For "I want to run this for my team," either license is fine.

Community signals

Both are in the top tier of Notion alternatives by star count. Both have GitHub issue trackers where the maintainers actually respond. AppFlowy skews "how do I do X that Notion did" issues. AFFiNE skews "the new feature I love does Y unexpectedly" issues. Different vibes, both healthy.

What we'd do

Install both. It's an afternoon. Import a small chunk of your Notion workspace into each. Feel which one you'd actually open on a Monday morning.

For most people who ask this question, the answer ends up being AppFlowy — because most people who ask it lived primarily in Notion's databases. But the meaningful minority for whom AFFiNE is the right call know who they are within about ten minutes of trying it.