[opensourcedex]

AppFlowy is a free, open source note taking & knowledge management project written in Dart and released under AGPL-3.0. It has 76,797 GitHub stars, 6,023 forks and 1,030 open issues, and was last pushed 2 days ago. On this registry it ranks #1 of 25 tracked projects in Note Taking & Knowledge Management, and is listed as an open source replacement for 1 paid product, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 233 stars over the last 6 tracked days.

AppFlowy — AI workspace for docs, projects, and wikis you control

What is AppFlowy?

What it is

AppFlowy is an open-source collaborative workspace platform that combines note-taking, project management, wikis, and AI features into a single interface. It runs as a desktop and mobile application and supports self-hosting, built with Flutter for the frontend and Rust for the backend. AppFlowy lives in the productivity and knowledge management ecosystem, positioned explicitly as a Notion alternative.

The project solves the limitations of proprietary tools like Notion—particularly weak data control, mobile compatibility issues, and vendor lock-in—by offering full user ownership of data and infrastructure. It enables teams to collaborate without relying on third-party cloud services while retaining a familiar, intuitive interface.

Key capabilities

  • Real-time collaborative editing for documents, databases, and boards
  • Built-in AI assistant for text generation, summarization, and task suggestions
  • Support for multiple view types: table, board, calendar, and gallery
  • Customizable templates for projects, wikis, blogs, and task tracking
  • Local-first data storage with optional server-side sync for self-hosted deployments
  • Markdown and rich-text editing with embedded databases and relations
  • Mobile apps for iOS and Android (ARMv8+ only)

Who uses it and how

  • Teams migrating from Notion seek full data sovereignty and avoid subscription fees by self-hosting AppFlowy on their own servers
  • Developers and DevOps engineers deploy AppFlowy in containerized environments (Docker) for internal documentation and project tracking
  • Writers and content teams use its wiki and blog features to manage editorial workflows and publish content internally or publicly

Getting started

Download prebuilt binaries for macOS, Windows, or Linux from GitHub Releases; install via FlatHub, Snapcraft, or SourceForge. Mobile apps are available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Self-hosting uses Docker images and follows the official Step-by-step Self-Hosting Guide.

When to use it — and when not to

Use AppFlowy when you need a Notion-like workspace with local control, offline access, and no per-user licensing costs. Avoid it if you require enterprise-grade SLAs, native SSO integration out of the box, or seamless migration from Notion without manual data export/import. Self-hosting requires managing a PostgreSQL database, object storage (e.g., MinIO or S3-compatible), and SMTP for email notifications—no managed database or email service is provided.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

AppFlowy
 ⭐️ The Open Source Alternative To Notion ⭐️

AppFlowy is the AI workspace where you achieve more without losing control of your data

License: AGPL

Website • Forum • Discord • Reddit • Twitter

AppFlowy Kanban Board for To-dos

AppFlowy Databases for Tasks and Projects

AppFlowy Sites for Beautiful documentation

AppFlowy AI

AppFlowy Templates



Work across devices

Work across devices

Work across devices

User Installation

Built With

Stay Up-to-Date

AppFlowy Github - how to star the repo

Getting Started with development

Please view the documentation for OS specific development instructions

Roadmap

If you'd like to propose a feature, submit a feature request here
If you'd like to report a bug, submit a bug report here

Releases

Please see the changelog for more details about a given release.

Contributing

Contributions make the open-source community a fantastic place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated. Please look at Contributing to AppFlowy for details.

If your Pull Request is accepted as it fixes a bug, adds functionality, or makes AppFlowy's codebase significantly easier to use or understand, Congratulations! If your administrative and managerial work behind the scenes sustains the community, Congratulations! You are now an official contributor to AppFlowy.

Translations 🌎🗺

translation badge

To add translations, you can manually edit the JSON translation files in /frontend/resources/translations, use the inlang online editor, or run npx inlang machine translate to add missing translations.

Join the community to build AppFlowy together

Why Are We Building This?

Notion has been our favourite project and knowledge management tool in recent years because of its aesthetic appeal and functionality. Our team uses it daily, and we are on its paid plan. However, as we all know, Notion has its limitations. These include weak data security and poor compatibility with mobile devices. Likewise, alternative collaborative workplace management tools also have their constraints.

The limitations we encountered using these tools and our past work experience with collaborative productivity tools have led to our firm belief that there is a glass ceiling on what's possible for these tools in the future. This emanates from the fact that these tools will probably struggle to scale horizontally at some point and be forced to prioritize a proportion of customers whose needs differ from the rest. While decision-makers want a workplace OS, it is impossible to come up with a one-size fits all solution in such a fragmented market.

When a customer's evolving core needs are not satisfied, they either switch to another or build one from the ground up, in-house. Consequently, they either go under another ceiling or buy an expensive ticket to learn a hard lesson. This is a requirement for many resources and expertise, building a reliable and easy-to-use collaborative tool, not to mention the speed and native experience. The same may apply to individual users as well.

All these restrictions necessitate our mission - to make it possible for anyone to create apps that suit their needs well.

  • To individuals, we would like to offer Notion's functionality, data security, and cross-platform native experience.
  • To enterprises and hackers, AppFlowy is dedicated to offering building blocks and collaboration infra services to enable you to make apps on your own. Moreover, you have 100% control of your data. You can design and modify AppFlowy your way, with a single codebase written in Flutter and Rust supporting multiple platforms armed with long-term maintainability.

We decided to achieve this mission by upholding the three most fundamental values:

  • Data privacy first
  • Reliable native experience
  • Community-driven extensibility

We do not claim to outperform Notion in terms of functionality and design, at least for now. Besides, our priority doesn't lie in more functionality at the moment. Instead, we would like to cultivate a community to democratize the knowledge and wheels of making complex workplace management tools while enabling people and businesses to create beautiful things on their own by equipping them with a versatile toolbox of building blocks.

License

Distributed under the AGPLv3 License. See LICENSE.md for more information.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to these amazing projects which help power AppFlowy:

Frequently asked questions

Is AppFlowy free to use?

AppFlowy is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does AppFlowy do?

AI workspace for docs, projects, and wikis you control

What is AppFlowy written in?

AppFlowy is primarily written in Dart. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/appflowy-io/appflowy, and it has 76,797 GitHub stars.

What is a good open source alternative to Notion?

AppFlowy is one of the open source options listed as an alternative to Notion. Compare licences, stars and activity side by side on the AppFlowy profile.