head to head
Notion vs SiYuan
SiYuan is the open source alternative to Notion — all-in-one workspace for notes, docs, wikis, and databases. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — SiYuan is a viable free replacement for Notion. SiYuan is open source under AGPL-3.0, written in TypeScript, with 46,409 GitHub stars, 3,012 forks and 18 open issues; it was last pushed 6 hours ago. Notion costs from $10, while self-hosting SiYuan carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 6 other open source Notion alternatives are tracked here, led by AppFlowy at 76,797 stars. SiYuan ranks #4 of 7 tracked open source Notion alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: AppFlowy (76,797 stars), Affine (72,715 stars), Memos (63,129 stars), Logseq (44,955 stars), Outline (40,590 stars), AnyType (8,828 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to SiYuan and 3 reasons to stay on Notion.
choose SiYuan if
- Your Notion bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Notion if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Notion integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| SiYuan (open source) | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | $10-$18/user/month |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — siyuan-note/siyuan | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 46K · ⑂ 3.0K | — |
| Built with | TypeScript | — |
Why people look for a Notion alternative
About SiYuan
SiYuan is an open source, self hosted knowledge management system built for privacy first workflows. It operates as a local first workspace where users store data in encrypted repositories on their own infrastructure, avoiding reliance on third party cloud services. The project lives in the productivity and utilities ecosystem, specifically targeting note taking and knowledge management use cases, and positions itself as a privacy respecting alternative to Notion.
read the full SiYuan overview →
Other open source alternatives to Notion
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is SiYuan a good replacement for Notion?
SiYuan is an open source alternative to Notion (All-in-one workspace for notes, docs, wikis, and databases). It is written in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with 46,409 GitHub stars.
Is SiYuan free compared to Notion?
Yes. SiYuan is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Notion is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Notion to SiYuan?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check SiYuan's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.