AppFlowy README

The project's README from github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy. As one markdown file: README.md.

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 🌎🗺

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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.

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

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:

AppFlowy (AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy)

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77.5K ·GitHub
AppFlowy
What is this?AppFlowy is an open-source, AI-powered collaborative workspace that combines projects, wikis, and team docs, built as a Notion alternative that keeps your data under your control.
Is this a desktop app I install, or a service I sign up for?It's a native application built with Flutter and Rust that you install on your own devices (desktop or mobile), with an optional self-hosting setup for the backend if you want full control over your data.
How do I get it running?Download the AppFlowy Desktop app for macOS, Windows, or Linux (also available via FlatHub, Snapcraft, or Sourceforge), or grab it from the App Store (iPhone) or Play Store (Android 10+).
Do I need anything special to run it on mobile?On Android you need version 10 or above; devices using ARMv7 architecture are not supported.
What's the catch compared to Notion?The team is upfront that AppFlowy doesn't yet match Notion's full feature set or design polish, and improving raw functionality isn't their current top priority — they focus instead on data privacy and community-driven extensibility.
Who controls my data?AppFlowy is built so you keep 100% control of your data, and you can self-host the whole stack instead of relying on a third-party server.
Why did the team build AppFlowy instead of just using Notion?They loved Notion but ran into weak data security and poor mobile compatibility, and believed closed, centralized tools eventually hit a ceiling on flexibility — so they built an open, self-hostable alternative instead.
What is AppFlowy built with under the hood?A single codebase written in Flutter for the UI and Rust for the core logic, which lets it run natively across desktop and mobile platforms.
Can I self-host AppFlowy's backend?Yes, self-hosting AppFlowy is explicitly supported for people who want to run the full collaboration infrastructure themselves.
Is AppFlowy meant only for individuals, or also for building custom tools?Both — individuals get Notion-like functionality with better data security, while enterprises and developers get building blocks and collaboration infrastructure to build their own apps on top.
What are similar projects?AFFiNE, oxynote, docs, Folo, logseq, leanote, Life-Compass-Obsidian-CN, siyuan
Which topics is it in?content-management, notion-alternative, project-management, wiki, blog, task-management, dart, flutter, knowledge-management, note-taking, collaboration, mobile-app
Creator
AppFlowy-IO
Size
91.7 MB
Stars
77.5K
Updated
CommitJun 26Release0.14.8Oct 08
Age
5y
Commits · 90 Days