AppFlowy-IO/appflowy

AppFlowy is an open-source alternative to Notion. You are in charge of your data and customizations. Built with Flutter and Rust.

Summary

AppFlowy is an open-source collaborative workspace built with Flutter and Rust, positioned as a self-hostable Notion alternative for projects, wikis, and team documentation. It ships as a desktop app on macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus iPhone and Android clients, and is distributed under the AGPL-3.0 license. The project is built around three stated values: data privacy, a reliable native cross-platform experience, and community-driven extensibility.

What it is useful for

AppFlowy is useful when a team wants a Notion-style workspace — pages, databases, kanban-style task boards, and wikis — but needs to keep data on infrastructure they control. The repository description and topics cover project management, note-taking, content management, documentation, and team collaboration, and the GitHub topics list it as both a "notion-alternative" and a "confluence-alternative."

It is a fit for engineers who:

• Need a self-hosted workspace; the README links a step-by-step self-hosting guide.
• Need Linux desktop or mobile clients; Android support is documented as version 10 or above, with ARMv7 explicitly not supported.
• Want to extend or rebrand a single Flutter + Rust codebase; the README invites feature requests and bug reports through dedicated GitHub issue templates.

For individuals, the GitHub Releases page, the FlatHub, Snapcraft, and SourceForge mirrors, and the App Store and Play Store apps are the documented installation paths.

How engineers can use it

To evaluate it, download the desktop build from the GitHub Releases page or install via FlatHub/Snapcraft; mobile users install from the App Store or Play Store. To run a server in your own environment, follow the self-hosting guide linked from the README.

To build from source, the README redirects to docs.appflowy.io/docs/documentation/appflowy/from-source for OS-specific instructions — the README itself does not list clone or build commands, so start with that page.

To contribute, the README points to a contributing guide and offers two concrete entry points. First, open a pull request against the Flutter and Rust codebase. Second, add translations by editing the JSON files under frontend/resources/translations, using the inlang online editor, or running npx inlang machine translate to fill in missing translations. Feature requests and bug reports use the dedicated issue templates.

Documented limitations: the README states the project does not claim to outperform Notion in functionality or design and that priority is on building blocks rather than feature breadth, and the Android client excludes ARMv7 devices.