// the find
toeverything/AFFiNE
There can be more than Notion and Miro. AFFiNE(pronounced [ə‘fain]) is a next-gen knowledge base that brings planning, sorting and creating all together. Privacy first, open-source, customizable and ready to use.
AFFiNE is an open-source Notion/Miro hybrid that merges documents, whiteboards, and databases into a single workspace with local-first storage and real-time collaboration via CRDT. It targets developers and knowledge workers who want self-hosted, privacy-respecting alternatives to SaaS tools. The editor layer (BlockSuite) is a separate, reusable project—AFFiNE is effectively a product built on top of it.
The CRDT stack is genuinely well-engineered: they wrote y-octo in Rust (a high-performance Yjs-compatible implementation) and OctoBase as a Rust-based local-first database, which means offline-first isn't bolted on—it's the foundation. The BlockSuite editor is a real architectural investment; publishing it as a standalone library means the block model is dogfooded by a production app, not a toy demo. Self-hosting via Docker Compose is straightforward with clear env var documentation and works without cloud dependency. Active release cadence with 69k stars and a real contributor base—this isn't vaporware.
The monorepo is enormous and the build tooling is complex enough that getting a local dev environment running from scratch is a multi-hour project; the Yarn 4 + NX + Rust + Electron combination means something almost always breaks on a fresh checkout. The AI features are purely additive wrappers over external LLM APIs—there's nothing novel in the AI layer, and it requires AFFiNE Cloud (their paid tier) for most AI functionality, which undercuts the self-host story. The dual-license model (MIT for CE, unspecified EE for enterprise features) is a yellow flag—SSO and audit logs are EE, so any team evaluation may hit a paywall. Plugin/extension ecosystem is still 'coming soon' after years of development, meaning the editor is not yet meaningfully extensible by third parties.