AFFiNE vs Notion
AFFiNE and Notion are both note-taking software. AFFiNE is open source under a license set out in its repository, with 74k GitHub stars. Notion is a commercial product from Notion Labs.
Which to pick
- Pick AFFiNE when
- You want an open alternative to Notion that also does visual whiteboarding and can run offline.
- Pick Notion when
- A small or mid-size team wants one flexible tool for docs, wiki and light project tracking.
Side by side
A workspace combining Notion-style documents and Miro-style whiteboards on the same content, local-first with sync and self-hosting.
A workspace of pages and databases for notes, wikis, project tracking and docs, with AI search and agents built in.
Still pre-1.0, the license is not a standard open-source one, and self-hosted sync lags the cloud version.
Cloud only, slow on large workspaces, offline support is limited, and its flexibility leads to messy structures.
Usable
Production-ready
Desktop app, self-hosted server, cloud service and mobile app
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
TypeScript, Rust, Electron and Swift
Not published
Open source, license unclear on GitHub
Closed source, sold by Notion Labs
GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
74k GitHub stars
4.1k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v0.27.4.
Not known
Other comparisons
More note-taking apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.