3 Open Source Alternatives to Notion

Teams leave Notion for many reasons: cost, data residency, vendor lock-in, or the need to run software on their own servers. Below are 3 open source projects that people actually use in place of Notion. Outline currently leads this list with about 40,773 GitHub stars, which is a useful signal of community activity (not a guarantee of fit for every team). Other strong contenders include AppFlowy and AFFiNE. Licenses in this set include BSD-3-Clause, AGPL-3.0, MIT. Most of these projects sit in the notes & productivity tools space.

When you compare alternatives to Notion, look past marketing pages. Check how often the repo ships commits, how clear the install docs are, and whether the license matches how you plan to deploy (including SaaS or internal use). Primary languages among these projects include TypeScript, Dart. That matters if your team already standardizes on a stack for operations and security review. Several options here are rated as approachable for smaller teams to self-host. Use the cards below to open full profiles, Docker notes, and community pros and cons for each project.