At a glance — how these 7 alternatives compare
Our read on each project's adoption, maintenance activity and commercial-use risk, derived from GitHub signals and SPDX license terms rather than star count alone. Sorted by stars. How we score.
| Project | Adoption | Maintenance | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 69,854 · TypeScript | Flagship | Active | Unknown risk No clear SPDX id — treat as all-rights-reserved until verified |
| ★ 44,697 · TypeScript | Flagship | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 43,579 · Clojure | Flagship | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 39,112 · TypeScript | Flagship | Active | Unknown risk No clear SPDX id — treat as all-rights-reserved until verified |
| ★ 36,620 · TypeScript | Flagship | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 14,190 · TypeScript | Mainstream | Active | High risk Distributing a derived work obliges releasing its source |
| ★ 2,921 · TypeScript | Established | Stale | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
The alternatives
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.
toeverything/AFFiNE Updated 2026-06-27 siyuan
A privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open source personal knowledge management software, written in typescript and golang.
siyuan-note/siyuan Updated 2026-06-28 logseq
A privacy-first, open-source platform for knowledge management and collaboration. Download link: http://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases. roadmap: https://logseq.io/p/NX4mc_ggEV
logseq/logseq Updated 2026-06-27 outline
The fastest knowledge base for growing teams. Beautiful, realtime collaborative, feature packed, and markdown compatible.
outline/outline Updated 2026-06-27 Trilium
Build your personal knowledge base with Trilium Notes
zadam/trilium Updated 2026-06-28 notesnook
A fully open source & end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to Evernote.
streetwriters/notesnook Updated 2026-06-25 Notes
Build your personal knowledge base with TriliumNext Notes
TriliumNext/Notes Updated 2025-06-24 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited
Nobody has rebuilt Notion's one trick — a database row that is also a page. Pick by which half you'll give up.
There is a single feature that makes Notion Notion: a row in a database is also a full document, and the same data renders as a table, a board, a calendar, or a gallery. That database-document fusion is what no open-source project on this list has fully reproduced. So the realistic framing is not “which one is the Notion clone” — there isn’t one — it is “which half of Notion did you actually live in: the structured database, or the writing surface?” Answer that and the seven projects below sort themselves quickly.
AFFiNE — the one openly aiming at the whole thing (and the one still maturing)
AFFiNE (68.6k stars, TypeScript, NOASSERTION) is the most ambitious match —
block-based docs plus an infinite-canvas whiteboard, explicitly chasing the
“Notion and Miro in one” target. It is the closest in intent. It is also the
one where ambition outruns stability: it is the youngest of the serious
contenders here in terms of feature-completion, and the GitHub card shows
NOASSERTION (its license is non-standard — read it before commercial use).
Pick AFFiNE if the all-in-one vision is what you want and you can tolerate
rough edges; avoid it if you need boring reliability today.
The local-first, single-person camp: SiYuan, Logseq, Trilium, Notesnook
If your Notion was really a personal knowledge base, four projects here are better at that than they are at team collaboration, and they share a philosophy Notion abandoned: your notes are local files you own.
- SiYuan (44k stars, AGPL-3.0) and Logseq (43k stars, Clojure, AGPL-3.0) are the block-based, privacy-first pair. SiYuan is the closer Notion-feel (page tree, block references); Logseq is outline-and-daily-note driven, beloved by the networked-thought crowd. Both AGPL — fine for personal/self-hosted use.
- Trilium (36k stars, AGPL-3.0) is the power-user’s hierarchical note
database — deep, scriptable, idiosyncratic. Important: the original
zadam/ triliumrepo is effectively in maintenance/archival mode and active development moved to the community TriliumNext fork. The card for that fork (TriliumNext/Notes) shows its last commit as 2025-06-24, so even the successor has slowed — go in knowing the maintenance picture rather than assuming the 36k stars mean a fast-moving project. - Notesnook (14k stars, GPL-3.0) is the one to pick if end-to-end encryption is your priority — it is built around encrypted notes first. Less of a database tool, more of a private Evernote.
The team-wiki camp: Outline
If your Notion was mostly a team wiki — shared docs, real-time
collaboration, a clean editor that non-engineers use happily — Outline
(38.5k stars, TypeScript) is the most pleasant collaborative writing surface
here, and it is actively developed (pushed 2026-05-21). It deliberately does
not try to be a database tool, so if you used Notion’s table/board views
heavily, Outline will feel like it is missing the point. Its license shows
NOASSERTION (BSL — converts to open over time, restricts hosting it as a
competing service); irrelevant for internal team use.
How I would actually choose
Solo, want your notes as files you own: SiYuan (Notion-ish) or Logseq (outliner). Encryption-first: Notesnook. A team that mostly writes and collaborates: Outline. Chasing the full docs-plus-canvas vision and willing to live on the frontier: AFFiNE. What no one should expect from any of them is Notion’s database-as-pages fusion or Notion AI — those are the two things you are genuinely leaving behind.
Comparison notes
Notion fans out into several open-source tools depending on which part of it you use. AFFiNE (NOASSERTION license) feels most Notion-like overall, pairing block-based editing with a whiteboard; Obsidian (source-available) owns the knowledge-management angle with local-first storage and a huge plugin ecosystem; SiYuan and Logseq cover block-based note-taking with self-hosting and local files; and Outline serves the team-wiki use case with a Notion-style editor and collaborative editing. The piece nothing reproduces cleanly is Notion's fusion of database and document, where a database row is itself a page — AFFiNE shares the ambition but trails on stability and feature completeness. Notion AI's inline writing assistant likewise has no open-source equivalent.
Migration tips
- Export Notion content as Markdown + CSV (Settings → Export → Export all workspace content) — databases export as CSV, pages as Markdown
- Use notion-to-obsidian or notion-to-outline community converters to improve import quality
- Database relations (linked pages between databases) do not export cleanly — document them and recreate manually
- Recreate Notion's rollup and formula properties in your target tool's equivalent — they will not import automatically
- Migrate team members in cohorts and run both Notion and the new tool in parallel for at least 2 weeks to catch workflow gaps
Which alternative should you pick?
Replacing Notion isn't a single call — it's a trade between license terms, team size, and how much early-stage roughness you can absorb. The 7 projects above split along those lines:
- You want the most active community and the lowest risk of abandonment → AFFiNE. 69,854★ — the largest user base in this list, which usually means more StackOverflow answers, more plugins, and more deployment runbooks online.
- You want a strong-copyleft project that resists vendor capture → siyuan. AGPL-3.0 licensed — downstream forks must stay open, which is what some teams explicitly want.
- You need a project that has shipped a release in the last few weeks → siyuan. Last commit 2026-06-28 — the freshest activity in this list.
License & commercial-use notes
With a Notion replacement the license usually decides more than the feature list — whether you can modify it, ship it inside a product, or host it as a service. The 7 projects here fall into:
- Strong copyleft (notesnook) — GPL / EPL — distributing a derived work obliges you to release its source under the same terms. Fine for internal use; plan carefully before proprietary distribution.
- Network copyleft (siyuan, logseq, Trilium, Notes) — AGPL / SSPL — the copyleft trigger extends to offering the software over a network, so a hosted deployment of a modified version can oblige you to publish your changes. Read the exact terms before building a paid hosted product on these.
- Unverified license (AFFiNE, outline) — GitHub returned no clear SPDX id. Treat as all-rights-reserved until you read the project's LICENSE file directly — do not assume commercial use is permitted.
License fields come from the GitHub API's SPDX classification and can lag a relicense. The repository linked on each card is authoritative — confirm its LICENSE file before any license-sensitive deployment.
Maintenance health of these 7 projects
Of the 7 projects listed, 6 shipped at least one commit in the last 12 months. See how we rank for the full criteria and our self-hosting cost reality check, which apply across every comparison on this site.
Frequently asked questions
What does end-user adoption look like compared to Notion?
Expect a 1-2 week dip in productivity while users learn the new UI, especially for power users who rely on Notion keyboard shortcuts and integrations. The OSS alternatives below close most of the gap on core features but lag on polish (drag-and-drop interactions, mobile apps, mature search). Pilot with a single team first.
How do these 7 alternatives compare on maintenance health?
6 of 7 have shipped a commit in the last 12 months. At least one project here has 5,000+ GitHub stars, which usually correlates with sustained maintainership. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest 5 closed issues — those two signals together catch 80% of abandoned-project cases.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last commit) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis is drafted from Notion's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata, then reviewed by hand.
- Maintenance signal: 6 of 7 projects shipped a commit in the last 12 months as of the latest rebuild (most recent activity: ).
- Last editorial review: by Yusuke Morinaga.
- Spotted an error? Email mori7ga2222@gmail.com with the page URL (subject prefix
[correction]) — we ship corrections within 14 days.