Appflowy.Io: The Open Source Notion Alternative Built With Flutter And Rust

by Flutter Awesome

AppFlowy.IO

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

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## Built With * Flutter * Rust

Getting Started

How to build on MacOS, please follow these simple steps.

Step 1:

git clone https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/appflowy.git

Step 2:

cd appflowy/frontend

make install_rust

source $HOME/.cargo/env

make install_cargo_make

cargo make install_targets

? Skip install_rust or install_cargo_make if you already installed it.
FYI, AppFlowy uses https://github.com/sagiegurari/cargo-make to construct the build scripts

Step 3:

Follow the instructions here to install Flutter. As AppFlowy uses the dev channel, you need to switch the channel. Just type:

flutter channel dev

Step 4:

You should enable the specified platform first if you don't enable it before and then select the desktop device.

# for windows
flutter config --enable-windows-desktop

# for macos
flutter config --enable-macos-desktop

# for linux
flutter config --enable-linux-desktop

  • Open the app_flowy folder located at xx/appflowy/frontend with Visual Studio Code or other IDEs at your disposal.

  • Go to the Run and Debug tab and then click the run button.

  • If you want to build for the other platform, you should modify the build_sdk.sh before running.

Roadmap

AppFlowy Roadmap

If you'd like to propose a feature, submit an issue here.

Why Are We Building This?

Notion has been our favorite project and knowledge management tool in recent years because of its aesthetic appeal and functionality. Our team uses it daily, and we are on its paid plan. However, as we all know Notion has its limitations. These include weak data security and poor compatibility with mobile devices. Likewise, alternative collaborative workplace management tools also have their constraints.

The limitations we encountered using these tools rooted in our past work experience with collaborative productivity tools lead to our firm belief that there is, and will be a glass ceiling on what's possible in the future for tools like Notion. This emanates from these tools probable struggles to scale horizontally at some point. It implies that they will likely be forced to prioritize for a proportion of customers whose needs can be quite different from the rest. While decision-makers want a workplace OS, the truth is that it is not very possible to come up with a one-size fits all solution in such a fragmented market.

When a customer's evolving core needs are not satisfied, they either switch to another or build one from the ground up, in-house. Consequently, they either go under another ceiling or buy an expensive ticket to learn a hard lesson. This is a requirement for many resources and expertise, building a reliable and easy-to-use collaborative tool, not to mention the speed and native experience. The same may apply to individual users as well.

All these restrictions necessitate our mission - to make it possible for anyone to create apps that suit their needs well.

  • To individuals, we would like to offer Notion's functionality along with data security and cross-platform native experience.
  • To enterprises and hackers, AppFlowy is dedicated to offering building blocks, that is, collaboration infra services to enable you to make apps on your own. Moreover, you have 100% control of your data. You can design and modify AppFlowy your way, with a single codebase written in Flutter and Rust supporting multiple platforms armed with long-term maintainability.

We decided to achieve this mission by upholding the three most fundamental values:

  • Data privacy first
  • Reliable native experience
  • Community-driven extensibility

To be honest, we do not claim to outperform Notion in terms of functionality and design, at least for now. Besides, our priority doesn't lie in more functionality at the moment. Instead, we would like to cultivate a community to democratize the knowledge and wheels of making complex workplace management tools, while enabling people and businesses to create beautiful things on their own by equipping them with a versatile toolbox of building blocks.

License

Distributed under the AGPLv3 License. See LICENSE.md for more information.