AFFiNE
Docs and canvas in one — write a page, flip it to a whiteboard.
91
sovereigntyAFFiNE merges the document and the canvas: the same content can be read as a written page or arranged as a whiteboard, switching between the two. That removes a real annoyance — the diagram in Miro and the decision record in Confluence drifting apart until nobody knows which is current. MPL-2.0, self-hostable, local-first, around 50k stars. It is ambitious and still maturing, and the honest caveat is that doing two things well is harder than doing one, which shows in places.
OPEN SOURCEMPL-2.0SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseMPL-2.0
PricingFree and open source to self-host. AFFiNE Cloud is a paid hosted option.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +Document and whiteboard modes over the same content
- +Local-first — works offline and syncs after
- +MPL-2.0, self-hostable, with no enterprise carve-out
- +Removes the drift between a diagram and its written decision
Where it falls short
- −Still maturing; rough edges in both modes
- −Neither mode is quite best-in-class alone
- −Smaller community than the focused tools
- −Self-hosting is more involved than Excalidraw's
AFFiNE as an alternative to
Where AFFiNE shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
AFFiNE head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.