AppFlowy vs Trilium Notes
| Tagline | Open-source Notion alternative built on Flutter and Rust | Hierarchical note-taking app for building personal knowledge bases |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Confluence | Evernote, Obsidian, Notion |
| GitHub stars | 77k | 38k |
| Language | Dart | TypeScript |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 3/5 Moderate | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose | Docker Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 5 days ago | yesterday |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
AppFlowy
- Self-hosted AppFlowy Cloud setup is involved and less polished than the local desktop app.
- Fewer database view types and formula capabilities than Notion.
- Limited third-party integrations and public API.
- Real-time multiplayer collaboration is newer and less battle-tested.
Trilium Notes
- Single-user oriented; no real-time multi-user collaboration.
- UI is dense and has a steep learning curve.
- No relational database/board views like Notion.
- Original Trilium is archived; users must migrate to the community TriliumNext fork.
Bottom line
Choose Trilium Notes if you want the lower-effort setup; choose AppFlowy for the larger community and ecosystem. Trilium Notes has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.