AFFiNE vs Docmost

The one question that decides this

The real split is whether you want a Notion replacement that also wants to eat the whiteboard, or a collaborative wiki that stays closer to documentation. AFFiNE describes itself as “There can be more than Notion and Miro,” and its GitHub description says it brings “planning, sorting and creating all together.” Docmost is plainer: “open-source collaborative wiki and documentation software,” explicitly positioning itself as an alternative to Confluence and Notion. That is the axis: AFFiNE is the broader workspace bet; Docmost is the team-docs bet.

What each one is actually trying to be

AFFiNE: Notion plus Miro energy, with open-source ambitions

AFFiNE is not subtle about its target. The project tagline is “There can be more than Notion and Miro,” which is a very specific promise: not just pages, not just docs, but a knowledge base that also cares about visual planning and creation. Its GitHub description calls it “a next-gen knowledge base that brings planning, sorting and creating all together,” which is the kind of phrase that can either mean a genuinely flexible workspace or a productivity app trying to wear too many hats at once.

That matters because Notion replacements often fall into two camps. Some try to be calmer, cheaper, self-hostable Notion. AFFiNE is not really doing that. It is aiming at the broader “workspace for thinking” category, where docs, structure, and canvases blur together. If your Notion usage is half notes and half messy visual planning, AFFiNE is the more natural comparison. If your Notion usage is mostly “please let the engineering team find the onboarding page,” AFFiNE may be more product than you wanted.

Docmost: A collaborative wiki that knows what room it is in

Docmost’s pitch is much more grounded. The tagline is “Open-source collaborative wiki and documentation software,” and the GitHub description says it is “an open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion.” That tells you a lot. It is not trying to be your entire creative operating system. It is trying to be where teams write, organize, and maintain shared knowledge.

That narrower target is not a weakness. In this category, focus is often the feature. A documentation tool should make the boring stuff reliable: pages, collaboration, organization, and enough structure that the company handbook does not become a junk drawer with a search bar. Docmost’s comparison set also says something: Confluence and Notion. That points toward internal docs, team knowledge bases, and collaborative writing rather than infinite-canvas planning or personal productivity theatrics.

Head-to-head: the metrics

AFFiNE’s GitHub repo, toeverything/AFFiNE, has 70,662 stars, 5,072 forks, 674 open issues, license listed as NOASSERTION, last pushed on 2026-07-21, and is primarily TypeScript. Docmost’s repo, docmost/docmost, has 21,092 stars, 1,451 forks, 305 open issues, license AGPL-3.0, last pushed on 2026-07-20, and is also primarily TypeScript.

The star gap is real. AFFiNE is much larger by GitHub attention: more than three times Docmost’s stars and forks. That usually means more visibility, more drive-by interest, and a bigger surface area of people trying the thing, filing issues, opening pull requests, or at least starring it after seeing a polished demo. But stars are not adoption, and they are definitely not a guarantee that the thing fits your workflow. GitHub stars measure attention first. Everything else is interpretation.

The license line is also worth not hand-waving away. Docmost is clearly listed as AGPL-3.0, which is a strong copyleft license and a common fit for open-source SaaS-style software. AFFiNE’s license field is NOASSERTION, which means the provided metadata does not assert a license value. That is not the same as saying “no license,” and it is not permission to invent one. It just means you should verify the repo license directly before building company policy around it.

Freshness looks good for both projects. AFFiNE was last pushed on 2026-07-21, and Docmost was last pushed on 2026-07-20. That does not prove product quality, but it does kill the usual concern that you are comparing one maintained project against one abandoned repo with a nice README and a dream. Both are alive by the provided GitHub activity signal.

Open issues need the same sober treatment. AFFiNE has 674 open issues; Docmost has 305. Larger projects tend to have more issues because they have more users, more features, and more people showing up to ask for things. A high issue count can mean healthy usage, maintenance pressure, or both. It does not automatically mean “buggy,” just like a low issue count does not automatically mean “stable.” The useful read is that AFFiNE appears to have the bigger attention footprint and likely the bigger product surface, while Docmost appears smaller and more narrowly scoped.

Self-hosting

AFFiNE supports both self-host and official-cloud, with a deploy difficulty of 3 on a 1-5 scale. That puts it in the middle: not a toy install, not necessarily an ops science project. The presence of official cloud also matters if you want to start with the hosted product and move later, or if you want the open-source posture without immediately owning backups, upgrades, and the full blast radius of your team’s workspace.

Docmost also supports both self-host and official-cloud, with a deploy difficulty of 2 on the same 1-5 scale. On the provided data, it is the easier self-hosting bet. That matches the shape of the product: a collaborative wiki and documentation tool should be simpler to reason about than a broader Notion-and-Miro-style workspace. Simpler does not mean less serious. It means fewer categories of weirdness to debug when someone says “the company docs are down.”

Community signals

There are Hacker News signals for both, but they are not equally clean. AFFiNE has 2 HN mentions in the last 90 days, but the provided top HN story is “Affine transformations,” with 82 points and 19 comments, posted by signa11 on 2018-01-10. That appears to be about the mathematical concept, not the AFFiNE product, so treating it as product buzz would be sloppy. The metric exists; the top-story context is noisy.

Docmost also has 2 HN mentions in the last 90 days. Its provided top HN story is much more directly relevant: “Install Docmost – open-source Notion Clone,” with 64 points and 29 comments, posted by vijeet_ on 2024-07-23. That is at least about installing Docmost, not a coincidental shared word from another domain. It is not a giant mainstream signal, but it is a real technical-audience breadcrumb.

The Reddit data is even noisier. AFFiNE’s provided top Reddit post is “Morality of giving every single person a permanent symbol of their 'destiny' the moment they do something they're 'meant to do' the rest of their life?” from r/MoralityScaling, with 15,689 upvotes and 409 comments. Docmost’s provided top Reddit post is “My Homelab Setup” from r/minilab, with 647 upvotes and 17 comments. Neither should be treated as a clean endorsement or criticism of either project. This is exactly where content farms start hallucinating “community sentiment,” and we are not doing that.

What we'd do

Pick AFFiNE if your Notion replacement also needs to cover visual planning, creative thinking, and the broader “workspace” idea that overlaps with Miro. It has the bigger GitHub attention footprint, fresher activity, and a more ambitious product thesis. Pick Docmost if you want a cleaner open-source wiki/documentation tool for teams, especially if your real comparison is Confluence plus enough Notion-like flexibility. For most teams trying to replace Notion as a knowledge base, Docmost is the less dramatic choice. For people who actually want Notion to become a canvas-heavy planning system, AFFiNE is the one to test first.