AppFlowy vs Trilium Notes

The one question that decides this

Are you trying to replace Notion as a collaborative workspace, or are you trying to build a personal knowledge base that happens to overlap with Notion? That is the real split. AppFlowy describes itself as “The open source alternative to Notion” and its GitHub description goes straight at the Notion-shaped target: “Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI.” Trilium Notes is much narrower and more explicit: a “Hierarchical note-taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases,” replacing both Notion and Obsidian. Same SaaS gravity well, very different escape route.

What each one is actually trying to be

AppFlowy: the open-source Notion replacement with team/workspace ambitions

AppFlowy is not shy about the comparison. Its tagline is “The open source alternative to Notion,” and the GitHub description doubles down: “Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI. AppFlowy is the AI collaborative workspace where you achieve more without losing control of your data. The leading open source Notion alternative.” That is a pretty loud positioning statement, and it matters because it tells you what kind of product pressure AppFlowy is accepting.

This is not just a notes app wearing a blazer. AppFlowy is aiming at the Notion bundle: projects, wikis, teams, collaboration, and now AI because apparently no productivity app is allowed to leave the room without saying AI into the microphone. The upside is obvious: if your problem is “we like the Notion shape, but we want more control over the data,” AppFlowy is the more direct answer. The downside is also obvious: products trying to replace all of Notion inherit Notion’s surface area, and surface area is where polish goes to die if the execution is not disciplined.

Trilium Notes: a hierarchical personal knowledge base, not a Notion cosplay act

Trilium Notes is much less interested in pretending to be an all-hands company wiki plus project tracker plus database plus AI productivity portal. Its tagline says what it is: “Hierarchical note-taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases.” That is not as glamorous as “collaborative workspace,” but it is refreshingly clear. It wants to help you build and manage a large personal knowledge base.

That focus is the selling point. Trilium Notes replaces Notion and Obsidian in the dataset, which is a useful hint: it lives closer to the personal notes / knowledge management side than the team workspace side. If you want a structured place for your own notes, references, trees of information, and long-running knowledge work, Trilium Notes sounds like the more honest tool. If you want to recreate a department’s Notion workspace, the pitch is less direct.

Head-to-head: the metrics

AppFlowy is the much larger GitHub project by the visible numbers: AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy has 74,271 stars, 5,710 forks, 994 open issues, an AGPL-3.0 license, and a last push date of 2026-07-24. It is written primarily in Dart. That is a lot of attention, a lot of forks, and a very recent push date. It is also a lot of open issues, which can mean a busy project, a wide product surface, a large user base, or all of the above.

Trilium Notes, under TriliumNext/Notes, has 2,934 stars, 153 forks, 1 open issue, an AGPL-3.0 license, and a last push date of 2025-06-24. It is written primarily in TypeScript. The raw GitHub footprint is much smaller than AppFlowy’s, but the open issue count is dramatically lower. That does not automatically mean it is “better maintained,” because issue tracker habits vary wildly between projects, especially across forks, migrations, and maintainer workflows. But it does tell you that these two projects are living at very different levels of public attention.

The metrics tell us AppFlowy has far more GitHub visibility. Stars are not product quality, but 74,271 stars versus 2,934 stars is not a rounding error. Forks tell a similar story: 5,710 for AppFlowy versus 153 for Trilium Notes. If you care about ecosystem gravity, third-party curiosity, and the likelihood that someone has already tried your weird edge case, AppFlowy has the stronger signal.

The metrics do not tell us which app fits your brain, your team, or your tolerance for product ambition. A giant Notion alternative can still be the wrong choice for someone who just wants a durable personal knowledge base. A smaller note-taking project can be far more usable for one person than a bigger workspace platform with ten times the hype and a backlog that looks like a city zoning dispute. GitHub popularity is evidence, not a verdict.

Self-hosting

AppFlowy supports both self-host and official-cloud, with a deploy difficulty of 3 on a 1-5 scale. That matters because it gives you an escape hatch in both directions: you can run it yourself, or you can use the official hosted version if you would rather not spend your weekend discovering which reverse proxy setting ruined your life. The official SaaS price provided here is $10 monthly. That makes AppFlowy the more flexible option if you want open source plus a commercial hosted path.

Trilium Notes supports self-host, with a deploy difficulty of 3 on the same 1-5 scale. There is no official SaaS monthly price in the provided data, so there is nothing useful to invent there. The hosting story is simpler: if you want Trilium Notes, you should be comfortable with the idea that self-hosting is part of the deal. That fits the product’s personal knowledge base identity pretty well, but it is not the same buying motion as “give my team a Notion replacement with a hosted option.”

Community signals

AppFlowy has a Hacker News top story listed as “Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative,” with 304 points and 78 comments, posted by lab on 2021-11-16T00:11:43Z. That is an early, clean signal that the Notion-alternative pitch landed with the exact crowd that tends to care about open source replacements for proprietary tools. The Reddit data provided is a top post titled “🚀 10 herramientas Open Source que parecen software de pago (Parte 1)” in r/programacionESP, with 51 upvotes and 12 comments, posted by Mateo-1991. That is not a deep product discussion signal by itself, but it does show AppFlowy appearing in broader open-source recommendation traffic.

Trilium Notes has a Hacker News top story listed as “Show HN: Trilium Notes – Scriptable note-taking application,” with 328 points and 124 comments, posted by The_Colonel on 2019-01-06T21:57:54Z. That is a strong signal for a note-taking tool, especially because the title emphasizes “scriptable,” which points to a more power-user-shaped audience. The Reddit data provided is a post titled “Trilium v0.140.0, our biggest release ever” in r/Trilium, with 62 upvotes and 26 comments, posted by Elian_D. That is more specific community gravity than a generic tools roundup, even if the absolute numbers are modest.

The interesting bit is that both projects have real old-school discovery signals. AppFlowy’s HN story is framed around being an open-source Notion alternative. Trilium’s HN story is framed around scriptable note-taking. Again, the distinction keeps repeating: AppFlowy is competing with Notion as a product category, while Trilium Notes is competing for the brain of someone who wants a serious personal knowledge system.

What we'd do

Pick AppFlowy if you want the closest open-source answer to Notion’s workspace pitch: projects, wikis, teams, data control, and the option of official cloud hosting. Pick Trilium Notes if you want a self-hosted hierarchical knowledge base and do not need the full collaborative Notion-shaped machine. AppFlowy wins for teams and Notion replacement energy; Trilium Notes wins for personal knowledge work where focus beats feature theater.