Credit: Tashreef Shareef / MakeUseOf

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Tashreef’s fascination with consumer technology began in the school library when he stumbled upon a tech magazine, CHIP, which ultimately inspired him to pursue a degree in Computer Science. Since 2012, Tashreef has professionally authored over a thousand how-to articles, contributing to Windows Report and How-To Geek. He currently focuses on Microsoft Windows content at MakeUseOf, which he has been using since 2007.

With hands-on experience building websites and technology blogs, he brings practical developer insights to his technical writing. You can view his complete work portfolio at itashreef.com.

You might also stumble upon his short how-to video explainers, simplifying complex topics. Beyond writing, Tashreef enjoys creating short explainer videos, gaming, and exploring animated shows.

Notion is an excellent note-taking app, both for individuals and teams. However, it’s online first, and while the offline mode exists, it’s nothing to boast about. It also doesn’t support end-to-end encryption, meaning while your data is encrypted, Notion still has the keys to them.

AppFlowy promises to be a Notion alternative with a familiar interface, but with a focus on privacy and keeping your data local, which is the single most important criteria when I am looking for note-taking apps or PKM tools. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Notion, it offers a good balance of features and data ownership, which is what I was looking for.

Feels like Notion

A familiar workspace without the overwhelm

Coming from Notion, it didn’t take me any time to get familiar with AppFlowy’s interface. The sidebar, the page structure, and the way blocks snap together, AppFlowy borrows heavily from Notion’s design language. That’s intentional. If you’ve spent any time in Notion, you won’t need to relearn how to organize your workspace.

You can create nested pages, build databases with different views, and drag blocks around just like you would in Notion. The difference is that AppFlowy doesn’t throw every possible option at you from the start, making it less intimidating.

AppFlowy also covers the collaboration aspect of Notion to a great extent. You can share pages, invite others to edit, and see changes in real-time. Notion’s team features are more mature, as it offers more granular permissions, inline comments, and page analytics. However, for working with a friend on a shared project or coordinating with a small group, AppFlowy handles the basics well.

Local-first approach

Your files stay on your device

Credit: Tashreef Shareef / MakeUseOf

Notion keeps everything on its servers. All your notes, databases, and pages live in their cloud. Notion’s offline mode is not the best either and requires you to manually mark pages for offline access beforehand. If you forget to mark notes for offline access, you’ll need to connect to the Internet before you can access them again.

AppFlowy, on the other hand, takes a local-first approach, much like Obsidian. All your notes are saved to your device first, making them accessible even when you’re on a flight or during an internet outage.

However, unlike Obsidian and more like Notion, AppFlowy offers cloud sync that gets you 5GB of free storage through AppFlowy’s servers, but, again, it’s optional. You can work entirely offline and never send a single byte to anyone else’s infrastructure.

Transparency and control

Open-source and self-hosted

Credit: Tashreef Shareef / MakeUseOf

Notion encrypts your data during transit and at rest. But Notion holds the decryption keys. If they wanted to read your notes, technically, they could. If a government agency came knocking with the right paperwork, they’d have to comply.

AppFlowy offers an optional end-to-end encryption for its cloud option. It’s also open source, so the code sits on GitHub for anyone to inspect. And if you need to sync your notes to the cloud without using AppFlowy’s server, you can self-host it on your servers.

Where AppFlowy falls short

Mobile experience is rough, with limited plugins and export options

I won’t pretend AppFlowy is perfect. The mobile app needs work. On my Android phone, sync is unreliable. Sometimes I have to force-close and reopen the app before changes appear, and sometimes longer notes occasionally lag or behave strangely. If capturing ideas on my phone is a big part of my workflow, this would be annoying.

Then there’s the ecosystem gap. Notion connects to Slack, Google Drive, Zapier, and dozens of other services. AppFlowy’s integrations are sparse and limited to what’s available out of the box.

What I also don’t like is that the export options are limited to only Markdown (.md) and .csv file formats. Notion gives me far more flexibility and offers Markdown, CSV, HTML, PDF, and ZIP archives.

AppFlowy

OS Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS

Developer AppFlowy

AppFlowy is an open-source AI-powered workspace for tasks, notes, docs, and projects, offering offline support, privacy, self-hosting, collaboration, Kanban boards, and fast native performance across devices.

AppFlowy is an excellent alternative to Notion for individuals

AppFlowy won’t work for everyone. Teams needing advanced collaboration, extensive integrations, or polished mobile apps should stick with Notion. The feature gap is real.

But for individuals who value data ownership over feature completeness, AppFlowy strikes a good balance. I get the familiar Notion-style workspace, my files stay on my device by default, and I can self-host if I want complete control. The free version is beefy enough and offers a great way to keep all your notes, tasks and ideas in one place.