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Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf. Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design.

Outside of work, you’ll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games.

For a long time, Notion was at the center of my note-taking and project management. It can handle everything in my work processes. But as I’ve been trying Notion alternatives this year, I’ve discovered there were tools that handle the same core jobs, and that they were actually better when it came to speed and ownership.

I discovered Anytype some time ago while looking for alternatives to Google Docs, but realized it functions more like Notion. It offers a lot of the same structure people rely on Notion for, but without forcing your entire system to live online or in the cloud. Everything runs locally first and sync is optional. Once I rebuilt a few of my core workspaces in Anytype, I wasn’t missing Notion at all.

What is Anytype?

A local-first workspace

Anytype is a local-first workspace app that focuses on privacy and data control rather than cloud-first convenience. It’s built on the idea that your notes, projects, and knowledge should live on your device. This also means it’s offline-first by design, so you don’t need to constantly rely on a connection to access your work - Anytype treats syncing as an optional layer rather than a requirement. It also offers end-to-end encryption for all your files, so not even the app can read them.

It’s best suited for people who rely on tools that let them create structured knowledge bases and manage their projects, but also want to protect their data and reliably access it offline. Researchers, writers, designers, students, and anyone who manages long-running projects will get the most out of it. If your work involves linking ideas, tracking progress, revisiting old notes frequently, or capturing notes as you work, Anytype would be a good fit.

It’s is cross-platform and available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, so you can use it on nearly any device. While it isn’t open-source, the license allows free modification of the code for non-commercial use. And overall, the product still aligns with the open-source philosophy of ownership and privacy.

Anytype keeps your notes and projects organized

It has a unique folder system

Anytype uses a folder system called “objects” - you’ll see them in the left panel. There are different types of objects into which the app categorizes your documents. By default, you start with Pages, Images, Tasks, Notes, and Bookmarks.

Any new page you create is considered an object and you can sort them into a relevant category. You can also create your own - Anytype lets you establish properties, formats, and names for your custom objects.

Anytype has a lot of formatting options

I can structure my documents however I need

Anytype has a host of formatting options for your documents. It has the usual plain text options (like headers), as well as links, lists, media, tables, and dividers. What makes it more plentiful than Notion is all the official embeds it offers for platforms like Facebook, Telegram, Figma, Miro, Vimeo, and many more.

Highlighting the text will give you more formatting options such as bold, strikethrough, and underline. You can also control the text and highlight color. These tools are perfect for building out research documents and highlighting the most important snippets.

Pages are highly customizable

Every page can be tailored to my needs

Anytype offers a lot in terms of page layout and customization. It lets you choose a cover image, icon, description, and custom layout for every page. You can even change the header position. At the top, you can also choose the object that the page is categorized into, as well as add tags for easy search.

From the slash command, you can insert as many properties to a page as you want, including date created, last opened, backlinks, object type, and more. I like how this lets me gather all the information from a document into one place.

Creating interconnected objects

Anytype makes linking and referencing super easy

Anytype is a block-based editor, just like Notion, meaning every line I create in a page is an editable, draggable, and linkable block. This makes it easy to drag around separate pieces of text in whichever order makes sense for my documents.

Pages themselves are just as flexible in Anytype. Via the slash command, you can insert any object into a note; it will embed as a block, and clicking it will take you to that object. This effectively replaces databases, and it actually gives me a better overview of where all my notes are.

An interactive graph view

Visualizing my objects

Every page gets “stored” in Anytype’s graph view, and it retains any connections it has to other pages and objects. This gives you a visual overview of everything you’ve created in the app and how it all links together. Plus, all of it is interactive - clicking a node will open that page or object.

A more private Notion replacement

I’ve tried many Notion replacements at this point, and a lot of them are impressive as far as capability and functionality. But Anytype is the only alternative I’ve used that gives me this level of data privacy and control. And it doesn’t come at the cost of features - I get all the core functions that Notion used to give me.

Anytype