Docs

Hello/Bonjour/Aloha/你好

Welcome.

AFFiNE is an open-source, all-in-one workspace and an operating system for all the building blocks that assemble your knowledge base and much more — wiki, knowledge management, presentation and digital assets. It’s a better alternative to Notion and Miro.

To Shape, not to adapt. Tools can impact your lifestyle. AFFiNE is built for individual & teams who care their data, who refuse vendor lock-in, and who want to have control over their essential tools. More on What AFFiNE is Not

You own your data, with no compromises

Local-first & Real-time collaborative

We love the idea proposed by ink&switch in the famous article of Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud. Furthermore, AFFiNE is the first all-in-one workspace that keeps your data ownership with no compromises on real-time collaboration and editing experience.

AFFiNE is a local-first application upon CRDTs with real-time collaboration support. Your data is always stored locally while multiple nodes remains synced in real-time.

A true canvas for blocks in any form

Many editor apps claim to be a canvas for productivity. Since the Mother of All Demos, Douglas Engelbart, a creative and programmable digital workspace has been a pursuit and an ultimate mission for generations of tool makers.

”We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”. A lot of pioneers have inspired us along the way, e.g.:

  • Quip & Notion with their great concept of “everything is a block”
  • Trello with their Kanban
  • Airtable & Miro with their no-code programable datasheets
  • Miro & Whimiscal with their edgeless visual whiteboard
  • Remnote & Capacities with their object-based tag system

There is a large overlap of their atomic “buliding blocks” between these apps. And they are not open source, nor do they have a plugin system like Vscode for contributors to customize. We want to have something that contains all the features we love and also go one step even further.

We are building AFFiNE to be a fundamental open souce platform that contains all the building blocks for docs, task management and visual collaboration, hoping you can shaping your next workflow with us that can make your life better and also connecting others, too.

If you want to learn more about the product design of AFFiNE, here goes the concepts:

Self Host

AFFiNE & AFFiNE Cloud is completely open source and selfhostable. You can use docker to selfhost AFFiNE Cloud & AFFiNE on your machine. More guides on Self-host AFFiNE.

Affine Development

For developers or installations guides, please go to Quick Start

Shape your own AFFiNE

AFFiNE, along with our cloud services and all our infrastructure, is 100% open source. You have the freedom to manage, self-host, or even shape your own version of AFFiNE. With our upcoming plugin community and third-party blocks, we’re building a platform that adapts to your unique needs. Imagine a workspace as customizable as your own digital lifestyle, where each tool and feature is specifically tailored to fit your unique workflow. You and your knowledge are unique, and your tools should be too.

Blocks that assemble your next docs, tasks kanban or whiteboard