AppFlowy

AppFlowy.IO
⭐️ The Open Source Notion Alternative ⭐️

You are in charge of your data and customizations.


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About the Project

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Built With

Flutter

Rust

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Getting Started

To get a local copy up and running, please follow these simple steps.

Development environment setup:

Step 1:

git clone https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/appflowy.git

Step 2:

• cd appflowy
• make install_rust

skip if you already installed it

• make install_cargo_make

AppFlowy use the https://github.com/sagiegurari/cargo-make to construct the build scripts

• *cargo*make flowy_dev

locate at xxx/appflowy/scripts/makefile/env.toml

The flowy_dev consists of three tasks:

1. install_targets

2. install_diesel

3. install_protobuf

Step 3:

Follow the instructions on [https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install](https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install) to install the flutter. Flowy uses the dev channel, so you should switch to dev channel by running the command:

%flutter channel dev

Step 4:

Open the app_flowy (locate at xx/appflowy/app_flowy) folder using Visual Studio or other IDEs at your disposal, go to the RUN and BUILD tag and then click the run button.

Roadmap

AppFlowy Roadmap

If you'd like to propose a feature, submit an issue here

Releases

Please see the changelog for more details about a given release.

Contributing

Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to be learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated. Please look at CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Why Are We Building This?

Notion has been our favorite project and knowledge management tool in recent years because of its aesthetic appeal and functionality. Our team uses it daily, and we are on its paid plan. However, as we all know Notion has its limitations. These include weak data security and poor compatibility with mobile devices. Likewise, alternative collaborative workplace management tools also have their constraints.

The limitations we encountered using these tools rooted in our past work experience with collaborative productivity tools lead to our firm belief that there is, and will be a glass ceiling on what's possible in the future for tools like Notion. This emanates from these tools probable struggles to scale horizontally at some point. It implies that they will likely be forced to prioritize for a proportion of customers whose needs can be quite different from the rest. While decision-makers want a workplace OS, the truth is that it is not very possible to come up with a one-size fits all solution in such a fragmented market.

When a customer's evolving core needs are not satisfied, they either switch to another or build one from the ground up, in-house. Consequently, they either go under another ceiling or buy an expensive ticket to learn a hard lesson. This is a requirement for many resources and expertise, building a reliable and easy-to-use collaborative tool, not to mention the speed and native experience. The same may apply to individual users as well.

All these restrictions necessitate our mission - to make it possible for anyone to create apps that suit their needs well.

• To individuals, we would like to offer Notion's functionality along with data security and cross-platform native experience.
• To enterprises and hackers, AppFlowy is dedicated to offering building blocks, that is, collaboration infra services to enable you to make apps on your own. Moreover, you have 100% control of your data. You can design and modify AppFlowy your way, with a single codebase written in Flutter and Rust supporting multiple platforms armed with long-term maintainability.

We decided to achieve this mission by upholding the three most fundamental values:

• Data privacy first
• Reliable native experience
• Community-driven extensibility

To be honest, we do not claim to outperform Notion in terms of functionality and design, at least for now. Besides, our priority doesn't lie in more functionality at the moment. Instead, we would like to cultivate a community to democratize the knowledge and wheels of making complex workplace management tools, while enabling people and businesses to create beautiful things on their own by equipping them with a versatile toolbox of building blocks.

License

Distributed under the AGPLv3 License. See LICENSE.md for more information.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to these amazing projects which help power AppFlowy.IO:

• flutter-quill