/AFFiNE

There can be more than Notion and Miro. Affine is a next-gen knowledge base that brings planning, sorting and creating all together. Privacy first, open-source, customizable and ready to use.

Primary LanguageTypeScriptMIT LicenseMIT

AFFiNE.PRO
The Next-Gen Knowledge Base to Replace Notion & Miro.

Planning, Sorting and Creating all Together. Open-source, Privacy-First, and Free to use.

All Contributors Node React React Rust

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How to use

If you have experience in front-end development, please refer to here; if you want to experience our latest version, please wait a moment, we will launch a web version in the near future. And, thanks to Lee who made a desktop build with Tauri for you to try out. Please notice that AFFiNE is still under Alpha stage and is not ready for production use.

Table of contents

Shape your page

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Plan your task

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Sort your knowledge

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Create your story

We want your data always to be yours, and we don't want to make any sacrifice to your accessibility. Your data is always local-stored first, yet we support real-time collaboration on a peer-to-peer basis. We don't think "privacy-first" is a good excuse for not supporting modern web features. Collaboration isn't only necessary for teams -- you may take and insert pics on your phone, then edit them on your desktop, and share them with your collaborators. Affine is fully built with web technologies so that consistency and accessibility are always guaranteed on Mac, Windows and Linux. The local file system support will be available when version 0.0.1beta is released.

Documentation

AFFiNE is not yet ready for production use. To install, you may check how to build or deploy the AFFiNE in quick-start. For the full documentation, please view it here.

Getting Started with development

Please view the path Contribute-to-AFFiNE/Software-Contributions/Quick-Start in the documentation.

Roadmap

Coming Soon...

Releases

Get our latest release notes from here.

Feature requests

Please go to Feature request.

FAQ

Get quick help on Telegram and Discord along with other developers and contributors.

Latest news and technology sharing on Twitter, Medium and AFFiNE Blog.

The Philosophy of AFFiNE

Timothy Berners-Lee once taught us about the idea of the semantic web, where all the data can be interpreted in any form while the "truth" is kept. This gives our best image of an ideal knowledge base by far, that sorting of information, planning of project and goals as well as creating of knowledge can be all together. We have witnessed waves of paradigm shift so many times. At first, everything was noted on office-like apps or DSL like LaTeX, then we found todo-list apps and WYSIWYG markdown editors better for writing and planning. Finally, here comes Notion and Miro, who take advantage of the idea of blocks to further liberate our creativity. It is all perfect... If there are not so many waste operations and redundant information. And, we insist that privacy first should always be given by default. That's why we are making AFFiNE. Some of the most important features are:

  • Transformable
    • Every block can be transformed equally well as a database
      • e.g. you can now set up a to-do with MarkDown in text view and edit it in kanban view.
    • Every doc can be turned into a whiteboard
      • An always good-to-read, structured docs-form page is the best for your notes, but a boundless doodle surface is better for collaboration and creativity.
  • Atomic
    • The basic element of affine are blocks, not pages.
      • Blocks can be directly reused and synced between pages.
    • Pages and blocks are searched and organized based on connected graphs, not tree-like paths.
    • Dual-link and semantic search are fully supported.
  • Collaborative and privacy-first
    • Data is always stored locally by default
    • CRDTs are applied so that peer-to-peer collaboration is possible.

We really appreciate the idea of Monday, Airtable and Notion databases. They inspired what we think is right for task management. But we don't like the repeated works -- we don't want to set a todo easily with markdown but end up re-write it again in kanban or other databases. With AFFiNE, every block group has infinite views, for you to keep your single source of truth.

We would like to give special thanks to the innovators and pioneers who greatly inspired us:

  • Quip & Notion -- that docs can be organized as blocks
  • Taskade & Monday -- brilliant multi-dimensional tables
  • Height & Linear -- beautiful task management tool

We would also like to give thanks to open-source projects that make affine possible:

  • Yjs & Yrs -- Fundamental support of CRDTs for our implementation on state management and data sync.
  • React -- View layer support and web GUI framework.
  • Rust -- High performance language that extends the ability and availability of our real-time backend, JWST.
  • Fossil -- Source code management tool made with CRDTs which inspired our design on block data structure.
  • slatejs -- Customizable rich-text editor.
  • Jotai -- Minimal state management tool for frontend.
  • Tldraw -- Excellent drawing board.
  • MUI -- Our most used graphic UI component library.
  • Other dependencies

Thanks a lot to the community for providing such powerful and simple libraries, so that we can focus more on the implementation of the product logic, and we hope that in the future our projects will also provide a more easy-to-use knowledge base for everyone.

Community

For help, discussion about best practices, or any other conversation that would benefit from being searchable:

Discuss AFFiNE on GitHub

Contributors


DarkSky

💻 📖

Chi Zhang

💻 📖

wang xinglong

💻 📖

DiamondThree

💻 📖

Whitewater

💻 📖

xiaodong zuo

💻 📖

MingLIang Wang

💻 📖

Qi

💻 📖

mitsuhatu

💻 📖

Austaras

💻 📖

Jin Yao

💻 📖

License

AFFiNE is distributed under the terms of MIT license.

See LICENSE for details.