anytype — decentralized, p2p, e2ee 'Notion' like app

anytype.io anytype — the everything app

for those who celebrate trust & autonomy.

26 comments

I've been evaluating this for the last few weeks, and have decided to migrate all my notes over.
The free 1gb of cloud storage is incredibly generous, and since I don't use much media in my notes, it's really all I need.
Interested to see how they price it in the long run.
- Wait, wasn't the idea about this project being p2p? Where does the cloud come in?
  Haven't tried it yet, but it looks rather interesting.
- It's worth trying. I am already loving it.
- Interested to see how they price it in the long run.
  I'm interested to see the pricing before I jump on. It ticks every box with it being local/offline first and open source.
  
  I’ve been reading their FAQ and this sounds very reasonable:
  If you want to use their cloud for backup, it will have a cost (they have not come with one yet because they have not come that far yet. It’ll depend on their hosting cost and such).
  But if you want to just sync between your own devices without their server, you can, and it’ll be totally free (they insist that “your data is always yours and only yours”)

Interesting. I have a few questions for those who have already tried:
Does it work offline?
Does it has databases like Notion?
Does it has a browser extension to capture content from the web?
I know I can look for it myself on the web, and I’ll do right now, but I think that having here the answers will help others with the same questions.
- Have been using it since early Alpha days, and I like it a lot but it definitely is still lacking some of the polish of more established tools like Notion.
  Does it work offline? Yes, it does. Your changes are saved locally and synced at the next opportunity. Obviously this can occasionally cause conflicts but in practice I've never had issues.
  Does it have databases like Notion? Not exactly. I was never a Notion power user so I can't say how well they compare, but Anytype lets you define your own custom objects with custom relations (sort of like database columns) and link any objects together, as well as creating Sets of objects of the same type and Collections of objects of any kind. So I think in principle it can replicate all the features of Notion databases but in practice you'd want to change how you think about it to fit Anytype's model more easily.
  Nothing like that yet, although they just open-sourced all their code and the devs are very active on the official forums receiving feature requests.
  
  Thank you! I downloaded and tried it and I like it a lot! Runs really smooth and the features like end to end encryption, decentralized and local sync between devices and being open software are enough reasons to jump onboard!
  I’m not a power user and I want to use it personally for myself (not a business) and after seeing what it can do and how smooth it is, I’m in!

Do anyone knows if it support local-only without joining the p2p network?
- Not sure if you can do device local only, but it looks like you can self-host a sync server and not use the IPFS network: https://tech.anytype.io/how-to/self-hosting. Requires a bit of setup but if you have a home server this looks like an interesting idea.
- I'm also wondering about that. I'm not willing to use an app that demands some kind of cloud.
  
  Well... note that it's end-to-end encrypted and works offline, though.

How close is this to feature parity with Notion in terms of the notes themselves?
- I’m trying it and i would say it’s quite close. As far as I know, it lacks the last recent updates like action buttons and AI spam (that’s a positive one for me). But it has databases like Notion, my biggest requirement for a second brain, so I’m in.

I respect the choice of early 90s apple esthetics.

Any recommendations on Google Keep alternative? Best if it was exactly the same, just not made by Google.

I feel like hosting your own Obsidian vault is still the way to go.

26 comments