AFFiNE
A workspace where documents and an endless whiteboard live together.
Instead of Miro, Notion
Screenshot from affine.pro, taken 2026-11-05, shown to help you recognise the tool. It belongs to its maker. Ask us to remove it.
Detective films love a wall of photographs joined by red string, a surface where pictures, notes and hunches all sit together and the connections are part of the thinking. AFFiNE builds that wall into a workspace. Its repository describes an open-source, all-in-one workspace and a better alternative to Notion and Miro, where documents and whiteboard are merged, and any block, from rich text and sticky notes to embedded web pages, databases and slides, can sit on an edgeless canvas.
Community Edition is free to self-host under the MIT license, and the repository tells you to begin with Docker to run your own copy. AFFiNE scores a 4 on power, longevity and delivery and a 3 on footprint, lock-in and self-direction, and the project has about 72,000 stars on GitHub.
The repository describes an Enterprise Edition that is not yet published and would add rebranding, single sign-on and audit tools, so some features are planned for a paid tier, and contributors sign a contributor license agreement before their changes are merged. The page does not say which formats you can export to, so we could not confirm how easily a workspace leaves with you, and because it does documents and whiteboards both it is a bigger thing to run and learn than a drawing board.
Living with it means setting up one Docker deployment of your own and keeping your notes and your boards in the same place, with the source open to anyone who wants to read it. Scores are our reading of public sources.
- Documents and an edgeless whiteboard in one workspace
- Community Edition is MIT licensed and free to self-host with Docker
- We could not confirm which export formats it offers
What stands out
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For comparison, we also reviewed Miro (11/30) as a benchmark.
