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Comment by preya2k | Hacker News Reader

So, there's Focalboard (https://www.focalboard.com/), Outline (https://github.com/outline/outline) and Appflowy.

Has anyone compare these three Notion alternatives, yet? Would love to know, which one comes closest to the features of the original.

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There is also https://bangle.io - a web based local note taking app.

It’s still early in development, but it distinguishes itself from the crowd by allowing you to open your locally saved markdown notes while providing a notion like WYSIWYG interface.

Looks like a neat concept! I tried it out quickly and it seems quite early indeed. It (for whatever reason) didn't detect all directories/files. For example I created a new workspace based on a directory containing four subdirectories (each with MD files) and it only detected/showed two of them.

Anyways, I will be keeping an eye on the progress!

Hmm that's interesting, can I please request you to open the issue https://github.com/bangle-io/bangle-io-issues/issues so I can fix it. Thanks!

I might try focalboard, I am using Joplin now, but looking for something… more? Like that you can run it local offline. Appflowy is macOS only right now unfortunately,

You can use focalboard to run locally with sqlite: https://www.focalboard.com/download/personal-edition/ubuntu.

I can see that the appflowy repo has a build folder for Windows, so if you're using Windows you can try compiling it? Flutter is pretty easy to set up and compile.

FWIW I'd be interested to see how much work it'd take to add linux support, since in my (albeit basic) experiments with Flutter it didn't take much effort at all. Good first issue?

If you give focalboard a try, we'd love to hear feedback! :)

https://www.focalboard.com/feedback/

Not original poster, but some quick notes:

- Easy setup. I was up in 5 minutes flat including reading time - Good start templates - Aesthetic quibble - dark theme seems off. I don't know if its a shade of grey that throws me off or what - It does not have pretty moving animations of various boxes ( and it is a good thing! )

I will keep playing with it.

What about Obsidian and Cherrytree?

I don't know about the others, but Outline is nowhere close to a notion clone. Notion has way more features, and Outline is more focused on being a wiki/knowledge base.

Outline looks fantastic. I prefer open source to build a Knowledge Base for my business. I would def not use a proprietary system.

IN my understanding the licence allows me to use it and do what I could do with a normal open source licence except that I cannot build another SaaS using the code?

https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE

Am I correct to understand that this licence says that the license changes to a fully open one after 2025? What's the catch?

Edit: A quick search took me here: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/. I imagine this license was created by MariaDB to stay "open" while at the same time prevent another corps to offer their software as a SaaS.

Could anyone confirm this?

>What's the catch?

Only the code reachable from given git hash changes, not anything later.

Thanks!

Yes. No catch. You can host it for you (personal) or your company but you can't host and sell it as SaaS.

Several others projects such as Sentry.io or Zerotier are using this license. Be aware that this license is not considered open source but is more like "source available".

You also can't pay some one else to host it for you. If you have to fork it for any reason, you will be stuck hosting it yourself, even if there is a large group of folks working together on the fork, everyone will have to host it themselves to use the fork, at least for several years until the code becomes open source. Beware vendor-lock-in.

I don’t consider this vendor lock in; more other-vendor lock out. Which is not to say it is necessarily better or worse - it’s just different.

For a company with internal IT or IT capable people, that’s a small hurdle if running the software is not too hard.

For a company with all IT outsourced, this is a deal breaker.

It will likely stop the behemoths (AWS, GC, Azure) from capitalizing on that product though.

Thanks!

But does this prevent me from hosting it on say, an instance on Google Cloud?

What's the wording that would prevent that?

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