The closest open-source alternatives to Notion and Miro | Hacker News Reader

The closest open-source alternatives to Notion and Miro

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27 pointsJohnson805312 comments

If you can solve the mobile UX, I would love to switch from notion where even a text selection is tedious on mobile app. Is there notion -> affine migration tools ?

EDIT: being behind cloudflare makes some url inaccessible with Brave on mobile. The captcha never solves. I know it's a very specific issue but worth knowing. It's an issue I encounter frequently on the web.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encryption/dns-ove...

try this

Good idea but still no chance!

There is no web app, no mobile app, and self hosted is not an option for now.

Are you sure? https://docs.affine.pro/docs/self-host-affine

As I can't try anything without creating an account, I will just have to wait and see what others have to say about this.

It's open-source and can be run locally

Actually, you can easily try it without an account: it stores everything locally with a nag/warning that your local browser data can be lost if you don't create an account.

- https://app.affine.pro

- OR click "Get Started" from https://affine.pro

I get a modal that requires me to sign in or make an account, can't seem to bypass that. But I just installed the self-hosted version, it seems to be very heavily notion inspired (as in it seems like the css is just a copy paste with the same icons and general look/feel)

I think Notion made this "slash command" block editor popular, but the underlying editor most of these editors use is actually TipTap: https://tiptap.dev/docs/examples/experiments/slash-commands

Or perhaps Notion invented the slash commands? Not sure now...

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Also: perhaps localstorage doesn't work for you (platform, permissions, browser, etc) so the account seems required.

(I work at Notion)

TipTap came out after Notion slash commands so I’m pretty sure they were inspired by Notion - there are a lot of open source packages implementing Notion UI patterns these days :)

Notion and Affine are actually both custom contenteditable codebases, neither use TipTap/Prosemirror or any other off the shelf framework for rich text editing. Affine implemented their editor using web components which I found interesting. However going your own way an be bumpy, last time I reviewed their code it didn’t work well on iOS; these days the website doesn’t let you view the editor unless you’re on desktop but maybe they fixed it.

My advice to anyone who wants to do rich text editors is: use ProseMirror (TipTap or anything on top seems fine too), DO NOT use Slate. Slate doesn’t work well on Android!!

I am genuinely impressed with what I see: Customisable tables, document editing as in notion combined with the drawing features (which I presume are inspired by Miro). The endless canvas / presentation feature reminds me of Prezi (but without transitions). All of this free and open source, really nice!

I did encounter plenty of glitches related to zoom and toolbars disappearing on firefox. As I didn't sign up all the AI integrations are not working; as someone else suggested it would be cool if I can just enter an API key somewhere. I recently tried out excalidraw. Really like the looks and how the arrow snapping works there. Excalidraw is MIT licensed so perhaps you can integrate it?

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