 Notion is a very popular productivity app and one of the favorite things that I like to do in my off times and this is going to sound very, very nerdy is to watch YouTube videos of people using Notion and explaining how Notion works because it's a very complicated piece of software and some of the YouTubers who dabble in Notion are basically wizards. They do a ton of different things in there and it has a ton of features and just kind of watching that stuff is kind of like nerd porn and I know that sounds uber weird but it's true but the problem with Notion at least from an open source perspective is that it's well it's not open source so because of that I have tried over the course of the last year or so to find a suitable or alternative to Notion that is open source because well I don't have you know I'm not 100% against using proprietary software when that's the only option I do like to use open source software when I have the opportunity so today we're going to be taking a look at a Notion alternative that is free and open source and that is an application called app flowy now first off let's talk about the name you can tell that this application is open source because it has a terrible name and well it's not the worst name we've ever heard of most open source software developers well they're not very good at naming things let's just put it frankly but that's all beside the point today is app flowy day and we're going to take a good look at it we're going to see if it stacks up against Notion because Notion like I said is super complicated has a ton of features and just a ton of stuff that you can do with it is the same true for app flowy so we're going to do that so before we jump in if you could hit the thumbs up button I'd really appreciate it it really does up the channel so let's take a look at app flowy so this is what app flowy looks like now obviously you're not going to have all of the stuff here out of the box I've done some stuff here so just know that you're just going to look a lot planer I think actually you'll probably start on this page here so basically the layout of app flowy is somewhat similar to Notion so out of the box you have the side bar along the side with which lists all of your pages and then in your main canvas area you have the page itself now the thing about Notion is that it has like I said at the beginning a ton of different features you can create tables you can create charts you can create links between pages one of the the most powerful things that you can do inside of Notion is to create a linkable database within your canvas in order to keep track of different things and make sure that you know things that are related to each other are connected and you can kind of do that inside of that flowy I'll talk more about that later but that's one of the features is kind of missing here but inside of Notion you can do just a ton of different stuff so app flowy has tried its best to replicate some of that functionality so if we were to open up a brand new page here we just go up here hit the plus button you start off with a blank canvas and just like with Notion if you hit the slash key you get an option of the things that you can create so you can create a text box you can create a header and you can insert image you can have a bulleted list a numbered list a checkbox list a pull quote or a block quote whatever you want to call it a divider a table a grid which if you actually will start with a grid the grid looks like this is this is probably one of the most used features on Notion is the ability to create a grid and the grid it basically allows you to create so if we enter something here tests like so we can actually then open this up and the way the grid works is that each item in the grid has its own page so you can then create notes right inside this so this is actually a page within a page and the idea here is that you can organize a whole bunch of stuff inside of a grid and each of that each item inside of that grid can have its own detailed information so if I say if I go back to one of the ones that I've already created so if I go to my video production page here which I've just been messing around with and I scroll down to the grid that I've created I can actually open up the page for app flowy and if I wanted to create an outline here so this is my outline you know and I could do that or I could actually insert anything that I wanted right inside this because it's basically just another page so if I wanted to insert a table or calendar or call out or an outline or whatever this is that with this would actually be the thing that I'd use to create an outline you get the idea right so for me personally both in Notion and in app flowy the most powerful tool that they have is the grid they also have something called a board which is kind of a Trello like thing so if we create a board here this is kind of the Trello like alternative that they have to offer so if you've used Trello which is again another piece of proprietary software and you use it to organize your projects or to share with people you can do that instead of app flowy as well and I think that Notion has something like this as well I'm not actually sure about that I've never really been part of the whole Trello workflow so I'm not sure but app flowy does have this another thing that they have added here you can actually add a calendar which I have right here so that you can insert a calendar one of the things that I don't really care for all that much is that one of the things that I would like to see actually is that if I click on this I'd like to be able to have this here be a page so if I have a page here for app flowy which is you know let's say I've scheduled that for today which I have done and I have that also in a grid down here as well or at least at one point I did because it's not here anymore so I have it here it's right there I was just scrolled down the point is is I have it here in the grid if those two things could be linked that'd be awesome but there isn't apparently a way to link it so this is actually a separate page so inside of the calendar I just click on this and I click here I can you know you get the page but actually having that associated with this page which theoretically those could be the same thing would be nice but apparently there's not a way to do that now it's possible I've only been using this a couple days that I'm just missing something but honestly the linking of those elements is at flowy's biggest weakness whereas with notion you can link anything together you can create a link to any page that you have you can link those things in any you can link to any of those pages inside of any of the elements that notion offers and you can just kind of move between any of the things so if you have a page just for a certain project that you're working for let's just say you have the app flowy page that can be linked inside of any element with app flowy that doesn't seem to be the case and I think that that's its biggest shortcoming is that it doesn't have that link ability that notion does it has all of the elements like you can add all of these different elements so you get the math equations and the code block and the toggle list and the emoji all that stuff is good but it hasn't taken the extra step that notion took in that it doesn't allow you really to link things together and that's my biggest disappointment with that flowy because one of the nice things about notion is that ability to link things together and that lack of being able to do that here is just not it makes it feel incomplete now another aspect of notion that is huge and maybe it's even bigger than all the individual features is the ability to share now app flowy does have some collaboration tools but they are very very minimal and they don't appear to work for me whatsoever now I'm not exactly sure why that is it's possible that I'm missing a step here like I would actually assume that it's because I don't have a count but I don't maybe it's because I don't have any of the AI or the the stuff you said but that doesn't like any sense whatsoever so I'm actually not sure why when I hit the share button all I get is the ability to share it via markdown and that button there does not work now it's possible that it's because I'm running it in a container of some sort uh that's maybe that's the reason why that's happening but for whatever reason I don't have the ability to actually share things now there is the ability to host an app flowy on your own so you could if you wanted to use this on docker on a server where other people come collaborating that way so maybe that's the primary way they expect you to collaborate I'm not actually sure I didn't test any of that stuff out all I know is that there's that big honking share button up there and it doesn't work for me so so that's another aspect that is kind of lacking when it comes to comparing this to notion so that's the basic actual functionality of app flowy so the idea here is that you can create these elements you can write and mark down if you want to it supports most of markdown the one thing that it doesn't support so if you do a link like so it doesn't actually change it into a link so it might be that you have to create this into a text thing but it's already actually a text thing by default when you just start typing it doesn't translate that into a link which is a little bit disappointing so that means it's not using true markdown it does follow the headings things so if you want to do a heading you can do that it does if you want you do two it does a heading two you know and so on and so forth I believe it will also do it'll do a list same thing with a numbered list so it does some things with markdown that doesn't seem to do images or links the way the markdown is supposed to be done so that's another thing that's just kind of lacking but that's not a huge deal it's not a markdown editor so I don't expect it to be 100 pure markdown but it does seem to want to share things into markdown and the fact that it doesn't actually support all markdown is a little weird now let's take a moment to actually look at the setting so there are a few settings here mostly around the appearance of it so you can choose between different modes so you got light and dark mode then you can choose an accent color there's three different ones here you can choose a language you can choose where the files are stored you can choose you can set up open ai and stuff like that I didn't talk about any of the AI features I'm not an AI guy if you want to check out the AI features have at it I'll leave that for other people and then you can edit the shortcut so it does a lot it does have a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts which is really good and you can then edit those if you wanted to change those to something different each of these can be edited as well so that's really nice but that's all the settings that's all there is so it's not a super complicated act when it comes to settings notion has way more settings if that matters to you notion also does have more elements as well and honestly like I said the biggest thing that's lacking here not isn't the number of elements but the ability to link between them which is you can one thing I didn't show is like right here we have this board great and if I named this board if I right click the board so I just renamed this the board like so and then I went to another page so let's just go down to this page here and if I click plus here and then click reference board I can actually choose the board here and it would actually show up as the board so that's one way it does allow you to link between things it just makes basically duplicates it on different pages and while that's kind of linking it and it does work out fairly well it doesn't do that for everything so you can't do that with pages like if I wanted to link link the video production page here and the test page together there doesn't seem to be a way to do that I thought if I like typed in if I went here and typed in the uh we're just type in product production page and then highlighted it I thought maybe I could link it that way but all the link here does is for you actual URL none of these things here to actually link it together they did put AI here which is something that they apparently are interested in but linking things together to me would be more useful than having an AI tool that's just my opinion so you know that that linking ability to different elements within different pages is the thing that I want to see and it's not here but all that's saying I know I know some of that came off as quite negative I think the app flow is actually pretty good it's very very stable it looks really nice and it has a lot of features not necessarily as many as is notion but it's not a competition it has quite a few features has all the elements that you want in order to actually create a block of productivity tool so if you want to do lists or if you want to do the grid I still think the grid is probably the most useful feature of both notion and app flowy because it allows you to organize things and set statuses and you can create different properties for each of these columns here and each property allows you to create a different type of property so you can have numbers if you wanted to have each of these have their own ID number if you could do that you can have a multi-select so it's kind of less it's kind of like a drop down so you can say like what type it is or whatever the idea here is that you can basically be as organized as you want inside of this grid and because each of these items inside of the grid is their own page you can expand on those things and actually put more detail about those products or projects or whatever on their own page and you know you can categorize them put all the your outlines and your pictures and your snippets and your screenshots and all the stuff related to that one thing right there and it's just linked so to me the grid remains the most useful tool both on notion and on app flowy and in terms of similarities i would say that the notion one is a little bit more full featured it allows you to have tags and such but i didn't see anything here for tags but it does allow you to filter so you can filter between different things if you have a really large grid you can filter between the type the status done whatever property you've set up you can filter between those you can also there's there are a few settings for so you can choose the different properties you can choose the layout if you want to so that it looks different so you can actually switch between a board and a grid and a calendar if that's what you wanted to do that's one of the reasons why it was confusing that if i if i go up here and change this to a grid like so this now has its own page which did before but those are different things like i want to be able to link this one here and this one here i want those things to be exactly the same but you can't i do like the fact that you can switch between them that's really cool so if you if you're using it as a calendar and it has a date property you can actually change a grid into a calendar and if you wanted to have both what you could do is now that this is a grid i could actually say or i could actually go let's see right here i can just press plus and then hit reference grid i can choose the video release schedule and that's just going to put that here now technically i have two of them but the second one here i can actually change back to a calendar so i can have a calendar of the thing and i can have actually it looks like it change so if i change the layout here have this a grid it actually changes it to a grid in both places that's a little disappointing i thought it was going to be a really awesome that you can have it have it in both grid form and in calendar form but it doesn't appear like that's possible so that's another little bit of a disappointment for me because i wanted if i wanted to have those both there so i can have a calendar view of the thing and the grid view of the thing at the same time on the same page but nope those two things are linked that's weird anyways it's not that big a deal but there's throughout my entire process of actually using this thing i found several different things like that that are just a little done in a weird way that bother me a little bit and it's the linking thing it's that thing you just saw me use there where the different layouts are actually linked so you can only have one layer of a certain element instead of having them both i prefer to be able to have both if i wanted to have both i'd like to have the option at least right it's not there but all that being said afloy is actually really good i don't if you're a high level notion user you're probably going to stick to notion i'm just going to put that out there if you're one of those notion wizards that i mentioned there at the beginning you're probably going to find afloy to be quite disappointing because it doesn't have all the features it doesn't have the functionality that notion has at least in the full breadth of the collaboration and the ability to link things together and all the elements that that notion has so you know that's definitely if you're really comparing them notions still wins but if you want an open source alternative to notion and you're just a very simple user of it you just need the grid functionality or you're just looking for a place to store and organize notes and stuff afloy is a good option for that and it works fairly well for me personally i'm looking for more of a notion replacement that has all those features so afloy doesn't really cut it for me but it was a good experience it was nice to try and i'm glad that i took a look at it so that is it for this video if you have thoughts on afloy or the use of notion you can leave those in the comment section below i'd really appreciate that if you haven't already leave a thumbs up on this video it really does help the channel i really appreciate it you can follow me on master downer odyssey those links will be in the video 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