Anytype
FreeA local-first, peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted knowledge base
A local-first personal knowledge base that keeps data on your own devices by default and syncs between them peer-to-peer with end-to-end encryption, so no central server holds your content. It organises information as objects and relations with types and properties you define — closer to building yourself a small database than keeping a running log.
Why we picked it
Source-available under its own Any Source Available License 1.0; the desktop repository has 8,800 stars.
The fundamental difference from Notion is where content sits. Notion's lives on Notion's servers; Anytype's lives on your devices, syncing peer-to-peer with end-to-end encryption so no server in the middle ever sees plaintext. It is fully usable offline, with sync being purely a device-to-device matter.
The organising model is objects: a book, a person, a project are each objects with types, properties and relations to one another, and you define the types and properties yourself. That is closer to a database than to a stack of pages, which suits long-term accumulation and cross-cutting queries at the cost of learning its concepts first.
To be clear about:
- The licence is not OSI-approved open source. Any Source Available License 1.0 lets you read the code and self-host, with added restrictions attached, so it carries no open-source badge — the same treatment we gave Open WebUI. For genuinely open licences, see AFFiNE (MIT) or SiYuan (AGPL-3.0).
- You must create an Any ID. That ID is a key generated on your own machine — no email, no phone number, with recovery through a locally stored seed phrase. It is not the same as handing over an email address, but it is also not open-and-write, so the no-sign-up badge stays off. Lose the seed phrase and nobody can recover it for you.
- The ecosystem and plugin selection are far smaller than Obsidian's, and export formats are comparatively limited.