What do 66.5k GitHub stars and 974 open issues tell you about a project?
For AppFlowy, the "open-source Notion alternative", it might hint a "vanity metric trap." I'm often asked about it, so I dug past the marketing hype and worked my way through facts and figures.
Here’s my take:
The promise is perfect. AppFlowy addresses the real, growing anxiety businesses have about data sovereignty and vendor lock-in. The pitch is spot on: Notion's features with 100% control of your data.
But when I analyzed community feedback and the repo, I found a different story.
- The "Perpetual Beta" Reality: The product is plagued by instability. For a tool meant to be a reliable "second brain," this is a non-starter.
- Critical Sync Bugs: Users report data corruption and partial data loss. This is the true killer. Most tech readers will stop reading here.
- Extreme Performance Issues: It’s marketed as "fast" (Rust + Flutter) , but GitHub issues state horrific 5-10 minute startup times and >90% CPU usage on a tiny 44KB database. Developer forums confirm "extremely poor performance".
- An "Untrustworthy" Roadmap: Core features like a web clipper and API maturity have been in development for years. The team seems focused on marketable add-ons (like AI) over core stability.
- The Open-Core Conflict: AppFlowy isn't just a project; it's a $6.4M VC-backed startup. Its strategy is "open-core," and that inherits a huge conflict potential.
- The License Strategy: It uses the "viral" AGPLv3 license, which is notoriously "toxic" for many corporations. However, this is a deliberate tactic to push enterprises away from the free version and toward a paid commercial license, though there are more elegant approaches used by other open source products out there.
- The "Freemium" Self-Host: Think self-hosting gives you everything for free? Developers who set it up report hitting a hard 2-user limit and paywalls for AI features, even on their own servers. This isn't FOSS; it's freemium SaaS.
My Verdict
AppFlowy is not a viable replacement for Notion or Obsidian in a professional setting today. The risk of data loss is simply too high.
It's a startup to watch, not a product to adopt.
The real question is: Can its team use its VC cash to fix this deep technical debt before the community loses faith?
Sources:
Official website: https://appflowy.com/
Github repository: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy
