AppFlowy finally feels like real Notion, and self-hosting it fixed my biggest complaint

Published Aug 5, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf. Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. Notion is genuinely good software, and if it's working for you then there isn't much reason to look elsewhere. It handles a lot of functions and tasks at once, its block-based editor is one of the more sophisticated ones around, and the database power is nearly unmatched. There's a lot of reason why plenty of people run their whole lives inside it. However, it has a bunch of small frustrations that stack up. For me, one of them is the offline usability situation, and also the slow load times with heavier workspaces, among a couple more, such as the no-ownership-over-your-own-files thing. AppFlowy has been on my radar for a minute as one of Notion's closer alternatives, and the thing that finally got me to properly give it a go was that you can self-host it… The Notion frustrations I've been putting up with The things Notion seemingly still can't fix My Notion workspace has grown a lot over the years, and pages take noticeably longer to load than they used to. My main dashboard has a few linked databases on it, and opening it involves a little pause every time, which sounds trivial but imagine having to wait 5-10 seconds longer for every web page you load; this stacks up and makes for a pretty frustrating user experience, especially when you're doing it hundreds of times per week. This isn't just me being impatient. Notion's own help center admits that databases slow down as you add pages, properties, and complex sorts or filters, and they cap databases at 250,000 rows before writes stop saving entirely. Their suggested fix is basically to use less of the thing you're paying for by splitting large pages, hiding properties, and flattening deep nests. The offline situation is also worse than I think many realize. Notion added offline mode in 2025, but it's opt-in per page, and comes with a lot of caveats. Sub-pages of a page you've marked offline don't automatically download with it, so if you set your dashboard as available offline you'll still hit dead ends when you try to open anything inside it. Embeds, buttons, and AI features don't work offline at all, and databases get capped at 50 rows in offline mode. Both of these things come down to the same root thing: Notion lives in Notion's servers, not mine. Self-hosting AppFlowy is a breeze All it takes is pasting a few commands, and you own your entire PKM AppFlowy is an open-source block-based editor built to look and feel like Notion. Same page structure, slash commands, and database views. The important difference is that you can self-host it. You simply install Docker Desktop, and it handles all the container stuff in the background so you don't have to think about it. The actual steps are quick. Clone the AppFlowy Cloud repo from GitHub with a single git command, copy the deploy.env template to .env, and run docker compose up -d. That last command pulls down about ten containers and spins them all up in the background, which took a couple of minutes on my machine. Everything runs at localhost from there. The admin console lives at localhost/console, which is where you create your user, and then you log into the desktop app or the web version with localhost set as the server endpoint. That's the minimum to get going. The official docs have sections on setting up SMTP, third-party auth providers like Google login, and custom certificates. For a personal setup, none of that is required though. If you were running this for a team or exposing it to the internet, though, SMTP matters for inviting members, auth providers matter for password-less login, and certificates matter for HTTPS on a real domain. Using AppFlowy day-to-day Familiar enough for a smooth switch, different enough to stick When self-hosting AppFlowy, the first thing you notice is speed and how instantly pages open, even if they're dense and loaded with data. I haven't once encountered lag or waited for a table or database to populate. When your data lives on the same machine your editor is running on, there's just nothing to wait for. The interface is close enough to Notion that muscle memory transfers pretty quickly. Slash commands work the same way, block types are almost identical, and dragging blocks around feels the same too. So if you are making a switch from Notion, there's virtually no learning curve. Databases is the part I was most curious about, because it's usually where Notion alternatives fall short. AppFlowy has grid, board, calendar, and document views, filters and sorts, and it handles the fundamentals well. But, as expected, it's not quite as feature-dense as Notion's databases. This is completely fine though, because I think it's exactly the complex architecture of Notion's databases that can make them so slow. AppFlowy's framework is more than enough for what I actually need. These days, I've been using it to keep track of details of a novel, and also just random notes and half-formed concepts. Offline usability is probably the best part. I turned off the wifi just to check, and everything was fine and still intact and loadable. Given our internet cuts out from time to time, this is a huge win, and I also don't have to worry about notifications and warnings about "sync required". The version of Notion I didn't know I needed I'm not going to tell you Notion is bad, because it isn't. But I think what AppFlowy offers, especially once you self-host it, is a version of that same idea that doesn't leave you waiting on servers or negotiating with an offline mode that doesn't quite work. I've been using it as my main workspace for a while now and I don't see myself going back. AppFlowy.IO