Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
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Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
#2Just downloaded it. This looks incredibly polished and smooth! Will play around with it a bit, although I have never been good at taking notes.
Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
#3I see this software has tables - are these able to be used like excel sheets?
I see this as a necessity for software like this. It's the one feature that Notion has that the competition doesn't seem to have, and it's absolutely crucial to everyday work for so many people. It seems to be a blind spot for programmer-types, I'm guessing because they see Excel as limited?
Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
#4I've been using this for about a year. It's very polished and been stable for me.
The Apple and Android apps work well too. They've been planning to open source it from the beginning, I'm glad it's finally here.
I'm using it as a very basic note system, nothing fancy like others are doing though.
Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
#5(I work at Notion)
The Anytype model is really cool - in a way, they’ve rebuilt Lotus Notes with 21st century E2E encrypted protocols and technology. They’ve built a really solid personal knowledge app with many of Notion’s features - and some clear improvements over Notion.
However they also demonstrate the complexity and tradeoffs of the E2E approach. Anytype has been a work-in-progress since at least 2019. Their docs still state:
> Future versions will allow you to share your work and safely collaborate with others
> There's no browser version of the app. Anytype is a stand-alone software, that works on desktop or mobile devices. There are many points of vulnerability in-browser apps that would compromise our commitment to data security and encryption.
Without these features Anytype is in a much smaller market (PKM) with less distribution than Notion/Coda/Dropbox Paper/Quip/Confluence/…
Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
#6i've been following anytype since 2019, when the initial public release plan was for autumn of 2020 (lol), and since then it has transitioned from being a libp2p based google docs alternative into something more complicated, with relationships, sets, etc, and tbh i just never use it, because it's become too complicated
every time i open the app, which uses electron btw ;(, i catch myself looking at the explainer videos sent out, explaining all the concepts, it's a tool that (for me personally) gets in the way of actually doing anything a lot; maybe there are people for whom this is an optimal setup, but if you're looking for a privacy-friendly google doc alternative, this is not it imo
Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
#7Can someone explain this is — what it does and what it's used for? I'm not familiar with Notion at all and the page — which basically says you can use it for everything — is not helpful in this regard.
It sounds like a P2P shared note and document app but it's not clear to me.
Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
#8I'm not familiar with Notion. How does this compare to something like Obsidian?
Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
#9I see this software has tables - are these able to be used like excel sheets? I see this as a necessity for software like this. It's the one feature that Notion has that the competition doesn't seem to have, and it's absolutely crucial to everyday work for so many people. It seems to be a blind spot for programmer-types, I'm guessing because they see Excel as limited?
I don't think Notion has formulas for tables. I think you mean formulas for databases.
The formulas for databases like Notion has is actually the second-most requested feature right now and is tagged as Acknowledged, so hopefully we will get it soon.
Re: Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative
#10I see this software has tables - are these able to be used like excel sheets? I see this as a necessity for software like this. It's the one feature that Notion has that the competition doesn't seem to have, and it's absolutely crucial to everyday work for so many people. It seems to be a blind spot for programmer-types, I'm guessing because they see Excel as limited?
Coda has the most powerful tables I've seen of the Notion alternatives, and was a fair bit cheaper for my team since they don't charge per viewer or editor but per "creator". But unfortunately it's not open-source or local.
They have a pretty good [writeup](https://coda.io/blog/productivity/tables-not-spreadsheets) on why "spreadsheets" were avoided in favor of more traditional "tables" (a la RDBMS).