Notion alternative evaluations

Notion is a fantastic app, but it doesn't have a self-hosted version, which is a big turn-off for us. We have read somewhere that a self-hosted version was at one point on the roadmap, but it's nowhere to be seen now.

https://selfh.st/alternatives/notion/

The main dealbreaker of AppFlowy is its lack of easily-deployed web frontend. One may exist, but it will require some manual effort. Others have moved to have the web app bundled with the main cloud image, but who knows when that will happen.

Pros:

• database entries can have text bodies

Cons:

• a real pain to set up authentication (might be easier now that we have Keycloak)
• database entries cannot be linked to directly (making it impossible to reference reading list entries)

For sure a top contender.

Pros:

• no OpenID backend required — just an email (no verification necessary) and password
• edgeless mode (haven't really dug into it yet, but I can see the potential)

Cons:

• still a lot of development work to go
• login not required to access the demo workspace (could be a security or storage issue, but it's unclear)

Not quite adequate for what we want. It lacks the object types that we want, and OIDC was such a pain to set up (though now we have a Keycloak instance, and we're not taking it down…).

https://github.com/outline/outline/discussions/6155#discussioncomment-7571518

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44752273/do-keycloak-clients-have-a-client-secret/69726692#69726692

Pros:

• slick interface

Cons:

• even more of a pain in the ass to set up than AppFlowy
• linking pages is awkward
• no databases, simple tables only