The short answer
Pick Notion if
You want a hosted workspace for a team and the price is what matters. At five members Notion Plus costs less than AppFlowy's cloud, and there is nothing to install or patch.
Pick AppFlowy if
The workspace has to live on hardware you control, or you are one person who wants a Notion-style editor on your own server for free. Sharing that server with colleagues means the Team plan at $10 a seat.
| Notion | AppFlowy | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | $0 · blocks limited for 2+ members 10 guests · 5 MB per upload | Personal $0 · 1 workspace owner 100 MB storage · 7 MB per upload |
| Entry paid tier | Plus $10/member/mo annual ($12 monthly) | Cloud Pro $12/member/mo annual ($16 monthly) |
| Version history | 7 days Free · 30 Plus 90 Business | 7 days Personal 90 Pro |
| SAML SSO | Business, $20/member/mo annual | every self-hosted tier Free included |
| Self-hosting | not available | Free: 1 seat, web app only Team: $10/seat/mo annual |
| Licence | proprietary service | apps AGPL-3.0 server under a commercial licence |
| Blind spot | no copy you can run on your own machine | free server stops at one member |
Checked 14 October 2026 against notion.com/pricing, appflowy.com/pricing (cloud and self-hosted tabs), the AppFlowy-SelfHost-Commercial repository and its licence agreement, and DigitalOcean's droplet price list. Annual billing unless stated. All prices in US dollars.
Two editors that look alike
AppFlowy's GitHub README introduces it as "The Open Source Alternative To Notion", and the layout bears it out. Pages nest in a sidebar, and a database can sit inside a page alongside the writing. The apps are built with Flutter and Rust and ship for macOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone and Android.
They part ways over who runs the backend. Notion is a hosted service and nothing more. AppFlowy runs its own cloud as well and also licenses a server you install yourself, priced by how many people sign in to it.
Hosted plans, priced per member
Notion's pricing page lists Plus at $10 per member a month on yearly billing and $12 month to month. Business costs $20 or $24 and is where Notion AI and SAML single sign-on come in. AppFlowy Cloud has one paid plan. AppFlowy Pro is $12 per member a month billed yearly, which is $144 a year, or $16 billed monthly; AppFlowy says the yearly option saves 25%.
On the hosted side, then, AppFlowy charges $2 a seat more than Notion's entry plan. Pro gives you unlimited storage and file uploads, 90 days of version history and guest editors at no charge. Its AI responses and meeting notes are full features there, whereas Personal gets them as a limited trial.
The free plans are further apart than the paid ones. Notion Free has no block limit for someone working alone and starts limiting blocks once a second member joins the workspace. AppFlowy Personal is built for exactly one owner: 100 MB of storage in total, files up to 7 MB, a single form and a single chart.
The free AppFlowy server holds one seat
AppFlowy's self-hosted pricing has four tiers. They were last reshuffled on 23 September 2026, when a $1-a-month Seed plan was taken off the website, so reviews quoting Seed are out of date. This is the matrix the page shows today.
| Free | One | Team | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $6/mo annual | $10/seat/mo annual | contact sales |
| User seats | 1 | 1 | up to 1,000 | unlimited |
| Desktop and mobile apps | no, web app only | yes | yes | yes |
| Workspace members | no | no | yes | yes |
| Guest editors | up to 3 | up to 10 | up to 1,000 | unlimited |
| SCIM, LDAP, audit log | no | no | yes | yes |
Free and One both stop at a single seat, and only Team turns on workspace members, AppFlowy's name for several people editing one workspace together in real time. A small company that wants to share one AppFlowy server is buying Team from the second person onwards. The repository README aims the free tier at "experienced IT professionals, developers, and self-hosting enthusiasts" evaluating the product, and on that tier everything runs in the browser.
A few things come free on every self-hosted tier. Single sign-on with SAML 2.0 is ticked even for Free, while Notion keeps SAML for Business at $20 a seat. Version history and publishing pages to the web are also on the free server.
Open-source apps, commercial server
The desktop and phone apps are on GitHub under AGPL-3.0, in a repository with more than 77,000 stars. The server used to sit beside them under the same licence, but that repository, AppFlowy-Cloud, is archived, with a notice that it "is no longer used to build or distribute the latest AppFlowy self-hosted server" and a last commit dated 11 September 2026. AppFlowy asks readers not to build from it. Current Docker images come from AppFlowy-SelfHost-Commercial instead.
That repository is covered by the AppFlowy Self-Hosted Commercial License. It permits use "for your internal business purposes" on a per-server basis, through a licence key bound to one machine, for a one-year term renewed with an annual fee. The agreement rules out modifying or redistributing the software and adds that "reselling license and custom client are not allowed." Reviews that call AppFlowy free to self-host for a whole team are describing the archived AGPL server.
What the server needs
The default install is a single Docker Compose file with twelve services. PostgreSQL with pgvector holds the data, Redis and MinIO sit beside it, GoTrue handles sign-in and nginx fronts the lot, and AppFlowy adds its own cloud, worker, search, AI, backup, web and admin containers.
The hardware sizing guide begins at 100 peak online users, and for that it asks for 4 vCPUs and 16 GiB of RAM on one host, with PostgreSQL, Redis and MinIO sharing it. No smaller profile is published. The guide calls its figures planning estimates and says the user counts "do not define a maximum deployment size." Five people will not stretch such a machine, yet 16 GiB is the lowest figure AppFlowy documents, four times the 4 GB box behind the Zapier vs n8n cost model.
Moving a Notion workspace across
AppFlowy's import guide starts inside Notion, under Settings, Workspace Settings, "Export all workspace content". You drop the resulting ZIP into AppFlowy's "Import from Notion" box and wait for an email; the pages land in a new workspace named after the file. For a big workspace the guide suggests leaving out files and images so the export finishes sooner. Self-hosted Team and Enterprise customers also get custom migration, which AppFlowy describes as hands-on help moving from Notion or Confluence.
Frequently asked
Is AppFlowy free?
AppFlowy Cloud has a free Personal plan for one workspace owner with 100 MB of storage. The self-hosted server has a free tier too, limited to one user seat, the web app and up to 3 guest editors. On your own server, the desktop and mobile apps start with the One plan at $6 a month billed annually.
Can a team self-host AppFlowy for free?
No. The free self-hosted tier allows one user seat per instance, and workspace members are a Team plan feature at $10 per seat a month billed annually. The older AGPL server repository is archived, and AppFlowy says not to build the server from it.
Is AppFlowy cheaper than Notion?
Not per seat. AppFlowy Cloud Pro is $12 per member a month billed annually against $10 for Notion Plus, and self-hosted AppFlowy Team is $10 a seat before the server. AppFlowy costs less only for a single person, on the free or $6 self-hosted plans. Prices checked 14 October 2026.
Is AppFlowy open source?
The desktop and mobile apps are, under AGPL-3.0. The current self-hosted server is distributed under AppFlowy's own commercial licence, which allows internal business use on one licensed server and forbids modifying or reselling it.
What self-hosting actually costs
A five-person team over one year, with the server and the upkeep hours counted. The self-hosted column has to be Team, because Free and One each hold a single seat.
| Notion Plus | AppFlowy Cloud Pro | AppFlowy Team, self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence, 5 users | $600/yr | $720/yr | $600/yr |
| Server | included | included | ~$1,152/yr (8 vCPU, 16 GB) |
| Your time | none | none | ~2 h setup + ~12 h/yr |
| Version history | 30 days | 90 days | included |
| Year one | $600 | $720 | ~$1,752 + 14 hours |
Assumptions behind these numbers: the server matches AppFlowy's smallest published profile of 4 vCPUs and 16 GiB. DigitalOcean's Basic droplets have no 4 vCPU size with 16 GiB, so the figure is the next one up, 8 vCPUs and 16 GiB at $96 a month on 14 October 2026. A 4 vCPU, 8 GiB droplet at $48 would probably carry five people, though AppFlowy publishes no profile that small, and it brings year one down to about $1,176. Setup and upkeep follow the rest of this site, about two hours to install and an hour a month for updates and backups. Either way Notion Plus is the smaller cash outlay at this size, and the case for running AppFlowy yourself rests on a requirement that the workspace stay on your own network.