Show HN: Anytype – an offline-first private alternative to Notion
youtube.comI'm on the alpha for both Windows and Android. It's pretty impressive already, but not everything shown in the video is yet available.
What they have put together so far seems well thought-out and, in my opinion, has some advantages and better design decisions vs. e.g. Notion in some respects. In other ways they need to improve, for example lack of a tree navigation makes managing deep page linking more annoying than necessary. But in general, seeing their current pace of progress, I am frankly more confident in their ability to create a good tool than I am in Notion at this point (Notion's next big release, theoretically this year, may change my mind again...).
Anytype in alpha is faster than Notion on both desktop and web. A good part of this is probably just because it's all local. So search is near-instant. Page loading tends to be very fast, etc. It will take a while to get to feature parity with Notion, and until then a full comparison between the two is unreasonable, but there is strong potential.
One thing I also particularly like about the Anytype team vs. Notion is the relatively new forum they setup. Unlike Notion they have an actual feature request and "vote" board! So you can see what has already been requested, comment on and upvote it, etc. This is so much better than Notion's opaque process and long periods of development inactivity.
It's early days, but they have some funding and a team that is doing good work so far. I'm optimistic about the future.
Thank you for such a detailed and positive review! Hope to exceed your expectations one day :)
Hello, I’m Roman and I’m a technical co-founder at Anytype. We are building a new operating environment that breaks down barriers between apps and gives back privacy and data ownership to users.
Anytype runs locally and exchanges data directly in a peer-to-peer way without exposing it to intermediaries even when users work across devices and with each other. Because of this, Anytype is free without storage and upload limits. We plan to open-source it with the public release.
This is our early demo and I’d like to get feedback on what we are building, so we can incorporate it into Anytype. Also, if you have any questions, I’d love to answer them.
Looks neat, but a few thoughts...
The video is from January, what changed since then?
I still only see a Get early access option linking to typeform, and no actual download/signup.
> We plan to open-source it with the public release
If it'll be open source, why not open source it now?
Also, according to: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.
I'm glad you liked the video.
Yes, it's from January and it was based on our prototype.
Now we re-built it from scratch and invited first 100+ users who are currently using Anytype and giving us a lot of feedback.
We are inviting alpha testers regularly from our community channel on telegram.
As a lot of things change (we re-wrote Anytype from scratch just recently), we want to open source with open beta.
Yes, I think it was a mistake to have Show in the submission
It is indeed in a closed test process right now, with onboarding new testers regularly. I think the selection is random from the pool of people who have filled out their interest forms on Telegram.
This looks really nice! I'll definitely register to the waitlist.
Can you tell us more about your business model?
> Anytype is free without storage and upload limits
So you mean there are no limits for P2P transfers? I'm not understanding this. Do you actually offer unlimited storage hosting?
I think they mean unlimited in the sense that you're only limited by what local storage you have on your devices.
yes, exactly. You can store as much as you want for free if you use your own resources. If you would need our network, it's a premium feature
Looks like you cannot actually try it out right away, you have to get on the waitlist...
Yeah, that’s frustrating. It might make sense to allow the HN readers to try this out instead of just hyping it and then hitting them with a waitlist.