AppFlowy vs Confluence

AppFlowy is an open-source collaborative workspace that covers notes, wikis, databases and project boards, positioned as a privacy-focused alternative to Notion. It is built with Flutter for the interface and Rust for the core, so it ships as native apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android rather than a web wrapper, and its source code is published on GitHub under the AGPL license.

The core product combines rich documents with databases that can be viewed as a grid, kanban board or calendar, plus templates, offline mode and an AI assistant for writing, summarising and asking questions about your content. You can use AppFlowy Cloud as a hosted service with a free tier and paid per-user plans, or self-host the backend with Docker so that every page and database stays on your own servers.

AppFlowy fits developers, privacy-conscious teams and organisations with data residency rules who want a Notion-style experience without handing their content to a third party. It is less mature than Notion in integrations, templates, permissions and the polish of real-time collaboration, and its plugin ecosystem is small. Anytype is the other well-known open-source, local-first option; AFFiNE combines docs with whiteboards; Notion remains the safer choice when a broad integration ecosystem matters more than data ownership.

Confluence is the wiki and documentation tool from Atlassian, the Australian company behind Jira, Trello and Loom. Launched in 2004, it is the default knowledge base in many engineering and product organizations: spaces group page trees, templates cover specs, retrospectives, runbooks and meeting notes, and live Jira issue embeds link documentation to the work being tracked.

The cloud product now includes whiteboards, databases, inline comments, page analytics and Atlassian's AI features, branded Rovo, which add search answers, summaries and writing help across Atlassian and connected tools. Pricing is per user: a free plan covers up to 10 users with limited storage, Standard adds permissions and more storage, Premium adds analytics, unlimited storage and admin controls, and Enterprise supports multiple sites and stronger governance. The old Server edition was retired in 2024, and Atlassian has also scheduled the end of Data Center: new Data Center licenses stopped being sold in March 2026 and support ends in March 2029, so self-managed customers are being moved to the cloud.

Confluence fits companies already on Jira, because users, permissions and billing are shared and the integration is genuinely useful. Its weaknesses are a heavy feel, editor quirks and search that users often criticize. Teams not tied to Jira usually prefer Notion for flexibility, Slite or Outline for a cleaner wiki, or Google Docs for simple shared writing. Large organizations with strict permissions, audit needs and Atlassian contracts still find Confluence hard to replace.