AppFlowy vs Height

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.

Height was an AI-powered project management tool that aimed to automate the busywork of tracking tasks. It combined a fast, keyboard-friendly interface with list, kanban, calendar and Gantt views, chat threads on every task, GitHub and Slack integrations, and an AI layer that triaged incoming bugs, wrote status updates and groomed backlogs.

The company announced in March 2025 that it would wind down, and the service went offline on September 24, 2025, roughly seven years after it started. Customers were given several months to export tasks and projects before the shutdown; no acquisition was announced, and the product is no longer available to new or existing users. Before closing, Height 2.0 had repositioned the product around autonomous AI features, with agents meant to handle project chores in the background.

This page remains as a record and to help former users choose a replacement. Linear is the closest match for engineering teams that liked Height's speed and keyboard-driven design. Shortcut, which published a guide for teams leaving Height, is a close alternative for product and engineering teams that work with stories, epics and iterations. ClickUp suits teams that want an all-in-one workspace with docs and goals, Asana suits cross-functional teams, and Plane is an open-source option that can be self-hosted, so a vendor shutdown cannot take your project data offline again.