5 Open-Source Alternatives to Notion

Phil, Jerry

Apr 17, 2025 — 5 min read

Notion is many things to many people. For some, it’s a note-taking app; for others, it serves as a wiki or a product management tool.

One of Notion’s standout features is its wiki functionality. Many users rely on it to document work processes or organize their personal lives. While Notion initially focused on a B2C audience, in recent years, it has shifted its attention towards the enterprise market.

Despite its versatility, Notion’s broad feature set can feel overwhelming. From wikis, mail to calendars and more, the sheer range of tools sometimes leaves users seeking more focused and streamlined alternatives. While its all-in-one approach has advantages, it raises concerns about vendor lock-in, making it difficult for users to move their content elsewhere due to Notion-specific features.

Additionally, businesses with stricter data privacy or regulatory requirements will find Notion unsuitable, as it does not support self-hosting.

If you're among the many businesses or individuals looking for self-hostable and open-source alternatives to Notion, you're in the right place.

Fortunately, the open-source community offers compelling alternatives. Over the years, several free and open-source wiki projects have emerged, offering functionality similar to Notion and Confluence but with greater flexibility and user freedom.

In this post, we'll look at five open-source Notion alternatives that are worth exploring.

Docmost

Docmost, an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation software, positions itself as a viable alternative to Notion. It provides a suite of features akin to Notion, including spaces (team space), pages, comments, permissions, and groups.

Docmost provides a real-time collaborative editor, enabling multiple users to edit a page simultaneously without overwriting each other's changes. While there are several open-source wiki software, only a handful can boast of real-time collaboration.

The rich-text editor supports LaTeX (math equations), tables, callouts, pasting images from the clipboard, and many more.

Docmost has built-in support for diagramming tools such as Drawio, Excalidraw, and Mermaid. With these, you can draw and design charts and UML diagrams without leaving the editor.

Features

Collaborative Real-time Editor: Work together on pages in real time.
Diagrams: Built-in support for Drawio, Excalidraw and Mermaid diagramming tools.
Spaces: Organize your pages by team, projects, or departments for better collaboration.
Permissions Management: Easily control access to pages with easy-to-understand permissions.
Groups: Easily grant unified permissions to users via groups.
Comments: Add inline comments to pages for better communication and feedback.
Page History: Track changes with a comprehensive version history.
Nested Navigation: You can nest and reorder pages via the sidebar.
Search: Quickly find the information you need with powerful search capabilities.
File Attachment: Attach files to your pages for quick reference and sharing.
Embeds: Embed content from Loom, Airtable, YouTube, and more.
Authentication: Email and password + SSO login (SAML/OIDC) in the Enterprise edition.

GitHub: https://github.com/docmost/docmost

Wiki.js

Wiki.js is a popular open-source wiki software that allows you to write documentation in Markdown, Visual Editor, and AsciiDoc.
It is very appealing to the technical audience. It is adaptable and versatile and runs smoothly across a wide range of systems and environments. You can set your wiki to be private, public, or a combination of both.

Wiki.js is built with Node.js, which ensures high performance, and overall, it can be a suitable open-source alternative to Confluence.

Main Features of Wiki.js:

Markdown: Wiki.js has a great markdown editor with support for Drawio and text-to-diagram tools like Mermaid and PlantUML.
Groups and permissions: It has a robust permissions system which allows you grant or restrict content access to certain people or teams.
Version history: It includes built-in version control to track changes, compare revisions, and revert to previous versions of pages.
Authentication: It supports integration with local and third-party authentication services such as GitHub, Google, and Microsoft for user authentication.
Search: It includes a powerful search functionality that enables users to quickly find relevant content within the wiki.
Git: It has support for Git syncing of markdown content.

GitHub: https://github.com/requarks/wiki

BookStack

BookStack describes itself as a simple, open-source, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information. If you're searching for an easy-to-use, lightweight alternative to Confluence for knowledge management and documentation, you might want to give BookStack a try.

BookStack categorizes content structure into three groups: books, chapters, and pages. Users can build books to collect relevant content, chapters to further organize content inside books, and pages to include actual content like text, images, or files. This hierarchical structure makes it straightforward to organise and navigate information within BookStack.

BookStack is adaptable and offers a wide range of customisation possibilities to meet a variety of purposes. Overall, the platform is best suited for smaller teams that require a simple solution for managing documents and knowledge.

Main features of BookStack:

Editor: BookStack has Markdown and WYSIWYG visual editor.
Content structure: Content is structured as Shelves, Books, Chapters, and Pages—ideal for clear, hierarchical organization.
Authentication: BookStack allows integration with authentication providers such as Okta, LDAP, Google, GitHub, and Slack.
Media embeds: Allows embedding of images, videos, and diagrams directly in pages.
Comments: The comment feature let users discuss and provide feedback on content content directly within pages.
Page history: Built-in page history lets you track edits and restore previous page versions.

GitHub: https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack

AppFlowy

AppFlowy is an open-source workspace that seamlessly integrates project management, wikis, and team collaboration. Positioned as a leading alternative to Notion, AppFlowy offers users complete control over their data without sacrificing functionality or user experience.

Offline first: AppFlowy is designed to work seamlessly without an internet connection.
File attachments: Upload and attach files or images directly to your pages, helping you keep all relevant content in one place.
Rich text editor: Offers a powerful block-based editor that supports various content types including text, laTex, to-do lists and more.
Cross-platform support: Available on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Kanban board: Visualize and manage tasks using built-in Kanban boards for flexible and intuitive project tracking.

GitHub: https://github.com/docmost/docmost

XWiki

XWiki is an open-source wiki software founded by Ludovic Dubost in 2004.
While it's user interface might seem old, XWiki offers a versatile and adaptable solution for knowledge management, collaboration, and documentation.

XWiki’s modular extension system makes it easy to extend by enabling advanced capabilities like templating, analytics, and integration with external services.

Main Features of XWiki:

WYSIWYG editor
XWiki offers extensibility through its wide range of available extensions and plugins.
Access control and permissions.
Hierarchical organization of structured content through nested pages and sub-wikis.
XWiki includes built-in version control functionality, allowing users to track changes made to pages over time, revert to previous versions, and compare revisions.
It provides collaboration features such as comments, notifications, and user mentions, facilitating communication and teamwork among users.

GitHub: https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform

Closing thoughts

We hope the options we have shared will help you pick the best open-source alternative to Notion that fits your team's needs.